2023 Year Review
What a year, I spent most of my time on a sail boat, cruising around the Caribbean etc, and working part-time for Wikimedia on Wikibase. WBStack became Wikibase.Cloud and the team now working behind it has continued to iterate on the platform, which finally made its way out of its early alpha state. That also…
Smart Home: A fleet of Temperature and Humidity Sensors
One of the easiest ways to get myself into the Zigbee life without needing to worry too much about exactly what I was doing, buying or what my goals were was to buy a set of Temperature and Humidity Sensors for every room of the house. After a tiny amount of research and some discussion…
Smart home: Starting with OPNSense Router, Eero Wi-Fi and a pile of cables
I recently moved into a home, that whether I like it or note, is rather “smart”. There is a Ring video doorbell, Ring camera out the back and Wi-Fi radiators throughout, not to mention the Wi-Fi fridge, dishwasher, washing machine, hot water tank and Amazon Echo Dot that I was recently gifted. In total, I…
COVID-19 Wikipedia pageview spikes, 2019-2022
Back in 2019 at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, Wikipedia saw large spikes in page views on COVID-19 related topics while people here hunting for information. I briefly looked at some of the spikes in March 2020 using the easy-to-use pageview tool for Wikimedia sites. But the problem with viewing the spikes through this…
If you have a sandwich and cut it in half, do you have one or two sandwiches
A few years ago, I asked a similarly silly question about lasagne to a group of people I know and summarized their responses. This time I’m bored on a coach, so asked 30–40 people the question “If you have a sandwich and cut it in half, do you have one or two sandwiches”. In this…
Automatic cobra command registration with fx
Cobra is a popular Go package for creating CLIs. It provides a lot of functionality for creating commands, subcommands, and flags. However, it can be tedious to manually register all of your commands. fx is a Go package that provides a dependency injection framework. It can be used to automatically register your application components, including…
Avoid image indexing in robots.txt
People might not want images from their websites to be indexed in online searches for several reasons. I have no problem with images from this blog appearing in search engines but recently wanted to add some protection against usage/indexing for another site. I did some thinking and research here. Search engines have some help pages…