Payment Security, Greek Style

October 8, 2025 | Comment

Handheld chip and pin machines aren’t as universal as I thought they were. On a recent trip to the States, I found that it is still much more likely that they will take your card away to some dark corner to produce you a paper receipt, no doubt cloning it in the meantime!

In the UK that almost never happens but the vast majority of restaurants will come to the table with a machine these days, demanding payment before you’ve even seen this bill!

While holidaying in Greece earlier this year I found in a number of places where not … 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

Adding a New Card to a Home Assistant Dashboard

Adding a New Card to a Home Assistant Dashboard

August 21, 2025 | 1 comment

Now that my Home Assistant devices are set up and working reasonably well, my focus has moved to building out a dashboard that has the elements that I want to see rather than everything that is shown on the Overview tab.

This post takes you through the steps to create a new dashboard and populate it with two different types of cards.

Create a New Dashboard

If you try to edit the existing default dashboard you will be presented with the following message – basically you cannot mess with the default dashboard and so you have to create your own.… Read the rest

Not all Zigbees are created equal

August 15, 2025 | Comment

I said in a previous post that I had been getting into Home Assistant/automation and you should expect more posts – and here is the first!

Baby Steps

My introduction to home automation was, like many others I suspect, via the IKEA TRÅDFRI range of blubs and plugs. In order for these to work you needed a hub which joined them all together and allowed you to control them via an app. These devices all worked over the Zigbee protocol and worked well. Then, IKEA took the decision to discontinue the TRÅDFRI range and replace them new devices using the … 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

What’s the Difference Between Matter and Thread?

July 27, 2025 | 1 comment

I’ve recently been getting into home automation and Home Assistant in particular (expect more posts on that as I get my head around it).

Words that frequently come up when dealing with home automation devices are Zigbee, Thread and Matter. I was familiar with Zigbee but was confused about Thread and Matter and how they worked together so I asked my friend ChatGPT to explain. I found it useful so decided to tidy it up and post it here.

What are Thread and Matter?

Thread and Matter are two of the latest smart home standards, often mentioned together, … 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