Quick shout out to Scott Hanselman, who recently gave an ACM tech talk on running Linux Apps on Windows, which I would recommend. First, as is perhaps often the way, an “off-topic” comment of his struck me, and partially inspired this post. I paraphrase from memory. I always think that we have a limited number of keypresses in our life, so I want to use them well. If someone asks me a question, I blog the answer so that the keypresses live on. E-mails are where keypresses go to die. Anyway, aside from the stuff I learnt about WSL, there […]

Since DynDns announced they were withdrawing their free offering, I have been looking for an alternative. Turns out Microsoft’s Azure DNS has a REST API, and python library. While not free, it is very cheap – so far my DNS costs with Azure are running at 1p/day (although I only incur 5k queries a day). Setting up Azure and a DNS zone is pretty straightforward, getting the authentication and python script working as a bit more tricky, so here’s what I did. First set up the DNS zone in your Azure Portal Now Create an App: Go to Azure AD, […]

Sometimes I deeply dislike computers, especially when they try and be too clever. It’s actually a little bit scary (The Terminator‘s looking less and less far fetched!). Recent incident – true story. My website now runs on my own server at home, at the end of my broadband pipe. Despite what the provider claims it really isn’t fibre, but it is 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up, which is far more bandwidth than the traffic I generate. So far so good. Last week, I suddenly started getting e-mails from Google’s search bot telling me the number of 404s on […]

Very excited that I’ve relocated my website and my photo site onto a Raspberry Pi, which is sitting on my desk looking at me as I type! I purchased said Pi for this purpose over a year ago, but somehow didn’t quiet get around to doing anything more than having it as a Linux box I could SSH into should the spirit move me. This is more useful than it sounds, as Linux network tools are good, it’s immensely useful to be able to test things from outside my work LAN while at work, plus SSH tunelling is the best […]

I have now successfully submitted an assignment in PDF format via the Common Awards Moodle, including analysis by TurnItIn!! I did have to do a few more tweaks, so I’ve updated my Using LaTeX for Common Awards page with the final instructions/template for anyone mad enough to do the same.