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Gareth's Tech Blog: December 2014
http://blog.dwyer.co.za/2014_12_01_archive.html
Sunday, 7 December 2014. Building a Twitter Bot with Python. South Africa has been facing some horrible load-shedding recently, with different areas experiencing complete blackouts for 2 hour periods up to 3 times a day. Our electricity 'provider', Eskom, publishes schedules about which areas will be without power and when, but these schedules depend on what stage. Implementation. The bot can be found here: https:/ twitter.com/eskomstagealert. Stage 2 loadshedding active. The process I used to write a Tw...
blog.dwyer.co.za
Gareth's Tech Blog: Building a Twitter Bot with Python
http://blog.dwyer.co.za/2014/12/building-twitter-bot-with-python.html
Sunday, 7 December 2014. Building a Twitter Bot with Python. South Africa has been facing some horrible load-shedding recently, with different areas experiencing complete blackouts for 2 hour periods up to 3 times a day. Our electricity 'provider', Eskom, publishes schedules about which areas will be without power and when, but these schedules depend on what stage. Implementation. The bot can be found here: https:/ twitter.com/eskomstagealert. Stage 2 loadshedding active. The process I used to write a Tw...
blog.dwyer.co.za
Gareth's Tech Blog: November 2013
http://blog.dwyer.co.za/2013_11_01_archive.html
Saturday, 23 November 2013. Everyone is writing about the Adobe hack, where 150 million email addresses, encrypted passwords, and password hints were stolen, and some may consider it old news, as it happened in October. I don't remember signing up for an Adobe account, but my email address is in the list. I strongly advise that you go to https:/ lastpass.com/adobe/. And type in your email address(es) to check if yours was included, too. Do this whether or not you think you have an Adobe account. 0 1 2 th...
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Gareth's Tech Blog: June 2014
http://blog.dwyer.co.za/2014_06_01_archive.html
Thursday, 12 June 2014. Facebook pushing more boundaries. Facebook used to look at your activity on Facebook and store this and analyse this and use this to show you 'relevant' adverts. As of now, Facebook admits to looking at your activity across various websites, stalking your every move in an attempt to get to know you better, and to show you an ad that you might just click on. Maybe. One day. After all, they need to make money somehow. So again, if you want privacy, stay off the 'Net. You're not ...
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Gareth's Tech Blog: April 2014
http://blog.dwyer.co.za/2014_04_01_archive.html
Thursday, 3 April 2014. The poor mans static IP. I recently discovered that to access my Calibre. Ebook collection on the go was as simple as hitting the "Start Content Server" button, and turning my laptop into a private ebook server. Actually it wasn't quite that simple. The problem: I wanted this server to run off my laptop, which is behind a router, behind an ISP. The router gives out dynamic IP addresses to the subnet, and the ISP assigns a dynamic IP address to the router. But we don't want to spam...
blog.dwyer.co.za
Gareth's Tech Blog: October 2013
http://blog.dwyer.co.za/2013_10_01_archive.html
Tuesday, 29 October 2013. How and When to Use Sqlite. Sqlite is a very simple and fast open source SQL engine. This tutorial will explain when it is optimal to use Sqlite, as opposed to a full-blown RDBMS such as Mysql or Postgres, how to install it, and will also provide some basic usage examples, covering CRUD - Create, Read, Update, and Delete. Clearing up a few misconceptions. Optimal Usage of Sqlite. The sqlite3 module is part of the standard Python library, so on a standard Ubuntu installation, or ...
blog.dwyer.co.za
Gareth's Tech Blog: February 2014
http://blog.dwyer.co.za/2014_02_01_archive.html
Wednesday, 5 February 2014. Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso. Picasso nailed it philosophically. But computers are even more useless when they try. To ask questions. From the vaguely annoying "Do you want to restart your computer now? No), through "Do you want to automatically recover your [document/tabs/settings]? No), through "Do you want to install updates? No), through "Do you want to subscribe to the pro version? No, No, and for the fourth minus one time, No).
blog.dwyer.co.za
Gareth's Tech Blog: May 2014
http://blog.dwyer.co.za/2014_05_01_archive.html
Thursday, 29 May 2014. A good example is found in a newly created Android Project in Eclipse with the ADT plugin. The project space is seen below:. Here we can see a pretty impressive hierarchy. There's a directory called gen. For Generated Java Files, it contains a single directory called android.support.v7.appcompat. Which contains a single Java class file called BuildConfig.java,. Which contains a single class called BuildConfig. Which contains a single variable (a boolean), which is set to true.
blog.dwyer.co.za
Gareth's Tech Blog: SSH Tunnelling for web access
http://blog.dwyer.co.za/2014/07/ssh-tunnelling-for-web-access.html
Saturday, 19 July 2014. SSH Tunnelling for web access. Today I set up an SSH. For the first time, and I was surprised at how easy it was! Using nothing but a simple SSH. Command and Firefox, you can route all your web traffic over an SSH. Connection, ensuring that it is all encrypted, and bypassing petty firewall rules. Completely hypothetically, this could also be used to gain access to a WiFi connection which allows SSH. A computer which has restricted access to the internet. Connection. Put the IP...
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Gareth's Tech Blog: P2P throttling and Transmission
http://blog.dwyer.co.za/2014/10/avoiding-p2p-throttling.html
Saturday, 11 October 2014. P2P throttling and Transmission. Peer to peer technology such as Bittorrent has gotten itself a bit of a bad name, because it is often used to obtain illegal copies of movies, and to otherwise infringe on the intellectual property rights of others. However it is a great way to share large files among a lot of people, and it has plenty of legitimate uses, such as downloading free operating systems. And breaking through censorship. Bit-torrent client (via web interface). First, e...
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