Using the Google Calendar API from your web site with PHP

This post is mainly to remind myself how to do this when I inevitably forget in a year or two and want to integrate data from a Google Calendar into a project. There are quite a few steps, but it’s pretty straightforward once you know what to do. As with most programming, there are many […]

About: beaks.live – the software

This is the bird box that is shown at beaks.live. It is on the side of a house in Cambourne, about 8 miles west of Cambridge, in the UK. Right from the start, the plan was to get it working roughly and quickly and then improve it until it was the best I could do with […]

About: beaks.live – the hardware

This is the bird box that is shown at beaks.live. It is on the side of a house in Cambourne, about 8 miles west of Cambridge, in the UK. When I put a camera in this bird box last year, I was not optimistic. Expecting to capture nothing more than the inside of an empty […]

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Login Loop – Fixed!

I have just upgrade 18.04 to 20.04, which went fine. But when I tried to log in, it would just dump me back at the login screen again. Looking through the logs I saw the line (EE) xf86OpenConsole: Cannot open virtual console 7 (Permission denied) The permissions for /dev/tty7 were fine. Various pages suggested solutions […]

Taming the PiFM Transmitter (Part 2)

In part one of this guide it became clear that a Raspberry Pi with a 700 mm long wire on pin 7, running a variant of the PiFM software is an easy way to make a nuisance of yourself. We might not be broadcasting kilowatts of power and realistically, you are not going to be […]

Taming the PiFM Transmitter (Part 1)

One of the million things you can do with a Raspberry Pi is using it as an FM radio transmitter. It is stupidly easy; you just attach a 700 mm long wire to pin 7 and install one of the many variants of the original program which was hacked together at a code club meeting. […]

windows-movie-maker.org is a scam

Sorry, that’s much of a punchy title for the first new post in over a year, but the only punching I want to do right now are ones aimed at the scamming gits behind windows-movie-maker.org. Movie Maker is a nice, easy to use video editor that Wibs had on his old laptop.  So we downloaded it, […]

Pirpl – it’s another Pirate Radio PLaylist thing!

If you liked the previous Pi-rate Radio Jukebox (and 15 people did!), you won’t want to miss this latest version of it.  It’s basically the same thing, but it runs as a daemon, so you can fire up your favourite tunes using a browser rather than logging in to your Pi to start up scripts.  As usual it’s […]

Pi-rate Radio Jukebox

Note: there is an update to this post. There is a nice hack for a Raspberry Pi where you can turn it into an FM transmitter.  While this is illegal in most countries, the range is quite limited so it’s fairly unlikely you’ll go to prison. The only hardware needed is your Raspberry Pi and a piece […]