Building a Webcam on a Raspberry Pi - Intro

A couple of years ago, peering lustfully out the back door of the 4th floor Cortex offices, I spotted an unusual sight - a plug on a roof top: What could that be for? I wondered. More precisely… what could that be used for? I immediately started thinking. Well, given the glorious view behind said roof top, it seemed pretty obvious that we could stick a webcam up there. Something connected via wifi to our office network should do the trick.

Read more

So close, yet ultimately... so far: Ikea.

Another story of an issue created (inadvertently) by me, which when presented with an opportunity to perform amazing customer service, the business smashed a big fat own goal. We live in Guernsey, in the Channel Islands. We visit the mainland infrequently. We were recently refurbishing our children’s playroom and given the size of the job and the relatively few local options available to us, and despite it requiring a special visit, we felt that using IKEA to achieve the result would make sense.

Read more

In hindsight, Nespresso, you did OK

Whichever side of the ‘is pod coffee evil?’ fence you sit on, it is nevertheless incredibly convenient. We’ve been Nespresso customers for 10+ years and it has (well, had) always been a pretty flawless experience. A decent online / app experience to order from; orders would arrive within a day or two, well packaged and as expected. And at around 30p a cup for decent enough coffee, it makes sense for us. Warehouse move Until in March 2023, when Nespresso botched a warehouse move.

Read more

Climbing Aconcagua, Argentina

When I posted about climbing Elbrus in 2017 I asked the question “where next” - the literal answer to that question turned out to be Ben Nevis - but the ultimate answer (in terms of climbing big mountains) seems to have become Aconcagua, which I’ve moreorless just got back from. Aconcagua, in the province of Mendoza in Argentina, and a stone’s throw from the border with Chile stands at 6961m. It is the highest mountain in the Americas, and the highest mountain in the world outside of the Himalayas.

Read more

Garmin - really doesn't care.

This is possibly one of the most disappointing tech business rants I’ve had to write because I’ve always genuinely liked Garmin as a company. Their products are generally (a) very well built and (b) work really well, it didn’t seem too much of a stretch to extend that to the company. I’ve had a load of Garmin products over the years… satnavs (including, for a time, a backup camera!), car head units with Garmin GPS built-in, a variety of sportwatches in preference to Apple Watch1, cycle GPS and assorted accessories.

Read more

eBay - apology please. I'll wait. Maybe.

Whilst some big tech businesses are very much imploding publically in a high profile ball of flames (I’m looking at you Twitter and Ticketmaster) for so blatantly not caring about being evil, it would be easy to overlook some others who are doing exactly that, but just a bit more discretely. Except when you anger them, of course. I could be talking about any number of tech companies and not even just generally - because more than one has behaved badly recently.

Read more

Algorithms Are Shit - Carvana, Amazon

I’ve talked in the past about my cynicism of so-called “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” and so on. That’s not because I doubt the technology, but because of the way it is marketed. The technology is powerful, but it is not what people think it is (or want it to be.) Lightbulb And then a short while ago, this Tweet1 from @MarkStockley appeared in my timeline: YouTube is offering me ads for Gantt charts. After showing me 9 million Grammarly ads and me not buying Grammarly it’s decided I might not buy Grammarly, so it’s moved on to selling me the singular representation of everything wrong with modern work.

Read more

The Cycle of Continuous Innovation

Some innovation truisms: it is not uncommon to perceive innovation as the ’big bang’ introduction of high-tech solutions to hard problems or creating brand new industries; most innovation is actually achieved through the incremental and continuous improvement of existing processes; the big bang commonly occurs when either all opportunities to innovate have been exhausted or external factors, such as advances in technology or some fundamental shift (entropy) is introduced, and anyone can be an innovator. We’ve always done it like that If you’ve ever wondered why something is done a certain way, or worse, uttered the immortal “we’ve always done it like that”, then opportunities for innovation are likely all around you.

Read more

Building a PiHole on a Raspberry Pi

Pi-Hole should need little by way of introduction. If you know what it is, happy days. If you don’t know what it is, then read on to find out why you need one. In summary, it’s a hardware-based traffic blocker for a network. In technical terms, it becomes a DNS proxy for your network - all your traffic flows through it, and it cleanses out a lot of the ads and other scummy shit that you don’t want to see.

Read more

Home Office Build

Some words and thoughts about the process of building a home office in my back garden. Background I’ve worked from home from time to time a fair bit in recent years, but thanks to Covid this turned in to much longer and much more frequently. You can cope with being surrounded by house shrapnel for so long (kids’ toys, dinner things, shoes, boxes, excess furniture…) but we hit a point where it became time to do something a little bit more fit for purpose.

Read more