Hello!#
So what is this site?
It’s a place for me to roughly document whatever small personal projects I’m working on really. There might be some build write-ups, some simple writing, film reviews, or even a look back at old content. Basically, a collction of non sequiturs. Check out the ‘About’ section for more.
This is my ‘indoor’ homepage if you like. I’m also very much an outdoor person, and for reasons lost to time and tea, for that kind of content, better to have a look at nanikore.net, as that is more focussed on motorcycling, photography, snowboarding and other outdoor stuff these days.
As sort-of promised, I’ve started putting some of my old old content up from the 90s and 2000s in the Retro section with some context added in a With Hindsight part preceding them. Just a bit of whimsical retro lip-service and reminding myself just how much more time I used to have, and just how many things have gone by the wayside in nigh on two decades.
Also updated my Currently Using page for a few minor changes over the last few months....
On this page there’s just a bit on what electronic devices / equipment / software I’m running right now. It’s all to meet requirements and geared towards value for money.
What’s New in December 2020? I’ve updated my Archive Server to Ubuntu Server 20.04 from Xubuntu 18.04. I like to stay on the more current LTS, and I wanted to dump the official UI weight on top since it really is just a server, so Xubuntu went....
(Late Summer 2019)
I wrote previously about my successful animatronic eyes build using some ping pong balls as ’eyes’, which moved around on a rig, each powered by 2 servos, for 2 axes of movement and controlled by an Adafruit Crickit and the Circuit Playground Express [CPE].
It worked well enough and the effect was quite interesting, but for what I wanted - eyes moving in a hood as party of a creepy monster animatronic for Hallowe’en - there were a few drawbacks....
MiniDV tapes aren’t old in the grand scheme of things, but they’re getting up there. I owned and used a Sony Handycam HC-48 from roughly 2007 to 2010 give or take, getting only about 14 hours of video. I think this is when I found out that as a family, we’re more photo than video oriented. It also dovetailed into smartphone video capabilities ramping up, and for me, action cams....
For the last few months, my 5 year old Asus RT-AC68U wi-fi router has been dropping connections. I tried adjusting management channel, checked for local interference in the house or with other wi-fi networks, and eventually did some signal checks with NetSpot running on the Windows 10 laptop.
From looking at the NetSpot graphs above for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz, it looks like that the whole signal was dropping off a cliff increasingly often, leaving pages not loading and in some cases devices being disconnected....