Archive for the ‘howto’ Category

My second Raspberry Pi came at the end of last week[1], so now I have one to tinker with in addition to the first that I’m using as a media player. It turns out that it’s not just SD cards that the raspi is fussy about, I had a real struggle getting either of my […]


I’ve continued tinkering with my OpenELEC media player, and there’s too much stuff to do as just updates or comments to the original post. Build I started out with a canned build[1], but discussion on the OpenELEC thread on the Raspberry Pi Forums suggested that I was missing out on some features and fixes. I […]


My old Kiss Dp-600 media player has been getting progressively less reliable, so for a little while I’ve been telling the kids that I’d replace it with a Raspberry Pi. Of course getting hold of one has proven far from simple. Some time ago the prospect of using XBMC on the Raspi was confirmed, leading […]


This should work for any service that only supports POP3S, not just gmail. You’ll need a Linux box/VM (I generally use Ubuntu). Background Since the mid 90s I’ve used Ameol to retrieve email. When I started using gmail I forwarded mail on to my ISP’s POP3 service and collected it with Ameol so that I’d […]


The title for this post comes from an old naval tradition, where a ‘make and mend‘ was time given to fix up clothing. These days sailors get their uniform from stores, and personal clothes from shops like the rest of us; so a modern day ‘make and mend’ is simply some time off. With the […]


Arduino Simon

11Jan12

I My son got a great Xmas present in the shape of a Starter Kit for Arduino  from Oomlout. After doing some of the basic projects I decided we needed something that we could get our teeth into. After a little pondering Simon came out as a worthwhile challenge. Back in the 80s I’d written a version […]


OpenVPN

22Nov11

For some time I’ve used SSH tunnels as a means to pretend that I’m somewhere else to avoid geography filters, or to otherwise sneak past content filters. This is fine for regular HTTP(S) traffic from a browser, where it is easy to define a proxy server, but doesn’t work so well for other applications – […]


I run a bunch of Linux (mostly Ubuntu) VMs on my main machine at home, which happens to be a laptop. I use VirtualBox, but what I have to say here is probably applicable to most host based virtualisation environments. My requirements are pretty simple: The VMs need to be able to access the Internet […]


After switching to using my tablet PC as my main machine I was missing the local storage and optical drive from my desktop. The solution was to get another HP Microserver to be a sort of sidecar when I want the extra drives. As the HP cashback deal is still on this is a surprisingly […]


My Galaxy Tab came from the US, and is AT&T branded. As soon as I got it I installed a stock firmware as I didn’t want to live with the various restrictions AT&T had imposed (and I also wanted to use a UK data plan). For my holiday in the US I wanted to get […]