The astonishing connected world

I'm a Manchester-based techie who likes building systems to solve interesting problems, with interests in media and video production and sustainability.
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I'm a Manchester-based techie who likes building systems to solve interesting problems, with interests in media and video production and sustainability.
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samdbmg/dhcp-netboot.xyz is a Docker container that can be dropped into your network to netbook various OS installers and tools. It lets your existing DHCP server hand out addresses, and then acts as a PXE Proxy for clients that want to use netboot. ...

samdbmg/ansible-traefik-auth-proxy combines the Traefik reverse proxy with thomseddon/traefik-forward-auth to provide HTTP reverse proxying, certificate handling with LetsEncrypt and SSO login, either as an Ansible role or a Docker Compose project. T...

I self-host a variety of apps on my own infrastructure, and make extensive use of Ansible playbooks to keep it all running, document everything as code and make it easy to run up new environments to test changes without breaking everything! This post...

I have a TimescaleDB container running on my home server, and recently I wanted to upgrade it from PostgreSQL 13 to PostgreSQL 16. This post documents the process I settled on (and hints at the false starts along the way!) I have a handful of sensors...

I have an old Asus Nexus 7 2013 tablet (codename flo) which is still serving me well ten years on, but occasionally I decide I want to put a newer LineageOS ROM on it, or generally reflash it. Unfortunately, I do this sufficiently infrequently that I...

Ever looked at a vision of the future from, say, 30 years ago? According to those 1980s authors, our future contains such excitements as flying cars, living in space and colonies on the moon. Unfortunately, none of these things have really materialised; although we've made progress in quite a few of them. However, one thing almost never predicted is every individual wandering around, always connected, always linked to the sum of human knowledge, able to share thoughts and experiences with the entire world as a matter of course.
Naturally I'm talking about the Internet, and the evolution of the smartphone and the widening spread of mobile data, all of which add up to rich, connected applications pervading our daily lives. For many of us, we can't imagine life without always-on connectivity, and are completely stuck when our phones/tablets/whatever break or run out of power. Going beyond the mundane desire to tweet pictures of what I had for dinner, connectivity has even played a part in overthrowing dictatorships and corrupt regimes. If I want to know the situation in Mali, learn how to fix my car, or just watch a cat falling down the stairs repeatedly, its available near-instantly, wherever and whenever I want it.
Today I've worked with people I'll never meet, on a product they'll never see, I've pair-programmed with a friend 80 miles away as if he were sat next to me, and I've watched a music video performed by 40 people, from radically different backgrounds, scattered all over the world. The likes of YouTube have made unlikely celebrities (Numa Numa guy anyone?) and launched countless careers and forced the music and broadcasting industries to turn established ideas on their head to stay relevant in today's connected world.
Looking to the future, I'm hesitant to speculate what will come given the start to this post; and there are a great many terrifyingly plausible visions of our future, however I think its safe to say that it'll be interesting.