Al Phillips

RaspIR Update for Linux Kernel 4.19

Posted on 9 June 2019 | Alex Phillips

Quick update for the RaspIR post I made a while back. After updating the Linux kernel on my Raspberry Pi a few days ago and rebooting, I was met with the unfortunate scenario of being unable to turn my lights on and off. After a few hours of furious Googling, it turns out that the lirc-rpi module hasn’t made it into 4.19, instead gpio-ir and gpio-ir-tx are recommended to replace it. [Read More]

Countries of the World - an Analysis of Sporcle Quiz Data

or: what's a Burkina Faso?

Posted on 19 December 2018 | Alex Phillips

This post comes as a result of a comment a friend made about what he thought was a good idea for a /r/dataisbeautiful post: “Some kind of graph showing the correlation between the population of a country and the number of people that answered it in the countries of the world sporcle quiz.” he said in a WhatsApp message. I think he knew exactly what would happen once I saw that suggestion… [Read More]

R ggplot Stan

Remotely switching OS with rEFInd

For systems without IPMI

Posted on 6 June 2018 | Alex Phillips

I’ve recently been doing lots of switching between Linux (i run arch btw) and Windows on my home PC. However, I also do a lot of things remotely. This is fine when you’ve got a pure Linux box, but dual-booting on consumer hardware leaves much to be desired. GRUB allows you to specify which boot option to select as default on your next boot (and only the next boot), which back-in-the-day I used to use to, in a slightly convoluted manner, reboot to Windows after defaulting to my Linux install. [Read More]

linux rEFInd

Adding HTTPS support to an nginx/Hugo site using letsencrypt

Free SSL certificates?!

Posted on 3 June 2018 | Alex Phillips

If your site doesn’t support HTTPS, better hurry up. Google already uses HTTPS as a ranking factor, but from July 2018, Google Chrome will label non-HTTPS sites as not-secure. The following setup is so simple that there’s basically no excuse for your site to not be HTTPS compliant. These instructions assume you’ve followed the mish-mash of a guide I posted for the starting setup. First of all, head on over to letencrypt. [Read More]

git hugo web development

Setting up an nginx/Hugo Site

With git-hooks for deployment

Posted on 10 January 2018 | Alex Phillips

What follows is something of a personal reminder of how I got this webserver set up, using nginx to serve a static website which is generated by Hugo using git-hooks to deploy with a simple git push. I had to read several different tutorials to figure it out; those that I can remember I have linked at relevant points. A while later, I added HTTPS support using letsencrypt, but I’ll save that for another post since it required some more fiddling. [Read More]

hugo git web development nginx

RaspIR

Because Philips Hue is far too expensive and convenient

Posted on 23 October 2017 | Alex Phillips

I can now turn my lights on and off from my phone Short update to keep this half-working with Linux Kernel 4.19 here I forget exactly what drove me to do this, probably sheer laziness; I was getting tired of getting out of bed to turn the lights in my bedroom on and off. In the age of the smartphone and internet of things, it seemed obvious to try some sort of internet-enabled solution, just in case I was ever on the other side of the planet and wanted to turn my lights on. [Read More]

code home automation raspberry pi electronics python

I went to York a couple of weeks ago

And took a couple of rubbish photos with my phone

Posted on 27 July 2017 | Alex Phillips

I’m not really one for taking many photos, I find it detracts from the experience of being in places. Better to have a couple of photos to jog the memory than take a hundred and not remember what was going on when you took ’em. Clifford's Tower A now empty shell, this is what remains of the Norman York castle. It was raining when we were at the top. All around the hill the tower sits on were geese. [Read More]

york travel photos

First

Well that was an effort.

Posted on 25 June 2017 | Alex Phillips

In case you haven’t noticed, this page is Powered By Hugo ©️. Hugo is a very nice static website engine, taking your neatly arranged directories full of Markdown files and converting it into a pretty website. I had tried to do something similar with Flask but the process of getting a kind of “dynamically-static” site running where I could just drop in new files was too much of a faff. Then a friend recommended Hugo which, after a couple of days of messing about, seems perfect for my use case. [Read More]

code git hugo programming