Ether: a tale of two blockchains

The price of Ether (ETH) has rocketed this year and is currently 23 27 times greater than 6 months ago.

For anyone that bought ether last year, this is very good news indeed.

But there are two reasons to be cheerful for anyone that has held onto their ether for at least the last 11 months.

The Brave Browser

It was only a week or so ago that I was grumbling to someone about the internet, and the time it can take to load a web page.

Using Firefox with NoScript, I have to take a decision on whether to allow scripts to run, but these are not always limited to the page of interest.

When viewing newspaper and magazine websites like Radio Times, I find it quite alarming that it wants to load dozens, possibly hundreds of script libraries belonging to Google, Facebook, Twitter & so on.

The Entroware Triton: my new box

My old ASUS x401A  laptop has served me well for the last 4+ years but all good things must come to an end.

The screen flicker/blanking just got too annoying, so I had to dust off my wallet and part with some cash.

So how does my shiny new Triton compare with the old ASUS?

BirdBox2017: something is eating my SD card

2017 is turning out to be a great bird box season for us.

Both of our Raspberry Pi camera boxes are occupied, with the first set of chicks almost ready to leave the nest.

For the last few days my only concern has been whether I'll run out of SD card space before the chicks depart.

Gambas Video Reverser

I recently needed to reverse a video clip, to make the action run backwards.

I couldn't find a Linux video editor with this feature built in, so I ran a series of command line instructions...

...then I decided it would be useful to wrap these instructions into a GUI application.

Looking for a Linux Video Editor?

I'm a bit of a sucker when it comes to video editors.

Although I don't do a great deal of video work (except during the bird box season) if I stumble across a video editor, I have to install it.

And so it was a couple of days ago when I discovered Shotcut.

Gambas MP4Box: a batch .h264 to .mp4 video packager

Using RaspiVid software with a RaspiCam results in a .h264 encoded video file.

Most media players require .h264 to be "packaged" into a suitable video container format like .mp4.

This very simple Gambas project uses the program MP4Box to convert or package a bunch of .h264 files into .mp4 files ready to be edited or played using popular applications.

Replacing the DHT22 with a Bosch BME280

I compared the humidity readings from two DHT22 and was alarmed by the difference between them.

Although they are cheap, the Bosch BME280 doesn't have to cost that much more, and provides pressure measurement in addition to humidity and temperature.

Although many of the BME280s available cost around £20, I splashed out £7.61 and bagged a bargain on Amazon.