Makevember 2025
As usual, I did Makevember this year - you make a thing a day in November and share it, and after some playing around I settled on a bit of a plan: a music camera.
Plan B - Libby Miller’s blog
Technical experiments and writeups by a creative technologist. Powered by Tea.
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Accounts Music
Accounts Music
Bat detecting with an iPhone
Bat detecting with an iPhone
Acoupi batdetect2 with a Raspberry pi 4 and Audiomoth mic
As part of #mayke I made up a portable bat classifier using a Pi4, Acoupi and an audiomoth mic.The idea eventually is to hook it up to LoRaWAN so we can see detections remotely. My cardboard birdnet version of the setup I got a load of useful hints from Sarah on Mastodon (thank you!) Acoupi is a framework for classifiers running on-device - it can use birdnet or batnet machine learning models,…
#mayke
Yesterday I gave a 5 min talk at Dorkbot Bristol "#mayke special" about what Mayke is, and a little bit about why we've been doing it. Here's a slightly expanded version. Ma(y)ke Manifesto ------------------------------ Grasp the means of production and Make something, big or tiny, every day in May unless You want to slack off for the day. There is no fayle, only mayke A few of us are doing #mayke…
A LoRa LoRa Faff
This is a version of a talk I gave at Dorkbot in May 2024. It was pretty funny because it had lots of pictures of Cilla Black, because my brain always says "Lorra lorra" in her voice when I think of LoRa. But I don't know how she would actually feel about it so this is MoRe SeRious. At that point I'd just left the BBC, I like puzzles and was looking for interesting mini-projects. I love Bristol…
Rescuing a broken hard drive with ddrescue
Some quick notes in case I ever have to do it again. A WARNING and REMINDER: this took 7 days for a 2TB disk. One of my backup drives died and wouldn't mount. Really I was using it as an archive as I keep running out of disk space. This is probably a bad idea. Anyway I have rescued it. My initial thought was using dd but this just kept failing (on unmounted disks; 5 was my new one, 4 the old one,…
Prototyping and Power
This is my talk from the Pervasive Media Studio Lunchtime Talk on 24 Jan 2025. For more on the importance of shonky prototypes, here's my previous talk, "Poking Holes in Reality with prototyping". Thanks to the PM studio and Lawottim for hosting me. There's a video version on Youtube here. Thanks to everyone who reviewed it for me. This is a talk about a little bit of my own history, some of the…
19 things I learned while visiting Japan
Everyone seems to have one of these - hope mine is useful to someone - I visited in November 2024. If you have backups running on your phone and a non-Japan plan, disable roaming before you get there or it'll cost you. We got an eSim (I used Sakura) for £35 for 2 weeks for unlimited data. Internet works in tunnels and on the underground lines. Wheeee! If you have an iPhone (didn't test Android)…
Resizing a disk at Mythic Beasts
I have a server hosted at Mythic Beasts and I'd run out of disk space. They have instructions but I'm not experienced enough to be able to follow them as is, though I broadly followed it to make sure I was roughly on track. Here's what I did so I can do it again. I do not necessarily think I did it in the optimal or correct way, but it did work. YMMV. > df ... /dev/mapper/nicecupoftea2--vg-root…