a personal site
I haven't posted anything for a long time now, so here's some things I've made over the past five years or so in no particular order. rng-pcb: A CircuitPython Random Number Generator This was built as part of the Boldport Club's community PCB swap, which was a really fun project to be part of. I based this board on the Adafruit Trinket M0 , using a 12 V charge pump to power an…
Update (6 April 2020): Having just updated my server, it appears that the latest version of Jitsi leads to some issues. I ended up reinstalling using the quick install guide , which worked without any issues. Best to go with that for now! Like a lot of the world, we're in "lockdown" over here, with only a few businesses allowed to open. Obviously a lot of people are now working from home, so…
Welcome to the new-look mitsake! Most of the changes are behind the scenes, but I've also played around with the style a bit. The biggest change has been shifting from using Jekyll to generate the site to Sunaina Pai's makesite.py . Over the last while, I've not really done much with Ruby, but I have had written a few scripts in Python and have started using CircuitPython a fair bit…
I've been playing with electronics for a few years now, and given my interest in how things work, enjoy reading people's commentary as they take apart various devices. I recently found this Playaway at a second-hand book sale and given it was just $1, decided to see what was inside. I hadn't seen one of these before, but they're a small digital audio player that comes…
Back last year, I posted about how I set up a non-bare git repository on NearlyFreeSpeech so I could work on the site from both my laptop and desktop. This has worked fine, but the fact that it's not the 'right' way to do it hasn't sat well with me. The issue I was having with a bare repository came down to deleting the temporary clone that was used to build the site. Despite…
Apologies to anyone who uses the RSS feed and has seen posts being republished as I've been making changes to the site. Apart from fixing a few typos and updating the semantic layout, the major change has been a slight update of the colour palette to one that uses the Solarized scheme. I've had a few projects on the go and will hopefully have something to write about them soon. In the…
As a birthday present, I recently bought myself my first oscilloscope. After researching the various makes and models for a fair while, I eventually decided on the Siglent SDS1104X-E . It's a four channel model, with 100 MHz bandwidth and options to add a waveform generator and digital input. Given this is my first 'scope, I started a bit of reading to find out how to best use it. In the…
Update (5 April 2019): the myraidrf repositories are now out of date. If you're running Ubuntu 18.04, your best bet is to install gnuradio from the default repositories and use the instructions on the Analog Devices Wiki to build the gr-iio blocks from source. I've been interested in Software Defined Radio (SDR) for a while, and after tinkering with an RTL-SDR for a while decided to get…
One of the issues with my current Jekyll / NearlyFreeSpeech.NET setup is that I haven't been able to post if I'm not working on my laptop which has the only copy of the site's git repository. That's not been a problem previously, but lately I've been working from my desktop a bit more and have a project on that machine that I'd like to write up. My goal with this…
Back at the end of January, I entered one of the Dangerous Prototypes free PCB giveaways, and was lucky enough to win a code. I've thought about getting a Bus Pirate for flashing microcontrollers etc., and building one seemed like a good project that would net me something useful at the end. So, here's the two-month-long saga of how I ended up with two Bus Pirates. Obviously, the PCB…
When the Raspberry Pi Zero came out last year, my love of small computers meant that I quickly purchased one along with a Scroll pHAT despite not having a project in mind. Recently, I realised that the small size and low power requirements meant that it'd be great for displaying the day's weather forecast. The first task was getting the forecast data. For most countries the most accurate…
A few years ago, I hacked together a way to updating my DNS record when my home IP changed. The script I wrote has generally been working ok, though recently I started seeing a few more errors than usual. Rather than debug them, I decided to rewrite the script using the more up-to-date python-nfsn and Requests libraries. Both libraries are available via pip, so getting them is super-easy: pip…
I've been teaching for nearly a full year now, and to say it's been a massive learning curve would be just a bit of an understatement. As is probably pretty normal for a graduate, some of my ideas have worked well, some have been ok and others have fallen completely flat. I figured I might share one of the ideas that worked well, particularly since it took two attempts to get it working.…
For years prior to its demise last year, I used Google Reader as an RSS aggregator - never really using the Reader web app itself, but instead using it to sync between my laptop (using NetNewsWire ) and phone (using Reeder ). It was a nice system that worked well, right up until the point that it was shut down. I've always intended to switch to one of the alternatives that sprang up ( The Old…
A few months ago, a friend sent the following email around to a few people: Didn't know it was on, but put my vote in for ABCs good game top 100 games of all time. I challenge you to pick a better 3 than: X-COM: Enemy Unknown (2012) Planescape Torment Minecraft This seemed to kick something off, with people offering their three favourite games along with really interesting reasons for their…
Back in January I managed to get in early on the Indiegogo campaign for the NavSpark GNSS receiver. For no real reason other than the fact that it was US$17 including shipping, I decided to buy one of the NavSpark-BD boards. Besides being an Arduino-compatible board with built-in GPS, this version is also able to pick up satellites from the Chinese Beidou constellation. While the modified Arduino…
One of my Christmas gifts, both from others and myself, was equipment for a quadcopter. I ended up choosing the popular Flamewheel F450 kit from DJI, mostly because their parts are available locally and I anticipated (correctly, it turns out) a few crashes as I was learning to fly something bigger than my Crazyflie . In the end, the complete list of things I needed to get flying: DJI Flamewheel…
I've recently been playing around with the Crazyflie nano quadcopter, using the Ubuntu-based Bitcraze VM to run the radio and Python client. I've been using a PS3 controller attached via USB, but recently decided to connect via Bluetooth so I didn't have to be tethered to my laptop while flying. Unfortunately, simply turning off Bluetooth in OS X doesn't allow the guest machine…
A few months ago, one of my co-workers set off on a much-anticipated travel adventure. Like most trips out of Australia, there was a long flight involved (this one was to the US, so longer than most), and with that, jetlag. There are probably thousands of products that claim to help prevent or relieve jetlag, but one that's become quite popular is melatonin. Melatonin is a hormone that has…
A few weeks ago I bought a ticket to the inaugural WAHCKon which was held at ECU Joondalup over last weekend. It was a great event, with some interesting talks and a general 'good vibe' over both days. Mostly so I don't forget some of the cool things I heard about, I thought I'd quickly mention a few of the talks that I particularly enjoyed. A Small Chain of Security Bugs Gone…
Update (14 April 2016): I've since rewritten this script - you can find the new version in this post . Since I got it, one of the things I've been looking to do with my Raspberry Pi is to access it remotely. This is a pretty easy task - give the Pi a static IP and forward the appropriate port on the router. However, my ISP assigns a dynamic IP address and having to check what my IP is…
I've been noticing for a while that pages that I click on in my Google search results don't show up in the history like I expect them to. Rather than showing the titles of the pages they display as Google URLs instead - not particularly useful if you want to retrace your steps. A quick search turned up this discussion on Apple's support site where it's mentioned that this is a…
Over the weekend I replaced a few parts in my desktop. Since one of the parts I replaced was the motherboard, I also reinstalled Windows to avoid any driver issues. Every other time that I've reinstalled Windows, I've also downloaded and re-installed the League of Legends client, reasoning that it didn't work after the reinstall because the client hadn't been installed…
I like using Markdown to write posts, but one of the problems I have with it is that the image syntax is a bit basic. For example, you can't give images a CSS class which is how I position both of the images I've currently got on the site. Using regular <img> tags works but isn't particularly neat. Fortunately, Brandon Mathis (the designer of Octopress ) has written a plugin for…
One of the workshops we run as part of our technology program gives students the chance to create a stop-motion animation using SAM Animation and some modelling clay. Once they've finished taking the photographs, SAM exports a movie which is uploaded to our servers using the Podcast Capture utility. The workflow then adds the title and date to a splash screen at the start of the movie before…
Whenever my desktop machine running Windows 7 woke from sleep, the USB wireless adapter didn't seem to wake up with it. Disabling and re-enabling it in Device Manager got it working again, but I recently discovered a way to stop it happening at all. Under the adapter's properties in Device Manager, select the Power Management tab and make sure the option 'Allow the computer to turn…
I've had two pairs of headphones lying on my desk awaiting repair for ages and finally got around to doing something about them a few days ago. From the ashes of a pair of Koss KSC-75s that needed a new cable and some Sennheiser PX100s that needed a new jack was born this: I originally got the idea from this thread on Head-Fi where it's apparently a popular mod. The main reason I went…
After setting up the RSS feed, the next thing I wanted to add to mitsake was a set of 'proper' archives by both date and tag rather than just the reverse chronological list of posts. Although this wasn't as straightforward as setting up RSS, a bit of searching turned up some sites that helped me get everything running. Tags Although there's built-in support for tags in Jekyll,…
Today I set about the task of adding a RSS feed to the site. I knew this was something that Jekyll supported as there's a Liquid tag for each post's unique identifier, but I didn't expect a Google search to deliver ready-to-use templates . After customising the RSS template for my site, the only thing I had to do was add a <link> tag to the default layout. Many thanks to Dave Coyle…
To start off my posts here I thought I'd document the process I went through in setting up this site. If nothing else, it'll be handy for me to refer to if I need to jog my memory later on. I've been working on mitsake in some form for a few years but it's only now that anything has actually gone online. Procrastination is the main culprit, but I've also been trying to…
As you might guess, this is the first post to my new website. Since this is the first post there's not much to it, but most things seem to be functional. If you're interested in the backend, I've built this site using the Jekyll static site generator and hosted it using NearlyFreeSpeech . The main reason I've made mitsake is to learn a little bit more about Ruby and other…