Oli’s Blog

Microbit: easier with extensions

The BBC Microbit is a wonderful introduction to both programming and electronics, but MakeCode’s Blocks make some ideas quite hard to express.

What’s happened?

Foreign money is interfering in UK elections again, but I can’t remember it ever being this obvious.

FreeCAD got good

A testament to Open Source tenacity, is this Free CAD software Good Enough™ to compete with the big boys?

I think I lost my voice

Why’s it so much harder to publicly opine in your forties?

Save £23,265 with one weird trick!

Tobacconists hate him.

Goodbye Internet Explorer

As Microsoft hammer in the last few nails, I ask the question: what will people use to download Chrome?

Turning my sites up to Eleven-ty

This site is now powered by a static site generator called 11ty. It’s awesome! I’ll try to explain some of my favourite things about it and reasons you might prefer it to stalwarts in the SSG arena.

Wait! What happened to RSS?!

While I was busy aging like soft cheese, someone killed-off* RSS.

It used to be everywhere, now it’s gone; hidden or dead. How do you kids stay up to date with the websites you like? Do you know what RSS does? How are websites supposed to advertise update-subscriptions?

CSS layouts are so much better than 2010

In finally dropping IE11 support for my last few projects, I’ve been able to use raw CSS —not somebody else’s framework— and it’s lovely to see how far CSS has come.

Did I ever tell you about Suzie?

Suzie was a cat and I was her human. And that’s how things were for 15 years. This is an obituary for the best cat I’ve ever known, bar none.

Easy multifactor authentication in Django

Use django-multifactor to make your Django websites extra-secure by requiring a secondary authentication factor. Disclaimer: I made this.

Be careful with my kids’ biometrics

Schools often aren’t the most clued-up when it comes to understanding privacy and security, but the companies and service providers that that work with them —and take on all sorts of child data— really need to watch what they’re doing.

Nobody should be handing out my daughter’s fingerprints to strangers, right?

Why don’t we care about basic network security?

As we continue to shovel piles of crappy abandoned devices onto our networks, why aren’t we monitoring and curtailing what these devices do on our networks? Why don’t we care any more? Have we given up on network security?

Our doctors are striking for patients, not money

My better half is a junior doctor. She works insanely long hours and cares completely for her patients. When you can see how much it costs somebody as conscientious as she is to walk out on strike, it’s all the more frustrating that press coverage so spotty, confusing and often insulting.

The underlying issue is so simple: There aren’t enough doctors.

“Your Policy Just Got Better!” and other lies insurers tell you

Five words to chill the heart. Becki from E&L, the people who insure my cameras, wrote to me today to let me know the outstanding news that I get to pay more money for something I never asked for.

Breaking the Internet won’t stop terrorism

Governments want to intercept all terrorist communication but… they can’t. You can talk online with perfect secrecy if you know what you’re doing. Their solution to this is banning strong encryption. Most people have probably switched off but this will affect you (and won’t stop terrorists).

PearOS is dead - Don’t install it, stop using it immediately!

We have seen a sharp increase in the number of PearOS questions appearing on Ask Ubuntu. The reason it doesn’t work any more is because it’s an abandoned project that is based on a version of Ubuntu that is now also dead. It has more holes than a colander and will all-but-guarantee your system gets compromised.

Streaming Kodi over the Internet

If you’re leaving your media centre behind while you travel this Christmas, you needn’t go without your media. Follow these steps to access all your TV and movies on an Android device over a nice, secure SSH connection.

Python isn’t always slower than C

If you asked developers to describe Python you might hear: easy, dynamic and slow; but a recent impromptu game of Code Golf showed me that Python can actually be pretty competitive, even against compiled languages like C and C++ when you use the right interpreter: Pypy.

It’s time we buried Internet Explorer 8

Every web developer loves to wail on Internet Explorer but we need to act now if we want to stop the history of IE6 repeating itself with IE8. The longer we don’t, the longer we agree to limit ourselves to not using new and exciting features that make the internet better and our lives easier.

DIY sous vide for £25 in 25 minutes

Cooking sous vide can revolutionise the way you think about food but commercial water baths are expensive. Spend your pocket money on a DIY sous vide that does the job better. Start cooking like the professionals.

Putting the Secure in SSH; hardening your shell server against most attacks

SSH is the de facto remote access technique for Ubuntu and Linux servers and yet some of the defaults you’ll get from sudo apt-get install ssh can be downright dangerous in the wrong circumstances. This article will steer you around the biggest pitfalls to keep your server’s front door well protected.

Bulk renaming files in Ubuntu; the briefest of introductions to the rename command

I’ve seen more than a few Ask Ubuntu users struggling with how to batch rename their files. They get lost in Bash and find -exec loops and generally make a big mess of things before asking for help. But there is an easy method in Ubuntu that relatively few users know about: the rename command.

Hey Paypal, why do you need access to my microphone, camera and photos?

Who actually checks the permissions of applications they’re installing? A little while ago a Paypal update stalled because it required extra permissions. This is what happens if an app you have already installed wants more power. I was more than a little surprised with what I found.

Building a kiosk computer with Ubuntu 14.04 and Chrome

Single-purpose kiosk computing might seem scary and industrial but thanks to cheap hardware and Ubuntu, it’s an increasingly popular idea. I’m going to show you how and it’s only going to take a few minutes to get to something usable.

Converting an existing Ubuntu Desktop into a Chrome kiosk

You might already have Ubuntu Desktop installed and you might want to just run one application without stripping it down. This article should give you a decent idea how to convert a stock Desktop/Unity install into a single-application computer.

Two years without nicotine

So it’s that time of year again, it’s my ex-smoker-versary. Okay I’ll come up with a better name for next year but for now you’ll have to make do with my reflection on smoking and why it’s really not that hard to quit, as well as a few silly numbers.

Can we have FFmpeg-proper back?

A couple of years ago some FFmpeg developers decided they didn’t want to live under the tyranny of the project leaders and forked the project into Libav. That’s all fine except that for two years Ubuntu has erroneously been calling them the same thing. And they’re not.

Arguments Against Rolling Release Ubuntu

I’ve just read through Rick Spencer’s argument for rolling releases in the Ubuntu Devel mailing list but I’m frankly less convinced than I was before.

Migrating Django’s database

Django is awesome but there’s one job that can be a bit trickier than you’re used to: moving from one database to another.

Never log in with Facebook to read news

I’ve noticed a growing trend when you click an external link on Facebook from a desktop computer: you’re asked to log in. While this might seem like it’s only a minor inconvenience, in the long run this could be extremely dangerous.

Breaking the habit of a lifetime

For the past 10 years, I’ve been a nicotine-dependent smoker. The unpleasant sort who can’t go for an hour without really craving a cigarette, getting irritable when they can’t have one. I recently quit but the strange thing is, not smoking is the easiest bit in this process.

How to back up PPAs

Personal Packaging Archives are a popular method for sharing software not yet in the main repositories. You might be using one to gain a particular update you need. But how can you quickly get a list of all the PPAs you’re using?

Humble Indie Bundle is the single greatest thing to happen to Linux in years

I’ve been a full-time Ubuntu user for about five years and I don’t own any consoles. If you approached me three or four years ago and asked which games I played, you might have received a rather defensive reply. High quality games were few and far between, that is, until May 2010 when things changed forever…

How to fix the 100% CPU issue in XBMC

Long time users of XBMC and Boxee on Linux will probably be aware of a very annoying bug that essentially uses an entire CPU when just sitting at menus.

How to unblock Wikipedia

I thought I could go without Wikipedia for one day and I was wrong. Less than an hour into the day and I needed to look something up. I could go and look it up somewhere else but I like Wikipedia!

DPD are terrible

There are few things more tedious than waiting for a delivery. One of those is waiting for a delivery, seeing the van turn up and just drive off without delivering the item. Worse still when the driver says it was your fault.

The Death of Ubuntu

It’s happening again. Ubuntu is on its deathbed. Pundits and community members are exchanging blasts of statistics and in the crossfire people are getting dubious. Well I’ve one thing to say to Ubuntu community members…

Why does Ubuntu need the Canonical Contributor Agreement?

Let’s say you want to improve Ubuntu by contributing a patch but if that project is covered by the Canonical Contributor Agreement, you’ll need to sign over some of your rights. People have been arguing about this for a while now but why does Canonical need it in the first place?

Fixing /var/lib/dpkg/status corruption

Apt and dpkg are wonderful tools when they work. However, like most tools, if you chuck rubbish at them, they’ll stop working. Here’s a quick guide to overcoming the most common break in /var/lib/dpkg/status.

Canonical’s Landscape should be cheaper

Landscape is a great tool but at its current price and integration with the costly Ubuntu Advantage service plan, uptake will be slow.

How to Enable Antialiasing in Wine

I love Wine. If you’re a Linux user, you’ll almost definitely have some experience with it. I recently found a feature that enables antialiasing and I want to share it.