2020 has been an interesting year to say the least, but one of the oddest side effects of coronavirus is the fact that USB webcams have been much harder to come by and generally cost a lot more than they used to. The oft lauded Logitech c920 goes for the best part of £100 if not more, and that’s if you can find one in stock.

Tl;dr - For all of you doing some googling to find out how to make a secure password with any modern powershell version (i.e. Powershell 5 and above) the code snippet you want is at the bottom of this article.

In my day to day work I’m often reading a lot of database records that are sorted by time, usually using unix timestamps. The problem I usually have with this is when I view these records via some sort of web portal the numbers are a bit meaningless - I can’t tell by eye if 1575468821 is an older date than 1575598821 without a little reading. Realising that I could do with a tool that automatically converted these for me I decided to bite the bullet and write a simple extension called stampy for Chrome (and Firefox). It turns out writing one is easy and this post details how I wrote mine.

This post is my attempt to summarize my learnings about the basics of how to manage python packages with different tools and commands. I’ve spent a while collecting this information, hopefully it helps a few people searching for the same thing via google too.

Emulators fancinate me. The idea that you could run a computer within another computer feels like some sort of arcane vodoo magic. Playing Gamecube games on a PC? MegaDrive games on an Xbox 360? Insanity, but awesome nonetheless.

I’ve been been working with DynamoDB for a while now. I want to share some of my findings about it’s little quirks with you all as well as summarise my thoughts and learnings about how it works for my own future reference. It’s a really great system for storing per user information and in situations where you don’t particularly want to query across multiple tables at a time. This is going to be quite a high level overview but I’ll try to link more detailed articles as I go so you can research the topics raised here further.

I’ve been using Discord for a while, primarily to chat to friends while playing games. It’s replaced TeamSpeak and Mumble entirely for pretty much everybody I know online - for good reason! It’s easy to use and simple to administer, requiring only a web browser.

I’ve had a problem for a while, and that problem was that this website was getting rather dusty. I originally wrote it way back in 2010 as a WordPress website straight after university and it looked, well, pretty basic. I ported it to ASP.NET in 2012 to allow me to make it more flexible. I wrote everything from scratch including the css and scripts the page used. This site looked OK but it didn’t age well and it was left to rot for far too long.

I’ve wanted to create a robot for a long time and with the help of the wonderful Mr Andrew Brixey I have finally been able to do so, for the Big Draw at Cranleigh Arts Centre back in October.

Now and then a bit of technology comes out that really catches the attention of the interwebs and the media in general. The bit of technology doing that currently is the rather amazing Raspberry Pi Zero.

I promised last time that I wouldn’t leave it so long before writing again but it looks like I did. Whups. I apologise but life has been so busy that I really haven’t been writing as much as I should; I hope to change this.

UPDATE 28-10-2013 - Due to the fact I will be moving house at the end of the week the Minecraft server will be down, for how long I don’t know. I have been planning to put this entire site on my pi to save money, but then again this server has been far more popular than I originally expected thanks for the Pi Foundation et al. We’ll see what happens over the next few weeks but whatever the outcome I thank all of you heartily for playing on my server.

UPDATE 2: As of 2019 I’ve had to change the ezDoom installation method due to changes in how dropbox hosts files. I’ve added an MSI installer you can download via github and fixed a few small bugs.