I am thinking of reviving this blog. I am hearing from all angles why I should be publishing: in case what I share is useful, regular writing is supposed to be good for me, and because maybe “personal branding” is a fairly good idea after all.
The first thing I want to do is a draw a line under the old topics from 2012 while I was still at University of Aberdeen. I actually enjoyed reading them again, the topics are so unrelated to what I do now that they aren’t cringe worthy.
Boombox
My JVC ’80s boombox has had a good run. It has developed a hum on the tape deck that I can’t fix with my usual routine of poking the contacts with a spoon to ground them and twiddling the knobs to get static and dirt out. I don’t want to have to throw it away next time I move flat, so writing this has spurred me to contact a repair shop before I finished this paragraph.
In the end I used the FM transmitter, tape deck connector, and blank tapes pretty evenly depending on the circumstances. The FM transmitter if I needed to use my phone at the same time, the tape connector for better sound quality, and tapes for relaxing.
I have noticed an increased number of battery-powered small Bluetooth speakers that actually sound good. Finding something portable that sounded good without being too expensive is what drove me to buying a vintage boombox in the first place. The UE BOOM is the one I’ve heard the most of and I’m impressed by it. Some others sounded OK and there have been others that I didn’t think sounded good enough, but I didn’t take note of what they were. They seem to be in the £100 plus range still.
Node.js filtering proxy
I was really happy with how fast it is to get up and running with Node.js. I realise that forwarding all of your browser’s traffic isn’t a high load situation, but is more than Flask’s debug server would take with default settings for example. I appreciate that Node.js’ standard pattern worked so well out of the box, it’s evented and has a fast VM. Python is my first language now and I love it for how it encourages team maintainability, but often needs extra consideration to reach production performance. Python’s async syntax and PyPy should bridge the evented and VM gaps respectively. The new language features in ES6 should make JavaScript more attractive. Exciting times! I like to think of ease of maintenance by a team and performance as different facets of working at scale.
The code I wrote probably doesn’t work with 4OD anymore. I don’t have a television now so I don’t see adverts for shows, so I haven’t used any of the catch up services in years. It was a fun exercise though and gave me something to talk about in a job interview.
SD to HDD copier
I never tried it. I don’t hear the complaint of full SD cards so much anymore. I think the cloud and even lower SD card costs have solved the problem. I’m still excited about what new products these education focused electronics will lead to. The Arduino is still a great microcontroller. The Raspberry Pi is a great embeddable full computer and the new models are really powerful and still cheap. The new BBC micro:bit is awesome for experimenting with the components in modern mobile devices. I was worried that the micro:bit would be stepping on the Raspberry Pi’s toes, but after getting one at EuroPython 2016 I was won over. The micro:bit definitely has a focus on mobile devices, which makes a lot of sense as most people’s first computer is a mobile.
Universal repair USB stick
I feel guilty that I didn’t document my steps properly. I still have the one USB stick, but I’ve not had to use it in years. Modern Macs and Windows computers have built-in repair partitions. Upgrading to the latest OS is a lot more common now the upgrades are free and can be downloaded, so there seems to be fewer people with messed up systems. I myself hardly ever use a laptop anymore and do most of my work on a tablet. When a tablet goes bad, you just wipe it. That sounds like the worst case and evokes memories of reinstalling Windows. The reality is all the apps, settings, and documents are backed up on the cloud and starting from scratch again isn’t a big deal. With app stores for most platforms and Microsoft and Apple both peddling cloud storage, desktop could be going the same way. I’ve been considering trying to Dockerise my whole dev environment so even trickier installs are easier to reproduce. I’ve not seen anyone using Docker that way yet so could be interesting.
Clipboard sharing with Dropbox
I got a lot of use out of my little Dropbox app. Eventually messaging apps got better at accepting different sorts of pasted content and I stopped using it. I read the help page linked from my Public folder and it appears that only Pro and Business users can use Public folder simple URLs now, so my app may no longer work. If I were to make it now I’d probably have to use Dropbox’ API to make tokenised URLs. The help page also says that as of 2016-10-03 HTML documents won’t be rendered in a browser, I guess they’ll change the content type. My app relied on that for sharing rich text content.
The future
I do hope to keep this blog somewhat up to date now. Everyone in the tech industry has moments when they feel they were the first one to get a particular combination of parts working together, so I will try to share those times at least. I work mostly with Python, Docker, and AWS now so things could be more focused in that direction. That said I want to start making and computing as a hobby again not just work, I think about it so much.
