Simon PainterSomewhere to keep things

Bits & bytes

You have probably been directed here because you sent me an email with data volumes quoted in GB/MB/B or Gb/Mb/b inconsistently. Don’t worry, it happens all the time; so often in fact that I wrote this blog post to explain why the difference is important. Network people measure traffic (or bandwidth) in terms of bits […]

Read more

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

aws php sdk & DynamoDB

I am working on a project that requires me to store publishers and subscribers in a DynamoDB table. As both elements are stored as integers and as I only ever need to find out the subscribers of a publisher (and not the publisher that a subscriber is subscribed to) it’s possible to use a list […]

Read more

Tags: , , , ,

Route summarisation with python

There used to be a great little website for route summarisation and it did it far more intelligently than Cisco kit does it. It looks like the site has dropped off the internet which is a shame but there is a handy python library called netaddr with has the same capabilities. I have written a […]

Read more

Tags:

Dynamic DNS built in AWS

I was playing around with some home automation with a Raspberry Pi and needed remote SSH access back to it. There are a bunch of free dynamic DNS providers out there but I couldn’t find one I liked so I made one. http://www.pi-dns.me I won’t go into the ‘how to use it’ because that’s all […]

Read more

Tags: , , ,

Python framework for api.darksky.net

I wanted to use darksky.net as a quick source for weather forecast data so put together a simple class to get at the properties I needed. As my needs changed I decided to implement the whole (very simple) api. You’ll need an api key but that’s about it. Here’s a few things you can do […]

Read more

Tags: ,

Python IFTTT Trigger Class

I have started using Python a lot for day to day tasks and as I use IFTTT quite a lot I needed an class to trigger the webhooks feature to send myself alerts or whatever recipe I choose within IFTTT. To use the class just create a Trigger object with the trigger name and your […]

Read more

Tags: ,

Python as a service

I use Raspberry Pi for all sorts of little jobs and automation and for this Python is the natural choice. It’s often useful to have your script running as a service and able to automatically start on boot. It’s quite easy to set up a new service using systemd on a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian. […]

Read more

Tags:

Sergeant Clip Review

Full disclosure: I received some free samples and have worked with the inventor at a former employer. I don’t have any financial interest in the product though. I was quite excited to get my Sergeant Clip samples through as the inventor had told me about them in the past and I have been involved in […]

Read more

The best ‘bug’ I have ever seen…

Way back in October 2013 Cisco slipped out this little field notice to customers and engineers across the globe. The position and function of the mode switch is such that it can be pressed by the protective boot on certain types of cables and cause a reset to factory settings. Problem Description Certain types of snagless […]

Read more

Tags: , , ,