Exporting WordPress Posts to Day One

November 1, 2025 | Comment

For this month’s “12 Apps in 12 Months” challenge I decided that I wanted to try and import my WordPress posts into the Day One app. Given that Day One is now owned by Automattic who also “own” WordPress I was surprised that something like this didn’t already exist as an option within the app.

Into the Unknown

As a local app, albeit one with cloud storage and syncing, there isn’t an API for Day One. Instead there is a CLI which you can use to create new entries from the command line. This was the approach I took to … Read the rest

Using bookshelf – a reading list manager

October 2, 2025 | Comment

Yesterday I wrote about my latest project — bookshelf. Today, I am going to show you how to use it. This post assumes that you have already downloaded the code and got it up-and-running.

Table of Contents

Views

bookshelf has a number of different views to satisfy the different groups using it.

All Books

The main view (Home) is straight list of all your books which can be filtered by author, title, … Read the rest

bookshelf – a reading list manager

October 1, 2025 | 1 comment

As I have stated previously, I read more than the UK average (40% of Britons haven’t read or listened to anything in the last 12 months), but I get books faster than I can read them. This means that I have a backlog of books waiting to be read. I wanted somewhere that I could record all my books and have a priority list of those that I wanted to read next.

Therefore, for this month’s “12 apps in 12 months” I present bookshelf – a reading list manager a place where you can manage all your … Read the rest

Escaping a Frozen SSH Session

September 19, 2025 | Comment

If you use SSH regularly, you’ve probably seen this: you’re happily connected to a remote server, then you close your laptop or lose your network connection. When you open it again, your terminal looks stuck. You press keys, nothing happens, and eventually you get something like:

client_loop: send disconnect: Broken pipe

Until that timeout kicks in, the session feels “locked” and you can’t type anything useful.

Fortunately, there are a few simple tricks to escape frozen SSH sessions without waiting around.

Use SSH’s Built-In Escape Sequences

OpenSSH has a special escape character: ~ (tilde). It only works if … Read the rest

Home Assistant – Bus Stop Times

September 1, 2025 | Comment

As I have stated in previous posts I am currently trying to get my head around Home Assistant and Dashboards in particular. I am slowly working up to having a dashboard display on an old Android tablet.

I decided that I’d like a project that could show how Home Assistant could be used for more than simply turning on and off the lights, and what would be useful to me would be a display showing a list of the next bus arrivals at our nearest stop.

I found that our local bus company, Reading Buses, has an api that provides … Read the rest

Discogs Collection Clean-up

August 1, 2025 | Comment

As I continue my 12 apps in 12 months journey this month’s is, by my own admission, a low effort submission! That’s not to say it isn’t useful, it is to me at least, but let’s just say it’s not going to win any programming awards.

What is Discogs?

For those that aren’t aware Discogs is an online platform that allows you to record your media collection, mainly vinyl in my case, and it also has a marketplace allowing sales of the same. One part of the recording of items is that it allows you to record the grading of … Read the rest

Evernote Family Remembers

July 1, 2025 | 1 comment

On long car journeys one of the favourite games for my grandaughter to play is something she calls “family remembers”. What she wants is for us to tell her interesting stories from our family past and mainly from our son, her father, and her uncle. These stories are all taken from memory and made me wish that I had recorded them somewhere for future prosperity. This in turn led me to start collecting interesting stories about my grandchildren and recording them in Evernote.

I thought that it would be nice to be able to turn these little stories locked away … Read the rest

Adding labels to media with php2Bluesky

June 28, 2025 | Comment

Someone mentioned to me that you can add labels to posts in Bluesky and I have to admit that I had not idea what they were referring to. Looking at them I can understand why I’d not come across them – I’d not had any need for them but what are labels?

Bluesky Labels

A Bluesky label is a tag you can add to your own post to warn others (and moderation tools) that your content may include things like nudity, violence, sexual content, or graphic imagery. They:

  • Enable users to filter or blur posts based on content type.
  • Help
… Read the rest

bookISBN2Task

June 1, 2025 | 1 comment

In the UK, the average adult reads approximately three books per year, according to a recent poll by YouGov. However, 40% of Britons haven’t read a single book in the last 12 months. That I have read on average 19 books a year puts me very much in the upper echelons of readers in the UK. My wife, on the other hand, averages 126 a year (that’s one every three days) and very much puts me in the shade with her average!

Too Many Books

I suffer from a couple of problems where books are concerned. Firstly, books (that … Read the rest

Evernote Rules – an update

May 14, 2025 | Comment

Back at the beginning of April I released Evernote Rules, a play on Outlook Rules, where you can define actions that are carried out when a note is created or updated in an Evernote notebook. I have wanted this for almost as long as I have had Evernote and I finally got fed up of waiting for Evernote to implement it and wrote it myself.

As explained previously it works by receiving a webhook from Evernote every time that a note is created or updated and by reading the payload associated with that webhook you can see whether there … Read the rest