Category: Projects

My Home Network – Part 2

Hello again, this is the second in a series of my home network posts. In this edition, we’re going to be flashing another router with OpenWrt. You can read part one here. I decided it was time to leave all the old hardware behind and move to brand new stuff. I was having problems with the ZYXEL VMG8924-B10A as the main router, it kept cutting out and was causing short minute outages that ultimately I think was due to the system running out of ram and botnets trying to break into the thing. So I decided it was time to… Continue reading My Home Network – Part 2

Scraping Canvas (LMS)

Because my time at university is ending I thought it best to archive the canvas pages available to me for later reference should I not be able to access canvas later if they change platforms or disable my account. I should probably add this is for archival purposes and I will not be able to share the data I was able to collect. Thankfully I was able to get the whole thing going in a few minutes and downloading took a lot longer. The first snippet I got from here, didn’t complete the first time, it seemed some image was… Continue reading Scraping Canvas (LMS)

How Much Does My Car Cost Per Mile?

I thought its time I put my GNUCash Data to good use and worked out how much I spent on fuel. I loaded up a simple Cash Flow bar chart in GNUCash and selected my expenses column for Car>Petrol and voila. If you are astute you may have also noticed there are additional ‘fixed’ (varies annually/monthly) costs to running a car such as tax, insurance, maintenance and depreciation but I have chosen to eliminate these costs because I would like to explore the benefits of buying another car. We can use this graph based on the last 3 years to… Continue reading How Much Does My Car Cost Per Mile?

Tracking My Position all the Time

I have a long standing interest in monitoring my daily doings, I previously thought about putting a GPS tracker in my car, a good idea for both tracking my position and also checking to see if it has gone walkies (is stolen). I decided against doing this a while ago due to exams and lack of time to set the whole thing up. But I did decide to have a crack at this idea later with my phone. The way I chose to go about this power hungry task was to use an app like IFTTT to record my position… Continue reading Tracking My Position all the Time

Exporting GnuCash Data to PowerBi

Some things are better if you do them yourself. I mainly did this project to keep a running ledger of the changes that I would need to keep track of the account balance data. GnuCash is great, but when I export my accounts data the CSV file isn’t easily translated with power-query automatically. I decided that because I need to keep track of my transactions, this problem was best suited with a little program to calculate my net inflows and outflows using a python program, I also decided halfway through the project that I wanted to hook it up to… Continue reading Exporting GnuCash Data to PowerBi

My Meraki Home Network

If you have ever wanted to use WiFi reliably in your own home, most homelabbers and computer enthusiasts will eventually learn that using consumer equipment to achieve fast speeds and low ping can be a route that many take in vain, whilst mesh networking appliances look promising for home applications, the ever vast expanding market of power-line networking adapters and WiFi range extenders have lead consumers astray and often leave them unhappy with their network performance due to patchy and inconsistent behavior caused by devices looking for the ‘strongest’ signal despite it not necessarily being the fastest or most optimal. Having an… Continue reading My Meraki Home Network