I’m slowly getting around to making some of my projects available for purchase directly and needed a way to charge customers for them, and provide a licence key on successful payment. blicense is my solution for that, and I’m making it available for free. See the full details at...

I annoyingly had to abandon this project which started as a prototype for a classic macOS palmtop. I’d been after a palmtop with a usuable keyboard for a while (Something like the Poqet PC from the early 90s), but wasn’t having any luck. This was my attempt at creating...

I’ve got my hands on the radio set from an Avro Lancaster Bomber, used by the British in World War 2. Here it is, it’s been fitted with a power cord and antenna, but I want to go over it and check all of the capacitors etc before plugging...

I’m making available a constantly in-progress excel toolkit which was created for, and is used by, a UK university department to assist with processing the large amounts of data output by their spectrometry machines. This toolkit is updated periodically as additional needs arise. If you have found this page...

Following my previous article on creating custom reports for KoalaBrain EPOS in Excel using VBA script, a client requested some additional reports. I’m including them here as additional examples of what can be done with KoalaBrain VBA reporting. This report pulls sale details for any uncategorized sale rows, and...

I created KoalaBrain in part due to a client with unique reporting requirements. Many business and finance types are proficient with Microsoft Excel, and scripting it in Visual Basic for Application, so it made sense to base custom reports around this. VBA Reports in KoalaBrain dumps sales and payment...

I recently needed to add a case to a Raspberri Pi/5″ LCD combo so that it could sit countertop in a customers business. No suitable case could be found online, and I don’t have access to a 3d printer, or any tools beyond a sharp knife for that matter....

The Coin Starter Kit is a promotional booklet, targeted at collectable and coin dealers to help them get younger people interested in the hobby of collecting, to secure future customers and traders. I hadn’t done any pre-press work (or writing) in a long time, and felt like making a...

In a past life I would scan, crop, rotate and rename thousands of coin images, front and back, for catalogue print and eBay. This took up time, and wasn’t exactly exciting. I had a recent project which required more coin scanning and I decided to do something about streamlining...

I’ve been working on an arcade machine project on and off. My brother put together the screen and case while I worked on the internals and software. It’s still not completely done, but below are some shots of the work in progress. As far as the software side of...

A few years back I needed a project to kick start learning mobile dev tools and some new JS frameworks. I went ahead and developed Gadski, a social travel app for finding other holidayers on the same route or in the same place, as well as being able to...

I’ve been fixing old radios. It’s been providing good weekend projects that don’t involve staring at a computer screen. Here’s some of the results! These ones have all sold, and I’ve ordered some Bluetooth modules to add to future restores so the classic Rambler can be used as a...

There are a few examples online of using Dropzone JS with Laravel Media Library, however none of them quite worked how I’d like, and had various caveats. Below is my solution, which supports retaining original file names, generating thumbnails, file previews, repopulating forms, and deleting/adding new items when updating...

What is Drive Encryption? Drive encryption scrambles your files so that noone else can read them – except the person with the password or recovery key. This is usually done transparently. You use your computer normally, your files will be encrypted and protected. Drive encryption is not supported by...

There are many different backup methods, software solutions, and doctrines. Generally all agree that you should keep at least three copies of your important files in three different places. Many will suggest you keep weekly copies of your files, in case of accidental deletion or corruption so that older...

I have, along with others I’ve found online, encountered issues with the right joycon on my Nintendo Switch. Initially, the LED which displays the controller number up and died, and the pairing button would work intermittently. Then, the joycon would begin to fail to connect to the console while...

This directive will prevent clickable elements from being clicked again before the next ‘tick’. I hadn’t seen this particular solution in the wild, and it seems to be the most effective so it’s worth sharing. If you want a DOM element to be covered up or otherwise disabled after...

There’s a lot of tutorials on securing HTTP servers – including forcing SSL, deploying mod_security2, mod_evasive, etc (All of which are worth doing), but platforms like WordPress and OpenCart will attract automated login attempts no matter what you do – they’re popular, frequently out-of-date and often have weak passwords....

DO NOT USE ERECORD FOR ANY PURPOSE OTHER THAN ACCESSING YOUR OLD TAX DATA – IT IS DECADE-OLD, UNSUPPORTED, OBSOLETE SOFTWARE THAT COULD STOP WORKING AT ANY TIME – INVEST IN A MODERN SOLUTION OR RISK LOSING YOUR WORK. CLICK HERE FOR THE CURRENT ATO ADVICE ON DIGITAL RECORD...

Posting this as there wasn’t a clear answer elsewhere online. Brother have not released a driver package for M1 Macs running Monterey and suggest you install their printing app from the app store – an app which has terrible reviews. The good news is, the old drivers for MacOS...