Back in 2016 I wanted to see where I have been in Toronto. This motivated me to build a simple web app that would show me in a simple map overview. I always had my phone-gps on and Google location history provides a way to download this data. Google maps provided an API to display this information. After some old-school digging in Javascript and next-level googling I put together a simple together and got my data nicely displayed in a heatmap.

After many years I have finally decided to but a blog online. Lately I have been playing a lot with the awesome features of Netlify and decided to go ahead and put my blog online. Not sure if I will keep on writing but at least now I have an easy way of doing it. I’m retrofitting olg blog posts that I never published (online) so in case you see posts older than the blog itself that is correct.

Since a couple of years I made a simple web page with JS that did url encoding and decoding. In my line of work I had to do a lot of URL encoding/decoding therefore it was handy to have a local tool available. Of course there are loads of online tools that do the same… but where’s the fun in that? :) With the years I extended it to also do base64 encoding/decoding.

After Repurposing my RaspberryPi using PI Hole I wondered if there was an easier way to play my music from Spotify. We were using an android tablet connected with a jack plug to play Spotify. Sometimes however the tablet is in use and we can’t play music. We have a ChromeCast but I don’t want to have to turn on the TV whenever I want to listen to music. And our HiFi set is an old fashioned one without HDMI inputs on the receiver otherwise the ChromeCast solution would probably work very well.

I’ve bought a Raspberry Pi a long time ago. It’s a 1st generation B model and at that time was mainly used as a media center running openelec. Last year I did some experimenting with retropi which was fun but I never actually played games. An article about the PI-hole caught my eye. The idea of monitoring my network traffic while blocking advertisement-traffic seemed interesting. I found an old SD card and installed Raspbian.