James Thorpe

Feb 15, 2022 typescript vue webpack

One of my hobby projects has me wanting to use Vue.js. I started off using a CDN version of Vue along with a dynamic loader for loading individual .vue files, but as the project was growing, I was finding it was becoming cumbersome with long load times as individual files were pulled down, plus I also wanted to also introduce TypeScript, so it was time to bring in a compile/bundle step for this part of the project.

Jul 24, 2020 electronics pic

It's been a while since the last post about my PIC project, and a fair bit has been achieved and changed since, so let's have a quick run through of what those things are!

Feb 05, 2020 dovecot linux restic

Since writing this up, I discovered that there are more straightfoward solutions to running your own mailserver than manually building and configuring one from scratch. I had a look at 3:

Dec 30, 2019 AWS DNS

I used to have a fairly static home IP, with a DNS entry pointed at it that I manually updated on the rare occasion it actually changed. We moved in March '18, and with the move came a new internet provider - the IP now changes frequently. I've finally got around to sorting out a dynamic DNS for those times I need it.

Aug 14, 2019 electronics pic

Once again, this post is a bit overdue. But, progress!

May 12, 2019 electronics pic

It's been far longer than I intended to post this follow up. I received my order of PICs and the PICkit 4 some time ago, and set to playing.

First up, downloading the software. Microchip provide MPLAB X for free to work with their chips, and I saw no reason not to use it. When you start it up and create a new project, you can choose exactly which chip you're targetting. In my case this is the PIC18F27K42, which seemed to be a good balance of not too many pins plus had more than one UART, so I can potentially practice chaining them together in a communication array (remember, at some point I'm supposed to be working towards having 4 neighbours on each block, but I'm still learning to walk here, so 2 is plenty).

After choosing the chip type, you can then select the programmer you're intending to use - in my case the PICkit 4 - followed by the compiler you wish to use. There seems to be a choice of 2, those being C18 and XC8. A bit of googling led me to use XC8, simply because it's the newer one and appears to be the way things are heading. I'm sure there are reasons to pick the old one if you need it, but I'm unaware of what those reasons might be so stuck with "newer is better"!

Jan 04, 2019 electronics pic

In my first post after the website reboot, I said:

Well, here we go.

Dec 10, 2018 AWS Site

In my last post, I looked at how I configured and started using Wyam to build my new site. After finishing up that post and getting things working locally, I then figured out how to get things served from AWS.

I created a new S3 bucket, with the same name as my domain (james.pawsforthorpe.co.uk), and configured the properties on it to include static website hosting. This gives it an AWS domain - in my case, http://james.pawsforthorpe.co.uk.s3-website.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/. A quick CNAME entry in my DNS settings later, and I was up and running. At this point, I was still manually uploading files through the AWS console website - this now needed to change.

Being a .NET house, we use the AWS Powershell Tools at work to do some programmatic things - I didn't see any reason to do any different here. First job was to create an IAM user to allow programmatic access. Best practices are to limit permission to exactly what's needed.

Dec 04, 2018 Site Wyam

I'm in the process of rejigging out my web portfolio (website, email servers etc), and since my day job involves using AWS, I figured now was a good time to begin moving there. I'm also about to embark on some electronics projects, and I wanted to have somewhere to write about what I'm doing. I really don't use my personal site much, so I figured I wanted something simple and static(ish) that I could serve from S3, perhaps with a lambda function or two at some point.

Having seen what other people are doing with the likes of Jekyll, I thought I'd go for a statically generated site too. Being a .NET developer, I wondered what there was in the way of site generator engines that ran on top of .NET Core. A quick search found Wyam, and a Blog post from Scott Hanselman exploring it a little.

That was good enough for me.