jubileebuttons Cracking into the button case Hacking the Jubilee Line's door buttonsCracking into the button caseOpening up the door button case is initially obvious - four recessed nuts surround the black plastic case. Before you get too eager however,
jubileebuttons Hacking the Jubilee Line's door buttons I recently picked up a couple of retired door-open buttons from the Jubilee Line's 1996 stock, before they were removed in the recent fleet refurbishment. One will probably remain decorative, but I'm eager to hack the second one into something useful or fun.
Transport routing side-project I recently got one of my side-projects to a state where it's semi-usable, so thought I'd jot down some thoughts on the process. It's a London-centric transport routing engine, which will provide alternative
python Fix: Pytest hangs on q.join() This week, in stumping Ross for a couple of hours... At Snap Tech, we've been breaking up some of our large-file-parsing components into smaller units (for testability, reusability, and to be able to
TfL Working with HUB stations in TfL's StopPoint API Another "document it, so no one else has to research it" post I've been using TfL's API a lot recently - in particular live arrivals at a station/stop. I've started
aws Fixing command overrides when running tasks in Amazon ECS I'm sharing this as there's only a single mention of this in the entire AWS ECS documentation; and no hint in the console UI. If you attempt to run a one-off task in
Learnings: React and forms In building DayLog (intro post coming soon), since it's a completely personal project, I've been trying to play with as much new front-end tech as possible. In this instance, I've been finding HTML5
laravel Result + aggregate queries in Eloquent For a project I'm working on, I wanted to get a list of user-supplied tags for an office and the number of times each was submitted (e.g. 7 users added #freebeer): [ { tag:
php Running a Symfony console command independently I was trying to find a way to call a console command from another one, while modifying the container parameters, and ended up with this minimum-viable-bootstrap. It almost works - subsequent runs seem
ansible Ansible helpers When using Ansible with a dynamic inventory, you can end up typing a lot more: EC2_INI_PATH=prod.ini ansible -i plugins/inventory/ec2.py -u ec2-user -s "*" -m ping
rabbitmq (Solution) RabbitMQ not receiving published messages Ran into an odd scenario with RabbitMQ recently. Messages were not being published to queues, yet no errors were reported. Queues were recreated once deleted (indicating that the message was received, just not
php OpCache and symlink-based deployments PHP 5.5 introduced an alternative opcode cache, OpCache, which replaces the APC extension. It's great - for one thing it's only trying to be an opcode cache and not a key-value store
laravel Laravel on Docker Recently I've been looking at involving Docker containers into running a few Laravel applications - possibly removing provisioning and deployment scripts from the process completely. I'm going to record some notes on my
laravel Re-organising Laravel applications with PSR-4 I find the initial Laravel project structure quite approachable: app/ commands/ config/ controllers/ database/ models/ storage/ tests/ views/ However, as your application grows, you'll likely find it difficult to structure without namespaces. Larger
Synchronised Christmas lights For the past few years I've usually had a stab at making something with the Cheerlights API - a Thingspeak service that watches tweets hashtagged #cheerlights and extracts the latest colour tweeted. You
ansible Assertions in Ansible You can emulate assertions in Ansible using a combination of registers, the fail module and when directive: - name: get installed version # Get first two version numbers (major.minor) shell: node -v | sed