Kevin Boone
Kevin Boone
Kevin Boone
Musing on computing, math, electronics, de-Googling and the small web, from an old warhorse of the IT industry.
Latest Posts
Although building and deploying a simple program to an Arduino board is a point-and-click operation using the Arduino IDE, implementing more complex programs requires more robust build tools. This article describes how to build on Linux...
This is a design for a robust, wooden enclosure for a Raspberry Pi, battery power supply, and touchscreen, that can be made using hand tools.
This article is part of a series on building a customer Linux installation for a Raspberry Pi-based appliance. It explains how to install and set up the minimum software to get audio playback working.
This article is part of a series on building a customer Linux installation for a Raspberry Pi-based appliance. It explains how to set up a system which hitherto only boots to a root shell, to a network-aware installation with service...
This article is part of a series on building a customer Linux installation for a Raspberry Pi-based appliance. It explains how to obtain and install fundamental utilities for use in a system with a read-only filesystem, and no package...
It's entirely possible to run simple, X-based applications in an appliance-based Linux installation: you just have to dispense with the graphical desktop and all its baggage. This article explains how.
Switching loads of an amp or two with a Raspberry Pi or a microcontroller can be accomplished using a small number of inexpensive components. Suitable circuits are widely published, but the details of operation are not always described.
This article is about using an I2C analogue-to-digital device for applications like reading sensor values or monitoring backup batteries. With all the technical bits left in.
Writing graphical applications for minimal and embedded Linux systems can present a challenge. One of the problems is producing nicely-rendered text without the facilities that a graphical desktop would provide. This article describes...
See how OpenShift 3/4 deployment works in detail, using only command-line tools.
In many cases, "pitch" is just the musician's way of saying "frequency". However, pitch has a perceptual element to it, and the ear can be fooled. This article explains one of the ways in which this can happen, and why it isn't correct...
The notion of resource limits (on memory, CPU, etc) has never been very well-defined, and the use of container-based deployment makes the situation worse. This article describes why, and what can be done about it.
Containers have become increasingly important for Linux developers and administrators. A number of frameworks like LXC, Docker, and Podman are now available to automate the management of containers. However, all these frameworks rely on...
I see too many C (and C++) programs misbehave at runtime, for reasons that could easily have been detected using checks built into all modern compilers. This article describes some common C programming errors, and shows how they would...
The UK Government's response to the covid-19 is to 'test, test, test'. This article demonstrates in pictorial terms why this strategy will catastrophically overestimate the number of people actually infected, leading to widespread...