When I want to show a video chat on the big screen I tend to use a mobile device and cast the picture to the TV . It did occur to me though that it might be useful to have the capability to call directly from the home theatre PC under the TV . I don't want to buy a separate webcam for this niche u...

My monitors are colour calibrated using a colorimeter for photographic work, which requires the monitor brightness to be set at a specific level for colour accuracy. During general use in the evenings however I always lower the brightness to avoid eye strain. On laptops this is easy, as you can simp...

Launchbot, the start-page project that my personal portal is based on, recently released version 3. This release includes a settings page, so that sites can be added without editing the source, a feature that was sorely lacking in v1.

However I've forked and modified the original project substa...

Sadly I've decided to give it a miss this year. I registered for my tickets early and was still dithering over my itinerary for the talks right up to last night - there are a lot of interesting speakers to choose between. However with an epidemic looking like it's descending on the UK (and especiall...

As discussed in my ealier post A Better Baby Monitor , we're now using Gonimo to keep an eye on Tiny at home. On the road we've been using our phones (one stays in the bedroom as a monitor, the other we carry with us as a viewer). This works OK for audio only or during the daytime where there's a f...

I've been keeping a digital notebook in Evernote for quite a few years now. It's a great tool for archiving knowledge that you need to retain long-term. It's become my personal wiki of experience and clipped web pages. Despite this I've carried on making paper notes for calls and meetings. There a...

Having decided to use the GoPro Quik app for short video projects , I wondered if I could make better use of it at home. On the road I can run the app on my phone or iPad. At home though I'd prefer to make use of a large monitor, keyboard and mouse. I'd also like to make use of larger, faster stora...

I've done a fair bit of video work in my time and always looked down on the consumer options, such as Windows Movie Maker. iMovie was a notable exception before it was dumbed down to resemble the iOS app in v13. Over the years I went from iMovie '11 to Final Cut, Premiere and then Lightworks. Howeve...

Like many parents, since our first child arrived at the end of last year we have anxiously kept an eye on her using a baby monitor. When she was born we purchased a pram from an old friend and colleague, who kindly threw in a monitor that he no longer needed. It was a basic BT model, a simple microp...

Over the years my photo collection has grown and grown, especially since switching to digital photography circa 2007. A few years ago I decided to make a concerted effort to properly organise, backup and maintain my collection. Around the same time, I began to take an interest in manual photography...

Occasionally I still prefer a physical book (or am gifted one) over an e-book. But it's useful to have a digital copy of a chapter or two, either to read on the go without lugging the whole book around with me or to carry all the time for revision and reference.

A few printed books now come with...

In the middle of my desk sits a small KVM (Keyboard/ Video /Mouse) switch that lets me flip my only mouse and keyboard between my main computer and one other. I've had it a few years and it's been very useful, but far from perfect. The unit itself is a small, cheap model with a single USB input. Tha...

The overhaul of my company and personal blog sites is now complete. It was long overdue, and my recent sabbatical presented a perfect opportunity to do a complete redesign and get up to date. I had been thinking for some time that I would like to switch to a simpler setup and workflow. After a great...

I've been away for a week since my primary NAS died and in the meantime an identical unit has been shipped under RMA from Amazon. So today I began running through the recovery steps suggested on the Synology site. This wasn't quite as straight forward as I had expected (insert the drives in the new...

So today I have my first outage since switching to Synology NAS some seven years ago*. I received an email from my primary NAS, a DS218+, that the box would be going down for a reboot following an update. Some hours later I tried to view one of my internal portal sites, no response. So I checked the...

I've had a Wacom graphics tablet for a number of years now. I've never been completely happy with it's performance in either Windows or Linux - pointer movement was jerky and the accleration far too aggressive. Also switching between the configuration options appropriate for particular tasks, such a...

For a while now I've been struggling with managing browser tabs. Most of the time I seem to be working on tens of tasks at once, each task in its own window with many tabs. As everything has become web-centric, the collection of open windows and tabs has become unmanageable. For a while I tried tab...

I've been very pleased with the Docker support on my newest NAS, but the Synology Docker GUI is somewhat lacking. Essentially it provides start and stop buttons for the containers and that's it. I wanted something with some monitoring and a bit more control to avoid having to log into the box at the...

Recently I upgraded my travel router to a GL-iNet GL-MT300N-V2. My motivation was two-fold:

1. I wanted support for my OpenVPN built in.
2. TP-Link had stopped supporting my old TL-MR3020, leaving it insecure.

The MT300 is a fantastic little device. Very low power requirements (it will run off a sin...

My Tomato router supports dnsmasq, allowing me to provide user friendly names in place of IP addresses for the web services on my local LAN. Simply adding the following to the dnsmasq Custom Configuration field in the router settings creates addresses pointing to my start page and the staging/develo...

I've been running a self-hosted Git server on my Synology NAS for some years. A while back I searched around for a UI for Git. I'm comfortable at the CLI but sometimes I just prefer a GUI for browsing through revisions.

I've been very happy with my Synology NAS, a 4-bay DS411j which I've had for some seven years. But the ARM chipset has always been a little underpowered and with the latest DSM updates it's been really starting to show its age. I was finally spurred to upgrade when I read about the virtualisation features in the newer Intel based boxes. These are able to host VMs and Docker containers.

Back at the Techcrunch Disrupt London conference this year, one of my favourite tech news sites.

I was most interested in the talk on a general purpose API builder, quite close to something I've been working on lately.

My home office needs a landline - it's the only way to answer the door in the property, as the intercom at the building entrance dialls the occupants for authorisation. I've been looking for a way round this, as I object to paying a not insignificant monthly fee simply to answer the door. We really have no other need for a landline. It's possible to link a mobile phone number to the intercom, but then only one of us can answer the door!

A bit of 3d printing and the ergonomics of my Thinkpad laptop are much improved. It also frees up quite a bit of desk space.

Listening to Steve Freeman's talk on using command line tools for data processing. While everyone's trying to re-invent the wheel, often the old UNIX CLI tools are still the best for the job (with a little Python mixed in).

In recent years there have been many reports in the press about the dangers of using public WiFi. These hotspots offer free, convenient connectivity on the go, but are often poorly maintained and are not security audited. I attended a STAC conference recently where a security expert strongly recomme...

Attending Techcrunch Disrupt London for a couple of days, great fun!

The security of ISP's standard routers has been a nagging concern of mine for some time. Security updates seem to be few and far between and there are disturbing reports of exploits in the wild. Also the functionality of these boxes is quite limited; none or limited support for local DNS, VPN and DD...

Time to retire some old servers as I've made the switch to Synology NAS, which suffice for my purposes. Not before I've scavenged the old hard drives though.

I don't think I'll be going back to rolling my own. I enjoy the build process, but it's such a time-sink. With the Synology boxes I get less...

Attending the kx Annual Conference at the K club in Ireland for a couple of days. Fantastic venue to catch up on the latest KDB+ developments.