Simple Remote Wake on Lan with Raspberry Pi Zero W

September 18, 2023 | Comment

As part of my drive to help the planet, I am trying to use less electricity. We have a Windows machine in the lounge that acts as a Plex media server. This works very well but I realised that it was only being used at certain times of the day, usually in the evenings, meaning that it was running for hours on end unnecessarily. Therefore, the plan was to have the machine automatically turn off each night at midnight when I knew we would definitely not be using it, but what about turning it on?

If I was at home … Read the rest

Working out my credit card statement date in Excel

September 7, 2023 | Comment

This might be the most niche post I have ever done but I hope that it might prove useful to someone.

My credit card bill gets made up on or around the tenth of each month but, for reasons I won’t go into here, I needed to much more accurately predict when it was actually going to be created. Through a combination of searching and testing, I discovered that in my case it is always made up on the sixth working day of the month. Turns out that there is an Excel (and Google Sheets) function that can help with … Read the rest

Update to WordPress Posts to PDF

August 24, 2023 | Comment

A few weeks ago I released a tool that allows you to export your WordPress posts to a nicely formatted PDF file. I have today pushed some changes to the code which you can find on the GitHub page. This includes the following:

Heading (H1, H2 & H3) tags are all now supported
List (ordered & unordered) tags are now supported
Inline images (not supported) captions are silently dropped
A new command line parameter to choose the order of output
Progress now shows the number of posts out of the total processed (see image below)
Improvements in the

… Read the rest

Maco Go 2: Apple Watch Charger

August 16, 2023 | Comment

Back in February 2020, I backed the Maco Go project on Kickstarter. This tiny, portable, USB-C Apple Watch charger arrived in September 2020. While I was impressed with its size and portability I was less impressed with its charging speeds.

In my tests, shown below, the Maco Go took roughly twice as long to charge as the standard Apple Watcher charger cable in the same charging plug.

Apple Watch cable	Maco Go	Apple Watch cable	Maco Go
18:25 22% 19:25 92% +70%	13:19 28% 14:19 58% +30%	18:25 33% 19:25 96% +63%	16:51 15% 17:51 44% +29%

In the end, … Read the rest

Creating a Word Cloud from Your Day One Entries

August 9, 2023 | Comment

A while back I wrote a post about querying the Day One database in which I teased more to come with this statement:

I wanted more detail than Day One offered and had ideas of how I could mine my entries in cool ways (more on that in a later post).

Well, this is that “later post”! I wanted to visualise my entries as a word cloud.

Massaging the data

In order to produce the cloud I needed to do two things: extract the data and then display it. Sounds simple doesn’t it? I quickly found that there were a … Read the rest

Exporting all WordPress Posts to PDF

August 2, 2023 | Comment

I had a requirement to export all my WordPress blog posts into a nicely formatted PDF file and so I looked at plugins that were available to do the job, of which there are a few. I tried some and none worked for me giving no output at all so I decided I would roll my own. Here’s how you can use that code to download your posts to PDF too. You can see an example of the output at the bottom of the post.

To do this required two things: accessing my posts via the WordPress API and … Read the rest

Sending messages to Pushover from PHP

July 24, 2023 | Comment

One of the things that I regularly bake into my own applications is notifications of when things go really bad and need my immediate attention. For this, I use the excellent and simple Pushover service which allows me to send a push notification to my mobile device. In this post, I run through how to set up your application in Pushover and then send a notification via PHP.

Setup Pushover

I am assuming that you have already created your Pushover account. You get a 30-day trial and after that, it is just $5 as a one-off purchase.

From your dashboard … Read the rest

Day One Encryption

July 19, 2023 | Comment

TL;DR the Day One local database is not encrypted.

After my last post on querying the Day One database, I was asked the question: what happens if you have your journals encrypted?

Before we get into that, let’s look at the Day One encryption options. You can turn on encryption on a journal-by-journal basis and it is on by default. This must have changed at some point as my original journal is not encrypted and newer ones are. Despite being able to choose which journals are encrypted and which aren’t selectively there is only one encryption key meaning that … Read the rest

The Move from LastPass is Complete

July 14, 2023 | Comment

In December 2022 LastPass announced to their users that they had been subject to a data breach. This led me to consider moving to another password manager which I did, settling on 1Password.

I transferred over 1,700 passwords and I calculated that changing an average of three a day was going to take me a year and a half to change them all. Well, it has been somewhat quicker than that as I have finished! In doing so I have reduced the number from 1,700 to 677.

I thought that it might be useful to know what I did … Read the rest

More Twitter API Shenanigans

July 4, 2023 | Comment

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter things have been, how can I put this politely, a little unstable. Then, last Friday, the platform started to limit the number of Tweets that you can view. At the same time that this change was implemented my calls to the API stopped working returning the following:

stdClass Object (
   [errors] =Array (
      [0] =stdClass Object (
         [message] =Sorry, that page does not exist
         [code] =34
      )
   )
)

Searching online turned up nothing much about this specifc error message and nothing recent either. I spent a bit of … Read the rest