Table of Contents
I'm a novelist and have an interest in space science and physics. I've been a programmer for more than 40 years and I like reviewing new and up-and-coming authors.
Please consider registering (see top of page) to help support this site. Your personal data isn't shared with anyone, but it makes me feel good.
Home Network
I have far too many computers on my home network, so I decided to start making some of them more useful and see which ones I can make redundant. I have 16 servers, plus a development rig, a laptop, and two Windows machines. The two Windows machines exist because there is some software I have to run on Windows (and doesn't run properly under Wine, Mono or dotnet). One machine is using W10 (and can't be upgraded), so I'm gradually migrating stuff from that to the W11 machine.
For those of you that can count (most of you, I'm sure), that's 20 computers. One of these is a conventional desktop (the W10 machine), one a laptop, five are bricks and the rest (14) are Raspberry Pi's - one of which is a PiZero2, one is Pi3 and the rest are Pi4b.
News June 26 '24
Thanks to the wonderful support people at GitHub, I have regained control of my old account at github/phil-ide. I also added a new repository - another plugin for dokuwiki.
Moving Repo's
I had (have) an account on github under the name 'phil-ide', and had two repositories there:
- marsclock, software for building a physical clock (using a Raspberry Pi) that tells the current time anywhere on Mars
- dlcounter, a plugin for dokuwiki wikis that counts named file-types (e.g. zip files) downloaded from the media library
Rather unfortunately, I lost control of the 'phil-ide' account. Therefore, I have forked the repositories into my 'stroggprog' account, and they are now the official repos for these pieces of software. I have opened 'discussions' on this page so people can inform me if there are any issues surrounding the move. The Dokuwiki plugin page for dlcounter has been updated.
News 2024 June
I've been through some recent posts and added social media sharing links and Discussion posting. I also fixed the Crew in Space page, so it does actually only update when the data changes 
It also intelligently corrects for null data in date fields so dates display correctly.
Whole-home Music
If you read my article MPD Network, you know that I built a home music system using a Raspberry Pi model 4b, which is a credit-card sized computer, pulling a mere 15 watts of power, so is ideal for 'always on' usage. I also described using a NAS (essentially disk-drives on the network and so available to all devices) on which to store all my music. This made it easy to upload music from any machine and perform automatic backups whilst leaving the 'music centre' to just deliver music. I also use a VPN and configured MPD (the music player software) to also stream the music it was currently playing - allowing me to listen to my music when I'm out of the house.
It was time to rethink what was happening in the house.