Using a Raspberry Pi Camera to create a time-lapsed video

January 31, 2024 | 2 comments

For my birthday last year I was bought a Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 which I’d wanted for a while. I’d decided that I wanted to create a time-lapse video showing the change in seasons in the back garden. The rest of this article describes what I did and the results.

Setting up

As this didn’t require a huge amount of computing power I paired the camera module with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W.

That turned out to be the easy bit! Getting it fixed such that there weren’t any reflections from the window took a bit of creativity. What … Read the rest

Changing your Bluesky handle to be your own domain

December 27, 2023 | 2 comments

I’m liking Bluesky, which is a little like a rough around the edges X without the toxicity found there. And here’s a neat thing you can do on Bluesky that you can’t on X. If you have your own domain you can use that as your Bluesky handle. In the rest of this article, we’re going to look at how you do that.

Why would you want to do it?

First off why would you want to do so and what are the implications of making the change? I see a number of reasons to make the change:

it

… Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Five – Putting it all Together

November 10, 2023 | 2 comments

NOTE: This post is mainly about how I developed the php2Bluesky library. If you are looking for information on using the library in your own code please see here: https://github.com/williamsdb/php2Bluesky/

In this series of posts we have looked at:

In this final post we are looking at putting it all together. This includes a worked example plus a complete library of functions that will allow you to easily interact with the Bluesky API.

The Prerequisites

What this project has predominately been about is the correct formatting … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Four – Link Cards

November 9, 2023 | 4 comments

NOTE: This post is mainly about how I developed the php2Bluesky library. If you are looking for information on using the library in your own code please see here: https://github.com/williamsdb/php2Bluesky/

In this we post we are continuing to look at accessing Bluesky from the API via PHP. Previously we looked at making a connection to Bluesky, posting text, images and handling links and in this post we take a look at Link Cards.

What Even IS a Link Card?

Link Cards are the snippets of a website that is linked to a post that you will no doubt be … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Three – Links

November 8, 2023 | 1 comment

NOTE: This post is mainly about how I developed the php2Bluesky library. If you are looking for information on using the library in your own code please see here: https://github.com/williamsdb/php2Bluesky/

So far we have looked at making a connection to Bluesky, posting text and images. In this post I want to look at how links are handled. Unlike X and Mastodon on Bluesky when you post text that includes one or more links these are not parsed and activated. You have to tell Bluesky that you have links in your text and where they are.

Parsing for Links

In … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Two – Images

November 7, 2023 | 3 comments

NOTE: This post is mainly about how I developed the php2Bluesky library. If you are looking for information on using the library in your own code please see here: https://github.com/williamsdb/php2Bluesky/

In the first of these posts we looked at creating the connection to the Bluesky API and posting a text post. In this second post we are going to extend that out to post images as well as text.

The code posted here are snippets from a larger library of functions that you can drop in and use to post to Bluesky. If some parts look more complex than they … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part One

November 6, 2023 | 11 comments

NOTE: This post is mainly about how I developed the php2Bluesky library. If you are looking for information on using the library in your own code please see here: https://github.com/williamsdb/php2Bluesky/

With all the uncertainty surrounding the future of X (née Twitter), I decided to take a look at Bluesky which somewhat ironically has its roots in Twitter where it was started as an internal project. Bluesky is still in beta and is invite-only. I worry about its long-term given that ultimately it too has to make money, something that Twitter has singularly failed to do. None of this, of course, … Read the rest

Simple Remote Wake on Lan with Raspberry Pi Zero W

September 18, 2023 | 5 comments

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

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

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