Robey Lawrence

Running local scripts with HTML buttons

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 01:55:41 GMT

I was curious if it was possible to run local scripts from simply clicking a button on a basic HTML page, as I can think of a few good scenarios for browser based dashboard pages. This is using Python with Flask to start a tiny local web server, to serve a basic HTML page. The…

Google Apps Scripts for filtering Gmail in Sheets

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 04:28:00 GMT

Made a couple of Google Apps Scripts yesterday/today. The first one counts how many unread emails in your Gmail Inbox from a domain or particular email address, and adds the number in the adjacent cell in the spreadsheet. There is some conditional formatting applied to show what’s above 0, and what’s 20 and above. The…

Email Parsing with N8N and Graylog

Tue, 30 May 2023 04:26:00 GMT

I’ve been building some website monitoring stuff lately using self-hosted software. Here’s one that uses n8n (like Zapier) to ingest email logs (sent from a WordPress site) from an IMAP folder, parses the email content into the GELF format (for Graylog), then sends it to a Graylog install via a HTTP POST request. I configured…

Iriun Webcam Mobile App

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 03:23:00 GMT

My webcam in the office is an old phone on an arm mount, running the Iriun Webcam app .…

Auxl

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 03:22:00 GMT

I’ve been learning how to interact with APIs lately, and this app on MacOS (Auxl) has been fun to play with. You visually drag around Nodes on a canvas to build your requests.…

Virtual Reality Online Shopping

Thu, 04 Aug 2022 03:51:17 GMT

Allow me to make a prediction.. 5-10 years from now, you’re in your lounge room and you put on your Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality headset. You walk in (login) to the local Target (still in the virtual world). You walk through the front door and are greeted immediately by an invisible voice: “Welcome , let…

Netbox

Thu, 07 Jul 2022 04:18:57 GMT

If you work in IT with multiple client networks to keep track of, or you just have a lot of personal internet-connected devices around the place, NetBox looks like an awesome tool for interactive documentation! I’ve only just come across it recently, but I am definitely keen to try it out for my own stuff.…

Grafana

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 03:11:00 GMT

This is a Grafana dashboard running on one of the raspberry Pis in my home network. It’s visualising a data feed that’s being fetched from a couple of cloud servers using Prometheus and Prometheus Node Exporter. The little ‘Job’ drop-down field at the top can toggle between 3 different servers to quickly change the source…

Portainer

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 03:08:00 GMT

If you’re wanting to learn docker and what it’s all about, but you’re a visual learner (like me), there are a couple of great self-hosted GUI’s for managing containers. The one I’ve been using is Portainer – community edition (pictured). You can run the full version locally in your own network, and then just add…

My Raspberry Pis

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 01:33:25 GMT

My HomeLab currently consists of two Raspberry Pi 4’s The Pi in the black case is the 4GB RAM model, running my install of Home Assistant . The Pi in the official (red & white) case is the 8Gb RAM model, running Open Media Vault 6 to act as a SMB network share and to…

WordCamps of Australia and New Zealand

Sun, 07 Jan 2018 14:37:56 GMT

So I decided to look through a bit of the history of WordCamps in Australia and New Zealand, and it just makes sense to put the compiled list of links somewhere in-case anyone would like to peruse 😉 (Please let me know if you see any missing and I will update accordingly. I’m sure there…

Let’s Encrypt free SSL on Siteground

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 01:13:23 GMT

Just set one up on my personal blog (this site) on my Cloud VPS. Flippin’ insanely easy! 1. Click the Let’s Encrypt button in cPanel, enter your email, and click ‘Install’ 2. Use iThemes security to force front-end to use SSL. BAM!…

The year of the plugin

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 05:40:41 GMT

I’ve decided that this year I’m going to learn how to build WordPress plugins. Not necesarily to publish to the wp.org repo, but something that will make my life just a little bit easier. I’ve followed Dustin Hartzler’s webinar tutorial back in Feb of 2014, but I think I will go back and re-watch it.…

Grunt LiveReload on WordPress

Mon, 04 Jan 2016 09:11:14 GMT

The last component of Grunt I wanted to setup before I get stuck into my current WordPress project, is LiveReload. This does what it sounds like. When it detects any file changes (based on rules I set in the Gruntfile.js file), it automatically reloads the browser so I don’t have to constantly hit CMD +…

Docker & Grunt

Sun, 03 Jan 2016 09:10:34 GMT

Today I decided to look into Docker & Grunt. Docker doesn’t really seem like the kind of thing that would benefit me much in my workflow for building SMB WordPress websites. Looks like it might be useful for larger sites, or more likely, web apps. Grunt, I have setup and am planning to use it…

Virtualbox & WP-CLI

Sat, 02 Jan 2016 09:12:17 GMT

Today I wanted to take my new knowledge of SSH a little further, so I created a Virtual Machine, installed Ubuntu and then installed Apache, PHP, and MySQL. I then installed WordPress and accessed it from my local machine by adding a hostname in my hosts file mapped to the IP of the VM. After…

SSH and Rsync, and Git

Thu, 31 Dec 2015 00:43:52 GMT

So on NYE2015 I’m learning to SSH and Rsync to my server so I feel like more of a bad-ass web guy. Update: Oh, and I just setup a local install of WordPress on Mamp to sync with a live install on my server, using Git (via SourceTree), and a WP database sync plugin.…

Hosted a Unturned 3.0 Game Server on Amazon EC2

Mon, 28 Dec 2015 04:25:06 GMT

I wanted to play Unturned 3.0 with my brothers, but they were in another state. I attempted to host the server portion of the game on my spare laptop on the shelf. It worked fine for me, but anyone connected outside my LAN experienced enough lag to make it un-playable. This was because my current…

The beard is gone

Sun, 15 Mar 2015 04:51:40 GMT

A couple of weeks ago, I posted here that I was going to participate in the World’s Greatest Shave and lose my beard to raise money. Well as promised in that post, here is the follow-up. Yesterday (Saturday, March 14), I went down to Westfield where the local ‘Shave event’ was being held. Before I…

I’m shaving my beard for a cure!

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 06:46:37 GMT

Just over 15 years ago, I was diagnosed with AML Leukaemia . Long story short, after 9 months in hospital, I walked out the front door to go home. Unfortunately, not many people get that opportunity. Today 31 people will get the news they have blood cancer. According to Facebook, the last time I came…

Getting to know the guys behind the stuff

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 14:35:42 GMT

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Right now my Stitcher app tells me that I’ve listened to 184 hours over 1,830 episodes since Nov 2012. That’s not including the ones I listen to the web or through iTunes. I just find podcasts to be one of the best ways that I personally take in…