Whilst there is a ton of useful data on the EPA Ireland web-site, it’s not exactly easy to track what’s going on. After my recent RSS post, I got a request from Ashley to see if something better was doable with the EPA data. After a bit of playing around I was able to scrape the thousands of individual RSS feeds and generate what is hopefully helpful to those of you who wish to monitor submissions on the site. »
Bring out your dead I’m that guy, the one who never gave up on blogs and never ever gave up on RSS. “Let me tell you, young whippersnappers, what the Internet was like in 2007, it was glorious,” etc. My GitHub account is mostly just a collection of scrapers to turn webpages into RSS for all those companies who have killed their feeds over the years. RSS and advertising never really made good bedfellows. »
Sir Clive launched the greatest home computer of all time on April 23rd 1982, almost 40 years ago. I got mine in late 1982 and I still have it. Better, faster, stronger. I wanted to do something to mark the occasion and decided to play around with Z88DK, a C Compiler and toolchain for 8-bit micros like the Speccy. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and it turned out to be ridiculously easy to write programs using it. »
Two things happened in early 2012 that have made the past almost-decade a geeky joy - I discovered the Arduino project and the first Raspberry Pi was released. Since then I’ve had a ridiculous amount of fun with both and built a ton of useful and useless projects. Despite having a Masters degree in Electronics, I’ve never worked as a Electronic Engineer and have always lived in the software world. I’d often wanted to dabble over the years but everything seemed just too difficult. »
It looks like I first started talking about MongoDB online back in 2011 - We’ve come a long way baby. Right, need to finish watching the MongoDB vids (easier than I thought) and then do an Amazon ELB setup for kicks. — Conor O'Neill (@conoro) May 28, 2011 Mongo has remained one of my favourite tools for getting things done. I always think that’s why it succeeded. Whilst the factions argued it out on HN, developers just got on with using it for practical purposes. »
Every Halloween for the past decade or so, I’ve built something silly to scare or entertain the trick-or-treaters. Some years it works brilliantly, other years, not so well. But the basic idea is always the same - detect arrival of kids and use sound/light/motion to jump-scare them. And every Halloween is a last-minute race to assemble electronics, plastic, duct-tape and code. That code is often a horrendous unreliable mish-mash of Arduino, Espruino, Python, Node. »
TL;DR - Gordon Williams has a new Espruino Kickstarter for the fabulous Bangle.js 2. Go and back the project and enjoy every geeky minute of playing with it. I have one of the devices already and it’s a massive leap forward over V1. Imagine running JavaScript and TensorFlow Micro machine learning on your wrist! I’m still not sure how I heard about the Espruino project originally back in 2013. Hackaday maybe? »
As long-time readers of my blog(s) know, I come from an Embedded Systems background and still love to play with home electronics and IoT. And of course, since last year I’ve been noodling around with CO2 monitors and other environmental sensors because of you-know-what. So I decided to see if I could connect my sensor setup to Low Code platforms like Node-RED, parse the values, persist them and alert me somehow if CO2 in particular got too high. »
I saw two related threads over the past few days about computers in education. Walter retweeted one which called the Rasperry Pi a failure as it didn’t achieve its original mission. Clickbait title time: The Raspberry Pi failed (a thread). The original mission statement of the Pi was to be a modern BBC computer - a cheap educational resource that could be scattered throughout schools for kids to learn on. »
Gen-X nerds continue to ruin the internet for Gen-Z by implementing RSS feeds for TikTok 😁 I was really intrigued by the launch of GitHub OCTO Flat Data, having already been a longtime fan of Simon Willison’s work (all the way back to the early days of Django). There is something very powerful in there that is not obvious on first look. Connecting it to Low-Code platforms could unleash lots of crazy fabulous new ideas. »