Lew's blog

Last year, I collected some data from my car-mounted GPS, in order to update openstreetmap.org with a side-road into the lake at my cottage. As my GPS is only accurate to about 3 metres, and (on the drive along this side-road) often less accurate than that, I collected trackpoints from several drives up and down the side-road. This permitted me to refine the openstreetmap roadway path with a bit of accuracy, and add that side-road to the public map. This year, I hope to make many more trips to the cottage than I did last year.

A few months ago, I dragged my Linux laptop, some Digispark ATTiny85s, and some other hardware along to while away the time on an out-of-town visit. My objective was to, in my spare time, learn how to use some of the libraries available to the ATTiny85/Arduino environment, and to play a bit with the hardware.

So, I'm reading a Usenet newsgroup and see this post talking about how to view the Raspberry Pi desktop on another machine. The post recommended downloading and installing yet another application to the Pi, and to the system that would view the Pi desktop. I guess that's the answer for some, but it's not the answer for me.

Recently, I participated in a discussion about using Asterisk on the Raspberry Pi, to provide a call filtering facility for a home installation. My correspondant had tried to set up a Raspberry Pi and VoIP handset to handle phone calls such that incoming calls would pass through a whitelist/blacklist, promoting good callers and damning bad callers, while directing outgoing calls to their intended destinations.

A decade ago, I hosted a website for my partner, so that she could post photos and such for her family to see. She didn't use it much, and, in 2017, the hosting software reached end-of-life. So, I shut the site down, planning to upgrade the software and resurrect the site later.

Well, life got in the way, and I never did resurrect the site. Until now.

I make no secret about it that I run Slackware on both my server and my desktop workstation. Slackware allows me to manage my systems the way I want to, without a "nanny" holding my hand and saying "No.". And, with this level of freedom comes a corresponding level of risk; you can really fsck things up as Slackware doesn't supply a safety net. But, that's all right: I believe in learning skills, and Slackware certainly requires skills.