Menu

Blog

2 July 2019

Mythic Beasts Pi Cloud

Mythic Beasts is an awesome hosting company based in Cambridge. They host the Raspberry Pi website, including the Raspbian archive and download images, and like to make sure we eat our own dog food by hosting the website on new Raspberry Pi hardware for product launches. Mythic built a Raspberry Pi server rack in their […]

18 June 2019

terminator

Last week I covered terminal multiplexer byobu, and this week’s tool is quite similar. Terminator is a single-window split-screen terminal multiplexer that allows you to send identical keystrokes to all terminals at once. This means you can SSH into any number of machines, and run the same commands simultaneously, and see them all at the […]

11 June 2019

Byobu

Byobu is a text-based window manager and terminal multiplexer. If you’ve ever used screen, it’s similar but more modern and more intuitive. If you SSH’d into a Pi or server, ran sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade for example, and lost your internet connection while it was running, your command would be lost to […]

4 June 2019

Command line speedtest tools

Today I’m sharing three tools for checking your internet and LAN speed: speedtest, fast and iperf. speedtest speedtest is an old favourite. It’s implemented in Python, packaged in apt and also available with pip. You can use it as a command line tool, or within a Python script. Install it with: sudo apt install speedtest-cli […]

21 May 2019

deadsnakes

The deadsnakes PPA lets you install multiple Python versions on your Ubuntu system, so instead of only having just the Python 2.x and Python 3.x that comes with your distribution (18.04 comes with Python 3.6, and 2.7 is available), you can install older or newer versions, from 2.3 (!) to 3.8! The way PPAs (Personal […]

Tags: python, ubuntu
7 May 2019

pastebinit

Have you ever used pastebin websites like pastebin.com to share snippets of code, data or text? Did you know you can publish a file from your computer or a Raspberry Pi to a pastebin site with a single command? Install pastebinit: sudo apt install pastebinit Mac users can install with brew. Usage: pastebinit <filename> pastebinit […]

30 April 2019

ssh tricks and tips

I use SSH constantly. Every day I find myself logged in to multiple servers and Pis (both in the same room as me and over the internet). I have many devices I need access to, and different requirements for gaining access, so as well as using various SSH/SCP command options I have to maintain a […]

23 April 2019

logzero

I’m not sure whether logzero took its name to fit in with the series of “zero boilerplate” libraries like pygame-zero, GPIO Zero and guizero, but it’s certainly in that category. It’s a Python library that makes logging straightforward. It makes logging as easy as a print statement, which is a big win for education, as […]

Tags: logging, python
16 April 2019

ranger

I was recently introduced to ranger by Dave Jones. It’s an incredibly handy terminal based file navigator that’s written in Python and is available in Debian, Raspbian and Ubuntu. Ranger allows you to navigate your filesystem using the arrow keys on your keyboard: up/down to select files in the current directory (middle pane); left/right to […]

12 April 2019

Tooling Tuesday

I’ve decided to take a leaf out of Les‘s book and post about a new tool every Tuesday! From now on I’ll be sharing short weekly posts introducing a tool I’ve enjoyed using – mostly software stuff usually related to open source, Python, Linux, Raspberry Pi and so on. I’ve set up a new blog […]

Tags: tooling