Playin' around with Electronics and Computers
With my switch to vector maps, the dramatically reduced storage requirements now allow to have maps for whole countries on my Smartphone. Getting such maps still requires tile downloads, which sum up to millions of web requests and gigabytes of data downloaded. To avoid unfair and excessive load to the map provider web services, and […]
The survey offices of many countries now offer vector maps, so I adopted my previously raster map based hiking maps to use these vector maps. This results in much smaller map files, a sharper display and deeper zoom possibilities without the need to add more data. The data reduction now allows to store the OpenStreetMap […]
In part I of this series of three posts, I introduced you to the benefits of using vector map data vs. raster map data. In this part I’ll explain the one-time-setup required to use the maps with OruxMaps, and the steps you will need to run each time you want to produce up-to-date map data. […]
In this last (and longest) part of the Superatlas-goes-vector-series I’ll explain how to influence the process of selecting OSM data and adding them to the vector layers. This mainly revolves around a LUA script, which implements the logic of OSM object selection, filtering and attribute processing. I will also explain how a Mapbox style can […]
I was always mildly concerned of the brute force logon attempts to my blog. Using plugins, I renamed the login page and disabled the XML-RPC API calls that require login. As a result, I was able to bring attacks down to zero. The Details (This is a Short One) As many WordPress bloggers, I use […]
With a Raspberry Pico, I monitor my Sony amplifier from the 90s and my 2013 Dell monitor, and switch on my NUC-based media center if any of these devices are switched on. This is comparable to the CEC functionality that more modern devices provide via the HDMI port. I also utilize the USB/serial interface of […]
I created a script that runs via cron job that will power off my media center if it is not in use, but will program the real time clock (RTC) on the motherboard to wake up the system in time to run a scheduled recording, and/or to update the EPG data, and from that derive […]
My Raspberry Pi 4 based media center has some issues, which I was able to resolve by switching to an Intel NUC8i3BEH platform. I was able to make the device quiet despite of its fan, and set up everything to have live TV and PVR, a web browser, Spotify and other DRM content in a […]
Capacitative soil moisture sensors based on this DFRobot-design (and its successors) can be found in numerous blog articles about irrigation automation. For me, they do not work out for two reasons: a) A notable temperature dependency of the measurements, and b) a high failure rate after a few months to a few years. I decided […]
WordPress admins are currently sued for using Google Fonts directly from the Google servers without correctly informing users about the data collection by Google. I give a few hints on how to protect yourself against this. Disclaimer: I’m not a Pro in legal regards, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. This […]