Easy AWS Lambda function deployment with Apex Introduction Recently I have been spending a lot of time playing with AWS Lambda functions for various tasks like (small) ad-hoc data imports, billing alerts and building Amazon Alexa Skills. For simple tinkering
Gigabyte Aero W15 Keyboard and Linux (Ubuntu) Introduction TL;DR - Here is the GitHub link: https://github.com/paul-ridgway/aero-keyboard, which documents the protocol and has a few utility scripts and examples. For the first time in a long
Raspberry Pi, overlayfs read-write root, read-only NFS base Introduction My recent projects and write-ups (linked below) have involved Network (PXE) Booting a Pi and loading the root file-system from NFS. It works well but any files operations are quite slow, and
Network Booting a Raspberry Pi 2 Introduction While going forward it would be ideal to only use Rasberry Pi 3s for Network Booting (or generally) we have a number of Pi 2s left at The Floow. Being able to
Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi 2/3: Chromium in Kiosk mode Introduction At The Floow we have a number of screens around the office used for monitoring. To keep the costs down, solution versatile and setup simple the plan was always to use a
Network Network Booting a Raspberry Pi 3 from an Ubuntu Server Introduction At The Floow we use Raspberry Pis as Chromium Kiosk Clients to monitor our systems and infrastructure, we are now looking to Network Boot them for this and a few other uses
Fixing: uninitialized constant OpenSSL::Digest::DSS on Mac OS Sierra I recently installed Ruby (via RVM) on a Mac I use for work, and upon trying to run rails (after the usual bundle install) I got the following error: There was an error
Issues with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 (and others) using Ubuntu Gnome 16.10 The Problem It seems there are a number of NVIDIA Graphics Cards that do not place nicely with the Open Source Nouveau driver, some of which is described here. Installing Ubuntu If you
thrift Thrift 0.9.3 on Mac OS The Problem At some point Homebrew was updated to provide Thrift 0.10.0 and it would appear that the ability to install older versions was removed. At the time I couldn't find
xfce XFCE 'Tray Icons' not working (black with a red slashed zero) Introduction Since upgrading Xubuntu a while back (I think to 15.10) some of my tray icons have stopped functioning... One was always there, and when I launched HipChat I found that was
lenovo The problem with the Lenovo X240 Touchpad Introduction As introductions go, the preamble here is pretty simple. Lenovo made a nice portable laptop called the X240 (since replaced by the X250) - I have one, with 2 extra capacity batteries,
Connecting to a Mongo Replica Set via SSH Introduction At The Floow we recently upgraded our MongoDB Java Client Driver to use the latest version (we were a bit behind). Fortunately there were minimal compatibility changes: There were a few Checked
Turning a Raspberry Pi 2 into a shared Spotify Jukebox Introduction At The Floow we have music playing in the office through some wall-mounted power speakers. We wanted our staff to be able to control what is playing, skip tracks, change volume, etc.
Quick and Easy Lets Encrypt Certificates using Docker Introduction Let's Encrypt is an awesome service that appeared on my radar around the end of 2015. Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’
OpenGL Tower Defence A visually stunning tower defence game, awarded full marks. Also known as Photon Defence... Please note, this is a first revision and there are bound to be mistakes. Game Play Video: Features Video:
OpenGL Real-time Environment Mapping in OpenGL Environment Mapping, also known as Reflection Mapping is an efficient technique for simulating realistic reflections. In many cases a precomputed texture is rendered on the object which represents the environment surrounding scene. The
OpenGL Network Based Scene in OpenGL This scene is rendered identically on two computers with a TCP server sharing the scene data. A cube created on any client is shared with all other clients. More details coming soon...
Ruby Rescue from ‘execution expired’ in Ruby Today I was trying to rescue from an 'execution expired' error when using another colleague's gem (which interfaces with an XML RPC API). Thankfully I found this snippet at http://geoff.evason.name/
OpenGL Continuous Terrain Generation I saw this done for a dissertation and decided to try it for myself. The height map is generated on the fly based on the last data known to create a smooth variation.
OpenGL Hierarchical Quadratic Mesh Taking the Hierarchical Triangular Mesh prototype further, with a quadratic version texturing is easier using a skybox-like texture. More details coming soon...
OpenGL Hierarchical Triangular Mesh A HTM based sphere generation prototype, each primitive is approximately the same size and therefore it does not suffer from any singularities. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=64531 http:
OpenGL OpenGL World Generation This prototype procedurally generates and textures a sphere to that it looks like the earth. Unfortunately it suffers from polar singularities, where the vertices for all the longitudinal slices meet and cause a
Person Search System A search engine using Hadoop The aim of the Person Search System project was to crawl the web and find individuals, like many of these other person-finding sites. But unlike the other sites
RDFaS A cluster based RDFa spider The RDFa Web Spider (RDFaS) was my 3rd year dissertation project. Abstract (from the final report) Current web 'standards' formalize formatting and provision of information on the Web,
Spotify Spotify S15 The Logitech G15 plugin to show what Spotify is playing To use simply download and extract the files. When you run S15.exe it will register with the logitech plugin manager and then
