A year ago, I built a Raspberry Pi based car computer to provide music, along with weather, location and speed information, while going on a road trip around Australia. At the start of the trip, the computer used an external USB Huawei K3715 3G Dongle for Internet connectivity. The system…
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RaspberryPi Car Computer 15,000km Later


Restoring Github Code Streaks
Last week git hub announced it is removing the current and longest code streaks from users profile pages. The change is being touted as a push to give users a more “simplified interface”. Personally I think its a disappointing move, the profile pages for users on Github are already lacking…
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Building a Raspberry Pi Car Computer
6 months ago I bought an 80 series Toyota Land Cruiser and the time since has been doing the car up in preparation for a trip around Australia. Since its release the 80 Series Land Cruiser has earned itself a reputation as a dependable and an almost unbeatable machine off…
Read MoreChanging the Linux Mint Login Background Images
Newer versions of Linux Mint use MintX as the default login screen greeter. By default it comes with a predefined collection of images. These display in the background and change periodically in a slide show type format. The default images are great but I wanted to add a personal touch…
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Raspberry Pi 2 Bitcoin Node
Not long ago I set up a Bitcoin node on a Debian Wheezy VPS to teach myself about Bitcoin and the blockchain in general. It was a great learning experience but the memory requirements of the Bitcoin software kept causing my VPS instance to run out of memory. So the…
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Running a Bitcoin Node on Debian Wheezy
Over the last few years I have keenly followed the rise of Bitcoin from its early days trading at around $8USD. I watched with interest when it made its sharp rise to $1200USD and then felt dismay with more recent decline back to around the $200USD mark. As a whole…
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Android Debug Bridge Tricks
The Android Debug Bridge ( ADB ) is an underutilised tool in my opinion. Over the last couple of months I have been doing a lot of work using Cordova and the Ionic Framework to create my field guide to NSW Marine Life for the Android platform. When I started…
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Creating a Simple Iptables Blacklist
Anyone that had ownership of a server for any length of time quickly learns that the Internet is full of spammers, bots and other characters you would prefer didn’t exist. A firewall is key to keeping these guys at bay and Linux comes with a Kernel level firewall called iptables…
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Creating a Tor Relay on Debian
The TOR project has proven itself an indispensable tool in the fight to protect the anonymity of people on-line. The project needs servers to route traffic through for the project to achieve its goals though. So contributors are needed to donate relays nodes ensuring a free Internet for all. In…
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PHP FPM Errors After Upgrade
Recently I noticed a few of my servers had stopped serving my sites, with 502 errors being to visitors. I took a look at my site logs and noticed that they were full of the “Permission Denied” errors below: 2014/06/09 09:45:17 [crit] 11453#0: *22 connect() to unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock failed (13: Permission…
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