Some fun Raspberry Pi projects

I’ve got a spare Raspberry Pi Zero W sitting on my desk doing nothing, so today I decided to go looking for fun, easy Pi projects. Here’s a few I found which are a little different from the usual media player / arcade emulator / door opener projects you see all over the place. Desk Projects If you have a spare pi in your drawer but don’t want to leave the cubicle, these little projects are perfect.

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This url kind of blows my mind if I think about it too much:

https://github.com/git/git

Git is on git. Well of course it is, it makes perfect sense.

On a similar note, wikipedia is on wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

This just made my day =)

Source: For the Love of Code

I don’t read a lot of game news these days, but I popped over to theverge.com today and found this gem:

http://keyboardsports.com/

https://medium.com/techspiration-ideas-making-it-happen/how-i-wrote-and-published-my-novel-using-only-open-source-tools-5cdfbd7c00ca#.cp5q75zdb

This guy wrote his novel using only open-source tools. While it’s not mind-blowing stuff - the tools involved are fairly standard - it’s nice to see someone go through all the steps and show how easy it is to publish nowadays

iPhone 4 battery life

I recently fixed up an old iPhone 4 for fun and to try out iOS. Turns out it’s limited to iOS7 which means most of the apps I try to install don’t work. Damn you apple, damn you. I stuck it in airplane mode to fast charge, then plugged it out and forgot about it. A few days later I came back and found it at 100% battery life. Turns out the iPhone 4 has incredible battery life if you put it in airplane mode and do nothing with it.

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This helped my poor ageing eyes _so much _this morning. No more trying to read crimson on navy!

http://sedodream.com/2012/05/05/GitCustomizingColorsForWindowsIncludingPoshgit.aspx

a tiny github project blew my mind today

http://some1else.github.io/life/ It’s alarmingly simple - a 52 x 90 grid, which represents your life, assuming you life to be 90. Each square is a week. I found it a bit of a gut punch to see my weeks splayed out like that. The phrase “it really puts things in perspective” is an overused cliché, but this does just that. You literally see your life from another perspective. And in some ways, it is horrifying.

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The War On Ads, continued

Peter-Paul Koch over on quirksmode.org has mirrored my own thoughts on ads far more eloquently than I could ever manage: Ad-funded free content providers have a strong vested interest in pretending the web is in danger from ad blockers. They need to protect their revenue stream — and if they can generate some clicks along the way, so much the better. But the web is a lot larger than just news sites with problematic business models.

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wordcount is in the store

I’ve released a new app on the windows store, a universal / UWP app for counting words. It sounds silly, but I needed a way to count words on my phone, and there were no options. At time of writing there are three other wordcount apps on the windows store. One is full of horrific full page ads, one doesn’t work (on wp10 at least), and one is a paid app.

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The War On Ads

I spotted on techcrunch this morning that my favourite browser, Opera, has just added a built in adblocker which it claims speeds up page loads by up to 90% in some cases. This is sure to fuel the current tension surrounding ads and adblocking. I stand firmly on the side of blocking ads. I’ve heard the arguments for ads, for white-listing a site so it can continue to profit etc. I’ve even complied a few times just to test out the experience, and I quickly relented.

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Voice Recognition in Windows Phone 10 Beta is abysmal

Voice recognition on Windows Phone 10 Preview is terrible. To demonstrate, I’ve attempted to write the next sentence of this blog using it. Here’s every attempt: It off and start it’s nothing stops halfway through a sentence. It off and stop Often stops halfway through president It often star It often starts at waitara send an It often starts at waitrose in It after Aften stop sao It often stops halfway through the It often It often stop sasha It often stops halfway through a sentence?

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Impostor Syndrome - an analogy and pep talk - Mary Robinette Kowal

Mary Robinette Kowal, author, narrator, puppeteer, and caster-of-pods over at writing excuses, has this to say about “imposter syndrome” on her blog today. We’ve probably all felt this at one point or another. I know I have. I’ve just given the same pep talk to three different writers, so I figure you probably need it to. Let me speak to you about impostor syndrome. That thing where you are sure everyone knows you’re faking it and they are going to find out any minute and then you will be cast down and …

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This is cool - put in any two ingredients into http://www.foodpairing.ninja and it will pick out matches from a database of over 600,000 recipes.

It’s also the first .ninja site I’ve seen in the wild, which is mildly interesting

I couldn’t find anything matching Peanut Butter and Sausages, I think there’s a potential opening there.

jbranchaud/til: Today I Learned

Josh Branchaud wrote a small file detailing some bit of programming knowledge he learned every day for 328 days. I really like this idea and I think I might just do it. I certainly won’t be posting as often as he is - I don’t learn quickly enough - but it’d be nice to be able to look back on everything I’ve learned in one year. **So what did I learn today?

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What Kind of Name Is That? The Perils of Naming Fictional Characters

An interesting look into naming fictional characters. I always have trouble with this. Something else they don’t mention are the perceived problems of giving a character the same first name to someone you know, and then worrying that they’ll think the character is based on them. Yes, I overthink things. That’s the key to a good procrastinator How to name your fictional characters.Characters in need of names.To me the most embarrassing part of writing fiction, aside from telling people about it, is naming your characters.

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Megayachts

There was a news story linked on Hacker News this morning about how a yacht belonging to Billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen damaged a coral reef in the Cayman islands. It’s not really much of a story, but it led me down a wikipedia rabbit-hole of mega-yachts. This is a picture of the yacht in question, the MV Tatoosh, 92m long Tatoosh’s features include: • Five decks; • a master suite, a saloon and other rooms on the top deck;

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The Danger of Answers

(WARNING: this article contains spoilers for Bladerunner. If you haven’t seen it then oh my god what the hell are you doing reading a blog? Go and watch Bladerunner!)

Patrick Rothfuss wrote a very interesting review of Rama II (and subsequent blog post) in which he discussed “the danger of sequels”. In short, he felt that Rama II, though itself not a bad book, was so different stylistically and thematically from the first that he did not enjoy it. Worse, in the introduction it mentioned that Clarke had always intended Rendezvous with Rama to be a standalone novel. This retroactively ruined the first book for Pat. That, in a nutshell was his problem with sequels.

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The poor decisions of Jessica Jones

I just finished watching the excellent Marvel / Netflix show Jessica Jones the other day. I liked the ending, but a couple of days later, something occurred to me…

SPOILERS AFTER THE BREAK

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Not sure what to buy the writers on your list? Not sure what to ask for yourself? Here’s my yearly guide to the top Christmas gifts for writers.

Source: Top Christmas Gifts for Writers in 2015 - Helping Writers Become Authors

I’ve made a couple of home-made board games in my time but this puts them to shame. This guy made a custom Settlers of Catan board - it looks amazing.

Such detail!

Check out the full gallery at imgur.com

 

A wild blog appears.

Source: I ♡ you, but you’re bringing me down – Monica Dinculescu

This is undoubtedly the second best comedy song ever written about Stonehenge.

Instead of Said

There are two schools of thought when it comes to writing dialogue tags. There’s the opinion that you should never use anything other than “said”. Elmore Leonard famously said ‘Never use a verb other than said to carry dialogue’. And then there’s the opinion - that you should use anything but said. He replied. She gasped. He recalled. She muttered. I’m of the opinion that these are different styles, and that a writer can opt for whichever style they please.

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Source: The British Library is crowdsourcing the translation of a mysterious 13th-century sword inscription - Quartz

I don’t really post about current affairs stuff, but I had to share this. The Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan houses just shy of 70k Syrian refugees. Here’s a photo from the air.

We hear statistics like “70,000 refugees”, “1 million displaced” etc, but it’s very hard to visualise a number like that. Photos like this convey what numbers never could.

Edge can't do bookmarklets

I wanted to use the “PressThis” button to post about something else quickly today (filesprout - awesome, check it out) but instead I ended up falling down a rabbit hole of trying to set up bookmarklets in Microsoft’s new Edge browser. There are lots of search results on this, but all ultimately point to the same itworld.com article on how to hack this together. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for me. When I alter the content of a URL link in favourites it just disappears from the browser.

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Must have tools for developers and power users

Every Windows developer should give this list a once over when setting up a new PC: Scott Hanselman’s 2014 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows There aren’t many I can add to that list - Scott has pretty much covered everything. Here are a few things I would also suggest: FFMPEG - if you do any work with video at all, FFMPEG converts things by command-line so you don’t have to install some dodgy app just to turn a mov file in an mp4 or whatever.

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If you are a software developer, and you name your installer ‘setup.exe’, I hate you

I’ll be posting regular productivity shortcuts / hacks in here, including scripts for AutoHotKey, which is the greatest thing ever™.

Here’s a neat one, from HowToGeek - a hot key for changing sensitivity settings on your mouse

Poe: New version, new website

I’ve not had a lot of time to work on any side projects lately, been very busy with work and family stuff. But I have just this past month scraped together enough time to put out an new version of my writing app for windows 8, Poe Poe is a simple distraction-free writing app with lots of neat little features to help authors knuckle down and focus on the writing. I won’t go into all the details here - that’s what I built the poe site for.

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I had to post something to get rid of that Hello World post, so here we are. More than likely, this will still be the only post a year from now.

I am an Irish coder and writer. I’m not great at either of those things, but I enjoy them.

Clearing out deleted playlists in android

You’ve probably come here from an old stack overflow post about android. That old post was deleted when I refreshed my blog last year, but this post serves as a landing page. UPDATE 2: Tuesday, April 9, 2013 I’ve gotten a lot of traffic to my blog from this post, and a huge number of emails from people thanking me for it. Glad it helped out! Any potential users should know that my crappy app currently crashes as soon as you run it, but actually does what it’s supposed to do!

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