I’ve been accumulating a small amazon.com gift card balance for years but with no real way of spending it from the UK. Looking for a movie, I saw it was available on amazon.com but not amazon.co.uk. So, with some experimentation, I was able to make the purchase using my gift card balance. The key things …
One of my short stories, Papilio Carnivorus, has been published in the Elegant Literature magazine. The magazine is free to read and contains ten short stories selected from all competition entries. The story is generated from the open prompt of “paradise plundered” and tells the story of a nineteenth century scientist who travels to Africa …
I’m not alone in harbouring an ambition to publish a book one day, and after a) having had a programming book published, and b) having a short story published in an anthology, I have a reasonable expectation of how much work it is, and low expectations of how much money it makes. Still, it makes …
As with everything in Pi land, following the “just install Kodi” guides left a few things that didn’t work. Extra commands and steps so far are: Despite following about fifteen different methods I still haven’t gotten Kodi to autostart on reboot.
I’ve been thinking about replacing my old PVR with a Raspberry Pi based one. Setup so far has been a bit bumpy, so just in case this helps future me: this page has a lot of info, including the drivers. The problem I had was that the tuner seemed to work on Windows but was …
I’ve got a couple of Pimoroni’s excellent LiPo SHIM for Pico. When soldered to a Pico they allow a LiPo battery to be connected, or USB power, and if the latter then the battery is charged. There’s also a power button, which is a bonus. I wanted to programattically determine charge level, which it appears …
Gardening is not my thing at all. I can do houseplants, because they’re right in front of me, wilting away as they beg for water. But anything that’s out of sight may as well not exist. And, by the end of summer, they generally don’t, and the only sign that they ever might have done …
It may not be quite true to say modern computers have unlimited processing power and memory, but the high performance and huge storage space I’ve gotten used to does make things a lot easier. Yet one of the fun things about programming for the Pico is in working within tight constraints. The Pico is advertised …
Measuring temperature with the Pico is one of the easiest “quick wins” for getting familiar with the platform. Along with turning the onboard LED on and off, you can achieve something that feels like interaction with the real world with nothing more than a few lines of Micropython due to the Pico’s onboard temperature sensor. …
I’m starting to get more confident with putting components together with the Pico, so without too much research I bought a simple speaker/amplifier breakout board. Still, given how every time I try something simple on the Pico it turns out to involve hours of Googling I assumed that getting a speaker to work would be …