One of the "gaps" in my smart home setup at the moment is the burglar alarm. The burglar alarm I have in the house is functional and if you set it off it'll make plenty of noise and drive my neighbours nuts! But it's not "smart", which means that I have no way of monitoring it when I'm out of the country or simply not at home. I had looked into a number of different "smart" … [Read more...] about Making Legacy Home Security Setups a bit Smarter With Konnected
Open Source
Photo Licensing Change
I use Flickr for storing my photos, though I also post some images on to various social sites and blogs.. But most of the photos I've taken with my various digital cameras and phones end up on Flickr at some point. Up until a couple of days ago the license on all the images was restricted, though you could ask me for permission for a license. I'm not sure why I set the … [Read more...] about Photo Licensing Change
CD Ripping To Ogg Vorbis And Other Formats On OSX
If you use a Mac you get used to using its tools. Why wouldn't you? They're easy to use and pretty intuitive. Unfortunately my iRiver H340 can't read audio files in the standard OSX / iTunes format. It'll happily take the files in, but then you can't play the audio, which defeats the purpose of the exercise. There are quite a few software tools, both commercial and open … [Read more...] about CD Ripping To Ogg Vorbis And Other Formats On OSX
Working With SuPHP Permissions and Ownership
I switched one of my web servers over to use SuPHP a few weeks ago, as it's a lot more secure. However moving from mod_php to suPHP does require a small bit of tweaking of files and directories. Under mod_php you can easily end up with a lot of files and directories being owned by the Apache user, which on Debian / Ubuntu is "www-data". You'll need to change the ownership … [Read more...] about Working With SuPHP Permissions and Ownership
Checking Which Ports Are Doing What On Linux
From time to time it's handy to be able to see exactly which process is using a particular port on a Linux system - especially if you're debugging issues. This command will let you see exactly what's going on - you simply change the port number: lsof -i:80 If you need the standard port numbers you can check this list … [Read more...] about Checking Which Ports Are Doing What On Linux