Month: March 2014

Saving electronics

Posted on by Al

Quite often things break – sometimes I’m able to fix them.

The way I see it is that if it’s broken and is going in the bin then I’ve got nothing to lose by taking it apart and trying to see if it can be fixed.

Most recently I had the external thermometer of a wireless weather station stop working.  I was pretty sure some water had got into it so I dried it in the airing cupboard but it still wasn’t responsive.  With nothing to lose I took it apart, saw that there was a fair amount of corrosion on the circuit board and almost gave up.  Just on the off-chance that the components were still ok and the corrosion was causing a short I got an old toothbrush and cleaned it up.

Thermometer Board

Miraculously this worked and I’ve saved £35 on a replacement.  Result!

To set up a git repository on a server

Posted on by Al

So because it’s on a server there is no working directory required – as a result we do a bare initialise in the folder that we want the repo to be in:

After that, to allow pushes to the server over http we need to run the following:

This will then work nicely with a virtual host in apache:

Also, make sure the user running apache has write permissions to the git repository folders.

Authentication

To add some basic authentication I have used the following 2 techniques:

To make an entire repository private:

To make all repositories public for read and private for write:

 Web UI

Finally, I have used gitlist to provide a web ui to my repositories – to achieve this I used the standard approach documented here

My final config looks like this:

 

A site is born!

Posted on by Al

So I’m starting a blog – we’ll see how long that lasts!

The main types of article I intend to write are:

  • Technology – this could be something I’ve worked on as part of my profession or something I’ve tinkered with as part of my hobbies.  Generally they will be for my own consumption for future reference but may help others out if they get to the 4th page of google.
  • Beer – I like beer I do.  Articles may vary from a simple beer review to my adventures into homebrewing and also may cross over into technology because the only thing better than making beer is making beer and leveraging technology at the same time.
  • RPG’s – and other assorted games.  Everything from D&D through Carcassonne and back to Skyrim.  What I’ve been playing, what I want to play etc etc.
  • Pi – 3.14159 … and the raspberry pi too.  I’ve got a couple of these and enjoy tinkering.
  • Stuff – Anything else that takes my fancy.

The main types of article I intend to avoid writing are:

  • Personal – anything to do with day to day life.  When I see other blogs of that ilk I tend to squirm.
  • Fan Fiction – I’m not a “writer”.
  • Humus – It’s not tasty, especially with Jammy Dodgers.

I contemplated having separate blogs for each of the topics that I end up writing about but then I realised it was just too much overhead – I’m a whole person and this blog is for me.  Furthermore, I will be using the categories you will see at the right of every page to vigilantly categorise each post – so if you only want my posts about SharePoint there will be a category that niftily filters the posts and shows you only the ones that you’re interested in.

So, finally, erm … Welcome!