In exciting news, Deathbot4000 on Twitter (decomissioned because Twitter is a toxic place) is now also Deathbot4000 on BlueSky, which is great for many reasons. Source code for him is here. I hope it helps someone else build something useful, the list of features so far since I switched from html scraping to xml: scrape xml feeds keyword matching pull image from feed post to Discord, Twitter or BlueSky

A friend of mine has finally written something cool - A tool that gives you a notification in Discord for your Dupicati backup jobs. It can be found here: https://duplicati-notifications.lloyd.ws And it looks like this. Build your webhook URL, add it to Duplicati, that’s it. Easy!

Quick write up of moving my homelab server from a Lenovo TS140 to a Minisforum UN100L. I’d been looking to upgrade/sidegrade since the TS140 was getting a bit long in the tooth, chewed a bit of power as a 24/7 unit and had no support for QuickSync - for Plex transcoding. Other than that it’s been a great home server, GPU mined a bit of ETH in it’s time and carried a butt-tonne of hard-disks. The TS140 will be up for sale soon if anyone’s interested… ...

Replicated from my old blog since it was so popular. Edits: 14/04/2011 – Updated with the suggestions from the comments 19/08/2012 – Updated step 2 with feedback 14/08/2016 - Removed dead links You got these things free with BT Vision boxes, and for ages I didn’t bother using them because I didn’t need to. After moving to a flat where everyone had 802.11b/g/n routers I found I had a hell of a lot of interference in 2.4Ghz (15 APs in the area) making wireless fairly rubbish. I’d already used 2 of the powerline adapters to route the internet connection from the room where the BT line comes in to a second router in the lounge, but then set up a 3rd powerline adapter on the other side of the room so I now had wired access where I need it, and without wires all over the place. ...

I needed to do this obviously to appease my son who needs various servers running. The spec was one creative and one survival server and I don’t want to run in a VM since running itzg/minecraft-bedrock-server:latest image has been great for the single Minecraft bedrock server. This also means I can tinker with various Minecraft java images without stopping the existing container which is handy. Normally you can’t do this, since the listening port 19132 can only be bound to a single container, and if you try to port map it in docker config, it won’t connect from Windows clients. ...

A while ago myself and the wife had a rainy week camping in the Tewkesbury region in a tent, but more importantly with our paddleboards. We stayed at a campsite to the side of the Lower Lode Inn which is great because of course it’s a pub, but also because there’s a slipway and jetty for launching from. Food was decent and they have Doom Bar on tap. This gives you access to the River Severn, and across the water to the bottom of the River Avon. We chose to do a leisurely paddle up the Avon as we had the dog with us, and to try filming on a borrowed action camera. Luckily we got two hours of sunshine all week, one of which was captured in the footage. ...

Continuing our camping and supping adventures we headed to Wareham, where we’d been before with our paddleboards and known to be a great site. We set up camp at Redcliffe Farm, which is a great campsite and has slipway access just outside it’s entrance. There’s a walking path to get into town, but the river runs alongside it which is excellent for paddling. ...

This post covers Warsash to Swanwick and back. Launch point: Public slipway opposite the Rising Sun. Parking: Shore Road Car Park (outside the pub), Passage Lane Car Park - Both car parks are usually free in the summer with a duration limit, but gives you enough time to get out for a decent paddle without having to rush. Gets busy though, especially given the popularity of SUP these days. Check tides and wind as usual. I try to time it so the current takes me up to Swanwick on the rising tide and back out on the ebb tide, but so far miscalculated it so that getting back to Warsash is usually a bit more work. ...

I made a project as a test of my excellent new Go skills. I wanted to do something with websockets and put together what can only be described as the finest 1:1 chat on the internet. No sign-ins or anything, just click a button and chat, assuming that someone else on the planet is also doing the same and speaks the same language as you. Anyway, it was available for a while at https://randoms.us. Update - Ok, so a mate of mine pointed out that this is basically Omegle, but 14 years late. I lead a sheltered life so I’d never heard of it, but by all accounts it sounds like things did not go well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omegle) so I’ll kill this off after a bit. Sad times. ...