So, home control with your own setup is great, but you have to think about what happens in the event you sell your house, get hit by a bus or someone needs to work on it in the future. Home Automation should add value to a house, not turn people off a sale. This is… Read More »
This is part one of some of my notes regarding Home Automation concepts. Part 2 is about planning for the future and house resale value. Electrical Isolation/Safety Electrical safety is very important obviously for home automation, and as well as my tendency to over-engineer, I’m often thinking about ‘what could possibly go wrong‘. One of… Read More »
Beach Hop in Whangamata had around 100 classic, vintage and retro styled caravans this year. Here are a bunch of photos I took. Not my best work.. but I didn’t spend a lot of time taking them, and of course it was pretty overcast. Congratulations to the winner at the Top 10 shootout, Retro Custom… Read More »
Caravan thefts in New Zealand have become a lot more common in the past few years, and every day or so you hear about another one going missing. Caravans are pretty easy to steal by themselves, as they are light weight, usually easily accessible on a driveway… and they sit home alone when people go… Read More »
Do you have an existing house or structure and trying to get a cable into a tricky place? Here are a few tips from methods I have used over the years. Conduit Sucker There is nothing more annoying than finding a broken cable in a conduit or pipe and having nothing to pull the replacement… Read More »
These are the before and after photos of our 1965 15″ Zephyr Deluxe Caravan. It was apparently stored in a shed for 20 years so apart from some general decay, some borer and a bunch of broken and missing stuff, the layout and fittings were mostly original. We’ve had it for a couple of years… Read More »
I needed a phone for my son as he had been given an older ZTE V795 phone running Android Gingerbread. The ridiculous thing about this is that besides the fact there is really no way to easily upgrade or change out the ROM on this phone… you can’t even update the current setup as any… Read More »
I needed a photobooth for my wedding (this was one of my few assigned wedding tasks!). You know, one of those ‘take a few photos of guests, and print them’ sort of thing, like the early film ones . Early on, I built up a list of things I really wanted to achieve with it,… Read More »
People often ask me for the best way to store their thousands of photos, and I’ve tried a bunch of ways in the past. I take masses of photos (SLRs, Action Cams, Pocket Cams and phones), and running my own commercial (colocated) server has allowed me to use applications such as Gallery, Piwigo and other server apps… Read More »
The Raspberry Pi is a low cost, credit-card sized computer that plugs into a computer monitor or TV, and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. It is a capable little device that enables people of all ages to explore computing, and to learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python. There are lots… Read More »