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Easy APT Repository

The PATHspider software I maintain as part of my work depends on some features in cURL and in PycURL that have only just been mereged or are still awaiting merge. I need to build a docker container that includes these as Debian packages, so I need to quickly build an APT repository.

A Debian repository can essentially be seen as a static website and the contents are GPG signed so it doesn’t necessarily need to be hosted somewhere trusted (unless availability is critical for your application). I host my blog with Netlify, a static website host, and I figured they would be perfect for this use case. They also support open source projects.

Small Glowing Thing

Quite a while ago I obtained an Adafruit NeoPixel Stick. It was cheap enough to be an impulse buy but it took me some time to get around to actually doing something with it.

I’ve been wanting to play a little more with the ATtiny range of microcontrollers so these things seemed to go together nicely. It turns out that getting an ATtiny programmed is actually rather simple using an Arduino as an ISP programmer. I’ve written up some notes on the procedure at the 57North Hacklab wiki.

The Final Click

On my desktop, I had been using a Logitech G500 mouse. This was a really nice mouse that had the perfect feature set for me but it had a problem. Single clicks would turn into double clicks and it was nearly impossible to click and drag.

Some consequences of this include tweets being unliked instantly after liking them, ordering twice as many apples as necessary from Tesco and pasting my entire Twitter timeline into an IRC buffer instead of the two lines of log file. If there’s going to be an electromechanical component of your computer go wrong, the left mouse button is not a great choice.

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