I’m a bit excited about this project - repurposing an old Asus router from 15+ years ago into a GPS powered clock and NTP server!
Build writeup coming soon…ish.
Notes
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2026-10-03-Old-Router-Project-Is-Taking-Shape
03 October 2026 [Permalink]
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2026-09-24-I-Hate-Ikea,-but-at-Least-I'm-Inspired
After my second trip around Ikea in a week, I may need some blood pressure medicine or something. I wanted an item that the website said was in stock. Infact there were two of them! Except there wasn’t. “The website is wrong.”
So, tell me Ikea (I’ll address this at the store rather than the tired employee), what is the point of the website stock check if it’s always wrong!
Anyway, I saw that the Vindriktning is now sold in Hong Kong, so I picked one up. At least I’ve got a new project - an ESP32c3 is on the way to hack it into Home Assistant with a BME280 for temperature and humidity.
That will keep the rage at bay for a bit longer anyway.
24 September 2026 [Permalink]
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2026-09-23-A-Useful-Opnsense-Alias
Here’s a quick alias I found super useful in Opnsense when logging in as a non-root user to invoke the Opnsense shell:
$ echo "alias opnsense='sudo /usr/local/sbin/opnsense-shell'" >> ~/.profile $ . ~/.profileNow it’s easy to invoke the opnsense-shell from an ssh session with
opnsense.
23 September 2026 [Permalink]
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2026-08-03-Selling-the-8bitdo-64-Controller
Little bit gutted as I’m selling the 8BitDo 64 controller I just bought because it doesn’t support xinput! All my other controllers are xinput.I like being able to grab a controller and have Retroarch or whatever just auto configure for it. Can’t remember which, but one of the N64 recomps I have didn’t even detect the controller! Here’s hoping the Brawler 64 Pro from Retro Fighters solves this.
03 August 2026 [Permalink]
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2026-07-31-Decision-Made---Back-to-Mastodon
I’ve been thinking about the social side of my site for a while. I don’t think I want the headache of webmentions again. It’s a cool technology, but it’s a fragile technology. Instead I’ve decided to go with a Mastodon account and syndicate the occasional post for discussion (if anyone actually wants to discuss anything is a different story altogether!)
Anyway, the syndicated url is placed at the top of the post.
Anyway, people can always email me!
31 July 2026 [Permalink]
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2026-07-29-Bothering-With-Webmentions-Again
It has been a long while since I really looked at the backend of the site. I had a decent setup a few years ago using webmentions and had built Hugo templates for posts to include whether it was a note, reply, like etc. Unfortunately I didn’t have the motivation to keep this all working, so I transferred the site to its new host and never got round to the webmention stuff.
Not sure if I want to revisit it again, but I guess I could clean up things like formatting of the notes page on mobile etc. We shall see.
29 July 2026 [Permalink]
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2025-12-26-Gran-Turismo-4-Spec-II
Bit of a note for my future self if I ever do a version update of the AMAZING Gran Turismo 4 Spec II.
First, don’t bother upgrading - it probably won’t work. Maybe for other people, but I convert PS2 *.iso’s to *.chd files. Converting that back to patch doesn’t like it.
Just go with a full patch. Look for the Gran Turismo 4 Online Public Beta (US) - [SCUS-97436] image on a place like archive.org.
Then remember that xdelta is installed in macos via homebrew and called with xdelta3, as that’s the latest version.
$ xdelta3 -d -s [source file.iso] [GT4 patch.xdelta] [output file.iso] $ chdman createcd -i [output file.iso] -o [Gran Turismo 4 Spec II.chd]
26 December 2025 [Permalink]
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2025-02-25-When-Did-Hugo-Get-Complex
A quick thought…I’ve been reworking a website from Wordpress to Hugo. The last time I started a Hugo site from scratch was probably this blog. It was great being able to work everything out and add theme edits where I wanted just be reading the locally downloaded code. When did this get replaced by endless modules and submodules? How am I supposed to make the edits I want?
It’s mad confusing and really demands the use of Github. What happened to making the web simple? I’m hardly a tech neophyte, but if I have to learn entire new ways of working just to keep using a tool…maybe that’s a design issue. I shouldn’t have to be a programmer just to get a static site working. It’s only supposed to be a template machine!
/rant.
25 February 2025 [Permalink]
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2024-11-12-Deluge-Docker-and-Mergerfs
I am updating a whole load of my self hosted software, including a spiffy new reverse proxy. Part of this has been replacing my torrent client with Deluge. However…The linuxserver docker image just would not download anything. It’s always either permissions or DNS, right?…well this was permissions, but not in the regular way.
Turns out my MergerFS mount really did not like a certain setting (
cache.files=off), so I changed it tocache.files=partialand it worked! Links here and here very helpful in working this out.
12 November 2024 [Permalink]
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2024-08-16-Omg,-a-Mastodon-Thread-as-a-Comment-Section
I had initially integrated webmentions into this site and had my own mastodon instance. I let both languish and the mastodon instance broke. However, seeing what people like Carl Schwan and Graham Macphee have achieved in integrating Mastodon as a comments section is mindblowing on a static site.
I wanted this kind of thing with Brid.gy, but it never really worked out so well.
Surely this has got to be the next project…
16 August 2024 [Permalink]
This post has not been syndicated for discussion.