Getting your consumption data out of OVO Energy

I’ve been a happy customer of Ovo Energy for many years, since they were titchy, though they seem pretty big these days. One thing that frustrated me is since I got a smart meter there’s lots of fine detailed information being created and I can’t get at it, which boils my pee, because that’s my data, and I want it. Today, I finally got angry enough to get motivated, and so after 3 hours of piddling about, figured out how to liberate it in a very ugly way....

June 18, 2022 · 3 min · Me

Over engineering a greenhouse for fun

For the last few years I’ve had a go to grow various chilli and tomato plants for fun. You can’t grow these cheaper than you can buy them (or I can’t), but it’s fun and unrushable, which is a nice change from day to day tech. Last year I built a timelapse rig that took a photo of the sky every second for an entire year. I’ve not got round to writing it up yet, but I learnt a lot about how to build a reasonably resilient setup using an old laptop and a security camera....

May 18, 2022 · 12 min · Me

The TODO list

I mentioned my #TODO list in a previous post. It’s nothing complex, but chewing on it late last night, I thought it might be worth writing up. Late night was followed by early morning, so here I am. I should point out all examples in this page as fictitious, but based on real work over the last couple of years. I’ve started both previous “how I work and live” posts being embarrassed to be writing them, because they’re not especially clever or new, but I’ve had some lovely feedback and so maybe they’re at least entertained, if not helped, some folks....

July 1, 2021 · 16 min · Me

Bell, Book and Candle

Once again, I find myself feeling somewhat ridiculous writing and posting about something that is not complex or clever, but I figure that if it’s helping me, maybe it’ll help some other folks. Over the last year or so I’ve found that making use of my phone alarm and calendar has made it easier to relax and be productive. Partly the move to working from home all the time has made this more possible, but I think a lot of these habits will carry over should I end up returning to an office, full or part time....

May 29, 2021 · 11 min · Me

Write things down

I feel ridiculous writing this, but the last year especially has made me believe more and more that the key to getting things done as a group, is writing things down. If you’re working solo, doing your own thing, then you can probably get away with writing very little down, but if you’re going to be part of a team (and who isn’t, when you get down to it), writing stuff down is key....

May 1, 2021 · 7 min · Me

Bash in the name of love

For my aniversary I tried to express my love in the most pure form I could, making an animated gif of great moments in your relationship. Obviously my tool of choice where was bash, because I could have used a gui tool but where’s the fun in that. The aim A large format animated GIF based off a bunch of JPG images, or different resolutions, in a random order. The process First I gathered all the images into a directory from my Shotwell collecion and Google Photos....

January 7, 2018 · 2 min · Me

Turning off all retweets

The back story I realised one day this week that I retweeted far more than I wrote actual tweets, and whilst these thing were generally important or interesting to me, because they were so much easier to post I was retweeting four five tweets in quick succession and probably pissing people off. So I asked “who’s got retweets turned off for me?” and the answer came back from four people that they ha, and not to be offended by it it was just how they used Twitter because it reduced noise and made Twitter more personal again....

February 20, 2016 · 2 min · Me

Parsing AWS Elastic Load Balancer log on the command line for fun and profit

Amazon Web Services Elastic Load Balancers are excellent bits of kit and one of the mot useful things they have is that you can enable logging easily. Every request that comes through gets a tonne of information logged about it and the log fires are dropped into an S3 bucket every 5 minutes (or more, this is configurable). Because of the time delay, monitoring ELB logs for real-time alerting is not something I’ve experimented with, but processing logs to figure out what went on is something I’ve spent a lot of time on recently....

November 14, 2015 · 8 min · Me

An acronym for data jobs

Pretty much every job I’ve worked on has involved large, single run data jobs in one for or another, be they regularly run over night batch jobs, data migrations to support application code deployments (try to avoid this - read this brilliant article) or jobs to clean up mistakes in the customer data, and, almost without exception, they’ve been a source of misery. Data jobs often don’t seem to get the attention and love that regular code does which is a great shame....

July 1, 2015 · 3 min · Me

Geek Hero Syndrome

I’ve tried to write this post so many times, and never need happy with how it came out. So fuck it, I’m going to write it in one sitting and post it. This is by the way no reflection on my current job, I’ve been brewing this one for well over two years. A post about Crunch Mode I re-read this morning and some of the tweets that followed made me get this written down finally....

May 17, 2015 · 5 min · Me