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{ Category Archives } Applications

Software for getting the job done; programs, suites, utilities, stuff like that

Sense and Control: so many options

OK. got the Sonoff stuff going OEM. Now for the next step. I’m looking for two major features. (1) FOSS and (2) local without dependencies. Complexity is another factor as I’d rather the component count be in hardware rather than software. It’d also be nice if it was possible to get into customization and modification […]

Sonoff, VSCode, ESP8266, IOT

Another Amazon sale, another opportunity. This time is was a 4 pack of basic Sonoff switches. These are $5 boxes controlling a relay via Wifi meaning an app or Alexa. They run off of, and switch, 90-240 VAC and use an ESP8266 for the smarts and radio. As they are easy to take apart and […]

Guide to the Galaxy for Mobile App Developers

freetechbooks.com has posted Don’t Panic: Mobile Developer’s Guide to The Galaxy, 17th Edition.   More than 20 writers from the mobile community share their know-how in dealing with topics such as accessibility in mobile apps, UX design, mobile analytics, prototyping, cross-platform development, native development, mobile web and app marketing. It is an easy to read rundown about […]

Bitcoin seduction

It started with an observation based on the Equifax fiasco by Hao-Kai Pai: Defanging identity fraud by verifying identities – “part of the damage here stems from organizations assuming that Social Security Numbers are secret … another part of the problem is that some businesses are startlingly lax about confirming who they are extending credit to.” That is […]

So what’s wrong with 1975 programming?

Notes from the Architect picks up Varnish as his application example to highlight that things have changed since then. You can extrapolate from his examples to, say, Python or Java versus BASIC or C. I have spent many years working on the FreeBSD kernel, and only rarely did I venture into userland programming, but when […]

HRD and Amateur Radio Software Ethos

You’d think Amateur Radio and FOSS devotees would be sympatico but, alas, most hams are appliance operators and this means Windows and commercial software.  That goes back to Bill Gates’ famous letter about piracy of his intellectual property and the evolution about software licensing, ownership, and business models. Ham Radio Deluxe (HRD) just hit a […]

One thing leads to another: Time for the pi, GPS, ntp, ESP8266, microPython, Lua

The pi boots without any calendar time reference. If it comes up on the I’net, it uses ntp to set the clock but offline it has no reference. Things work pretty well by just ignoring the clock and I could just set it manually if need be. The other options would be to use a […]

Rallynet CONF soup: Setting up hostapd, dnsmasq, and nginx

The base honeypot LAN server requires only a few software packages and very little configuration. LAN means local area network and honeypot refers to it being set up to route all network inquiries to its own services with no outside connections. This post is about the basic set of services needed for an isolated network that will […]

Rallynet: Proof of Concept guidance

The first question was what to do with this thing (the Raspberry Pi or just pi). The NOOBS (new out of box software) install process worked well and provided a multi-boot pi with Raspbian, LibreELEC, and OSMC. Nice. Worked. Made a nice media center for the RV. Now what? How about a web services host […]

In the news: FCC vs innovation,

There is sometimes a need to provide a governor on things to keep them from going out of control. Protecting trade secrets has a long history that the patent idea was embedded in law to open this up a bit in a controlled way. Regulation is almost always a limiting control and it is another […]