I listen to Legends of the Old West podcast, it's a western-themed episodic podcast centered around outlaws.The narrator is great, the character actions are descriptive but I'm left wanting more.

With the surge of Stable Diffusion projects, I was inspired to make something AI generated art themed.

What I ended up with is transcribing the podcast audio into text, and then generating images based off of that. Take a look below for an example.


The bulk of the work is done by Vosk, an offline open source speech recognition toolkit. We convert the input MP3 to wav, send it through Vosk and receive a generated JSON output file.

Why look go outside and check the temperature if you can automate it and use Python?

I purchased this inexpensive wifi-enabled temperature monitor from Aliexpress for approx $20 CAD. The goal was to log the temperature and humidty throughout the seasons and make a graph at the end of the year.

During the setup of the device, you have to use their cloud smart home app. You can only guess what they do with your data (hey, maybe they’ll see how cold it gets here in winter and feel bad for me). You’ll have to use the app to connect the developer account to your device.

I deal with large CSV at work, mostly database dumps. Google Sheets and Numbers/Excel just can't keep up with formula changes for 300k+ lines. What do we do? We use Python.

The use case here is replicating a the VLOOKUP function with a left join. We want to get the matching criteria from our referenced CSV file, but only the matching (otherwise that would be a full outer join).

Here's what our data looks like:

We want to look up the lat/long in our reference file and join on zip code. Here's what that data looks like:

Note the matching "zip" column names.

Here's the code:

Sometimes during a Facetime call or watching your favorite dumb crime show on some sketchy Russian streaming site, your audio sounds like it's farting through a tin can. Sometimes choppy and not very clear, whatever audio that's playing doesn't sound right.

One way to fix it is by killing Core Audio, which is responsible for processing audio.

sudo killall coreaudiod

Here's a short little write up on getting Age of Mythology (great break down by staff here )running under Virtualbox. I'm running mac OS 10.15.4 but this should work under all platforms using VirtualBox.

Afteri some trial and error, I  found that VirtualBox 6.1 wasn't working with 3D acceleration under XP (apparently it's been removed) so I had to downgrade to 5.2. 

Quick update to SnackLinux, rolled out Linux 4.15.2 with Busybox 1.28.0. Also switched over to x86_64 only (for now at least) since it simplifies a lot of things. I removed the need to staticly link everything and get rid of that niche, since a few other smaller distros cover that (Alpine Linux for example). Again, this simplifies building packages and running into less issues. Check it out on Github for build instructions, or the getting started page on getting SnackLinux running.

I recently switched phones from a LG G4 to a Sony Xperia X Performance (isn't that a mouthful!), so I had a spare Android phone lying around. What better use for than to sniff some traffic!

Ads on your mobile device can use a fair chunk of your monthly data, so I set out to create a way to disable them while browsing. If you happen to have a rooted Android phone, AdAway is the easiest solution that I have found. Another solution is creating your own DNS server, to have all traffic to unwanted domains be unresolved. While that's great, one can only set the DNS servers manually for wifi, not for mobile data (3G/LTE). The fix this issue, what I did was create an OpenVPN server with Bind9 zones to block unwanted domains.

To bootstrap installing VPN, I used this script to quickly set up an OpenVPN server. Its all very straight forward and will prompt for a few options.

If all went well, it will generate a client profile for you to use (.ovpn). Next, I installed bind9 and followed this tutorial. Once that is all set up, you'll have an ad blocking DNS server! Only thing left to do is force clients to use the DNS.

Pasteros now has JPEG handling abilities when pastes are uploaded with base64 data (see commit). Convert your image to base64 like this and view it by add .jpg to the end of the paste ! I also wrote a command line utility that uploads a selected screenshot area to Pasteros.