After turning an old Android tablet into a dedicated E-Reader by utilising KOReader, I also turned to Calibre to manage my E-Books. Utilising this Caibre recipe in this gist by oott123 I was able to get Calibre to pull my RSS feed (hosted on my TTRSS raspberry pi) into a ebook, that I could sync with my “reader” and read on the go. Create a new “news” source From the “Fetch News” icon in the main tool bar of Calibre, select the down arrow and click “Add or edit a custom news source” Adding custom news source Create a new recipe by clicking the “New recipe” button down the bottom left area of the pop up window Add a new recipe Give it a name and fill out the form to your prefernce, and then switch over to advanced mode Switch to advanced mode Copy in the recipe and adjust the variables in the code to point to your TTRSS instance. Read more

I like the idea of e-ink. Ultra Low power, easily readable displays. Big fan. I also follow some cryptocurrency’s. So this project is a merge of these 2 things. It’s still a work in progress, as there a few bugs I need to sort out, and I need a nice looking case. But for now it was a fun project that does the thing well and I got to learn some image manipulation in python! Read more

Need to get the default Azure Search Service query key into a variable to use in other parts of your terraform infrastructure? I did too. Unfortunately the docs for this were a bit vague, so through a bit of trial and error we got there azurerm_search_service.example.query_keys[0].key Given that these query keys are called the “default” keys, I assumed we could access this attribute by azurerm_search_service.example.query_keys.default.key. But that was not the case. Read more

openSSL is a very handy tool from the command line. Managing multiple sites and domains I almost use it everyday to do crypto relating things to websites - checking validity, preparing new CSRs, converting certificates to different formats for different operating systems. Here are some of those that I’ve used along the way Read .cer in plain text openssl x509 -in certificate.cer -text -noout convert from pkcs12 (windows format, with private key and cert) to pem (-nocerts for only priv key or -nokeys for only certs) openssl pkcs12 -in keystore. Read more

I often work with images to go onto e-commerce sites, so getting them as small as possbile (file size wise) is what I aim for, for performance There are plenty of good, paid tools out there such as Kraken or ImageOptim and there are even some good, free (web based) tools you can use such as TinyPNG and Compressor but I was looking for something a I could add into my workflow (read automated and scriptable) Read more

I’ve had a plan of being a good guy and contributing to the litecoin network by being a full node. I was able to do this when I got around to buying a raspberry pi 3B+ and a 2TB external hard drive. There isn’t many up-to-date guides out there on setting a full node up on a raspberry pi, but this one was the most recent, and worked every step of the way (with a few minor changes) - the school of litecoin Read more

So I was asked to help finish moving a magento (1.9) installation to a new server the other day. To sum it up, it was not fun They had already moved the files and had everything installed and updated the database connection string, however it was still throwing an error. The plan was to set this site up on a subdomain, so we could test a few things, update some things and then go live on the new server Read more

Recently I installed pihole on my network because I was sick of ads, and wanted an added layer of security on my network against nasty malware and the like There are plenty of install guides out there for pihole (see official website) so thats not what I am covering today. I installed this on a raspberry pi 1 (Model B) and it handles everything just fine! Becauase I am a fan of home automation, I wanted all the data that is available in the piHole web interface, avaialable to me at my openHAB interface. Read more

Here is a start of a regular posting, “useful commands” Over the years I have saved snippets, commands and notes of things that have been useful or saved alot of time. I start off with a gathering of T-SQL commands to do useful things within a windows database. Some of these relate directly to modifying a Kentico database (the CMS of choice where I work), but may be useful anyway Read more

Creating a live USB is easy, adding persistence seems to be quite hard. After lots of research, there was alot of ways to do it, but most of these tutorials were out of date so some things weren’t relevant anymore or just didn’t work Here are some hopefully simple steps to create a live USB with persistence, using Ubuntu. This will also be available as a normal USB flash drive to windows users Read more