Yesterday, I opened the first box from this year’s PiHut Maker Advent Calendar. This next box revealed some simple parts so we can get on and do the first proper project, which I will be covering tomorrow. Take a look at the video 👇 for details of what is in the day two box.
Day two included the following:
Tomorrow I will post a video showing how I got on wiring it all together.… Read the rest
It’s back! As I trailed a while back PiHut have released what they call the “Maker Advent Calender” for 2023. This year both the original and a new “Let it Glow” versions are available. Given that I did the original one last year, this year I am unboxing the “Let it Glow” version.
Day one included the following:
Not terribly exciting but the foundations on which to build what I hope will be some exciting light based projects.
As last year there is a … Read the rest
MagSafe has been around for the iPhone since the 12 variants released in 2020 and works incredibly well. I carry this Anker MagSafe power bank with me when I am out and about that snaps onto the back of the phone and gives it a bit of a top-up. Other than power banks I haven’t really seen anyone make much of the iPhone MagSafe.
Enter ShiftCam which does a series of accessories that use Apple’s MagSafe in interesting ways. I am taking a look at the SnapGrip and the SnapPop here.
SnapGrip is a snap-on accessory that adds a … Read the rest
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.
What this project has predominately been about is the correct formatting of the parameters that need to be passed to the Bluesky API. This code does not directly call the API but uses BlueskyApi by Clark Rasmussen to do that.
Here’s … Read the rest
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.
Link Cards are the snippets of a website that is linked to a post that you will no doubt be familiar with seeing elsewhere. Typically, elsewhere these are handled for you but not in Bluesky – here you do all the heavy lifting.
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.
In order for links to be handled correctly by Bluesky in addition to the text itself you also need to pass an array as part of the parameters giving the start … Read the rest
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 need to all will be revealed in the final version.
In order to post an image to Bluesky you have to take a few steps:
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, affects the topic today which is posting to Bluesky via the API.
The first thing to say is that I am using the following library to actually post … Read the rest
This blog and others that I run are all hosted on a cloud server with MySQL installed locally. Occasionally MySQL becomes unresponsive and I have to login to the server to kick it back into life by restarting msqld.
The most likely reason for MySQL becoming unresponsive is lack of resources so the best solution would be to increase the size of the server – however, that requires money that I don’t want to spend. Therefore, the next best option was to write a script to detect when MySQL was unavailable. Enter mysqladmin.
Last year for the first time PiHut released an advent calendar called “The 12 Projects of Codemas!” which included 12 projects based around a Pico covering such things as temperature sensors, switches and the like. I did a series of unboxing and project videos covering their content. I had great fun so I was pleased to see that PiHut have brought them back for this year too.
This time there are not one but two advent calendars to get stuck into. This year alongside “The 12 Projects of Codemas!” is a second one called “Let it … Read the rest