All the forum posts I could find assumed access to either Windows or Linux machines to burn the firmware onto an SD card. I needed a couple of goes at this when trying from my Mac.

The main issue I had was how to remove and recreate one partition from the initial image.

i.e. how to grow that partition to use the remaining space on the SD Card. I found a way of using Virtualbox to do this as outlined below.

I recently bought a Sipeed Maix II Dock. For my purposes, it’s an IOT device with a camera and screen that can also run a complete Linux environment. The core board is fairly cheap, and even the docked version comes in at around £20.

The full specifications of the board are available from SeedStudio

Getting this running has been a bit of a journey for me. Between using a Mac as my primary OS and struggling with the Chinese forums I’d not been able to find a “how to get started” site that worked for me. As such, I will attempt to document that process here over the next few posts.

Before I jump to an automated GitHub -> S3 deployment for Hugo, I needed to get hugo deploy working for me locally to write changes directly to S3 once I’m happy with a post. I’m a little paranoid about AWS credentials for obvious reasons, so for local work, I like to have specific profiles in my ~/.aws/credentials file. These look like :

[hugo]
aws_access_key_id=c3VwZXIgc2VjcmV0IHVzZXI=
aws_secret_access_key=SSdtIG5vdCB0aGF0IHN0dXBpZAo=

Where the given user Hugo has specific access only to the S3 bucket being published to along with the ability to invalidate a cloud front distribution.

I have a bunch of historic content that I created on Blogger many years ago.

The vast majority of it is about devices and technology that are long since out of use for me (ant and Zaurus PDAs anyone?). However, on the off chance that anyone is interested in the excitement generated by wonders such as Skype incoming phone numbers back in 2005. I have migrated the content over to Hugo.

I’ve been avoiding posting blog content for a while, in fact it’s been a very long while. Initially, this was due to my previous employment, and now having served a years garden leave it feels like it would be worth updating a few things here in the blog.

Heads up to @jbstans for reminding me that Hugo existed, so this is a little attempt at moving away from Blogspot to something more appropriate for me.

I’m a very happy Alfred and iTerm2 user on OSX.

I spent 30mins last night writing an Applescript Alfred extension to help me launch new tabs directly into iTerm and execute the ssh command directly. This means if you have ssh keys setup then it means a simple Alfred command can launch a new ssh session in a new tab in iTerm.

Applescript for the extension :

-- change this to ssh you want to run  
set myCommand to  "ssh -i /Users/goul/keys/myspecialkey.pem ec2-user@my.host.name"  
  
  
-- this will send it to iTerm  
tell application "iTerm"  
	activate  
	set myterm to (current terminal)  
	-- talk to the new terminal  
	tell myterm  
		set mysession to (make new session at the end of sessions)  
		-- talk to the session  
		tell mysession  
			-- set some attributes  
			exec command myCommand  
		end tell  
	end tell  
end tell

I keep having to look this up, so putting it here ought to save some time. When attempting to post a block of JSON to a web service the Curl incantation is :

curl -X POST  -H 'content-type: application/json'  -d @myjsonfile.txt http://some.url/param

A month or so ago I raved about Alfred App and how impressed I was with it. I’ve also been a long time user of Remember The Milk to keep lists of the things I should be doing.

The good folks over at Ruk have shown how to bring these two worlds together using a Ruby command line script. This now means entering a TODO/reminder can be as simple as :

Alt+Space
r Mail Jim about bulk purchase rates of hamsters ^Wed 9am

This really helps my flow through the day - things that would have become interruptions can be quickly added to the TODO list without any real context switch.

After a year of envy of my better half having an original iPad, I was lucky enough to pick one up about ten days ago. In this time its already become my go to device for a bunch of scenarios and I’m delighted with it.

With my professional hat on, we have been asked to take a look at building some tablet based applications. Much as I love my IOS based device, Apple keep a very tight reign on whats happens on that platform so I wanted to show the client alternatives.

I’ve been a long time user (3+years) of Quick Silver as a task launcher and general tool for keeping hands on keyboard rather than a mouse.

Around 6 weeks ago I decided to trial Alfred, Quick Silver got uninstalled about an hour later. Alfred lets you launch applications, web search, find local docs, open recent files etc etc with amazing ease. If you own a Mac, go try the free version either from http://www.alfredapp.com/ or the Apple Store. Once you are hooked go spend a few pounds to get the PowerPack and support an independent developer who is doing a great job.