europe Visiting Prague, Czech Republic After the third day in Prague, I suddenly realised I had not taken out the lofty Canon DSLR to take pictures of the amazing city. Most of these are quick snaps taken on the iPhone. Praha is quite a touristic city, and you'll find a Euronet ATM ready
Venice I prevailed on the train from Budapest to Vienna, using my skills and luck to get good seats without reservations. Austria was beautiful, and I wish I had the time to explore more. I imagine it'd be bloody extraordinary during winter. When I crossed the border, the train
Kraków, Poland After hearing plenty of great things about Krakow from other travellers, I decided to change my itinerary at the last minute. I'm so glad I did. This was absolutely one of the highlights of my Europe trip. It's one of the most beautiful produce markets I&
europe Leipzig I saw some nice things on the bike-sharing system "Durstexpress." I prefer the name "DursteXtremeMTB" because I used the 3-speed city bike for over 3 hours, costing about 5€. I travelled over 40km on gravel and small mountains towards Markkleeberg and cycled around the Cospudener See.
europe Dresden Dresden is a pretty remarkable city, architecturally speaking. The city skyline from the bridges across the Elbe has some fantastic buildings to photograph. Another highlight was visiting Saxon-Switzerland National Park, which is close to the Czech Republic's border. It has some incredible sandstone rock formations and a famous
europe Berlin Taking the Deutsche Bahn train from Hamburg was a piece of cake on the Eurail pass. Upon arriving and opting to take the 50-minute walk from the station to the hostel, I was immediately surprised by how interesting punk many people were! You could people-watch in the park for hours.
europe Hamburg After spending an incredible one week with my friend and his girlfriend, who were kind enough to let me stay for a while. Conclusion: I would love to live here. There are plenty of things to do and cycle around to see. The scale and beauty of Stadtpark were breathtaking,
travel Cologne 🇩🇪 I spent three nights in an extremely quiet but friendly hostel in Cologne. I had great nights out with local food and beers. The very friendly locals pointed out all the best places to eat & drink. Saturday nights are pretty big here! Next up: Hamburg
travel Visiting Amsterdam Amsterdam was okay, but I preferred the quieter streets of Rotterdam. It was probably the crowds and crazy heat wave temperatures. I was also in a very lame hostel located 30 minutes away on the metro. I would rather revisit it during a quiet season without all the tourists like
travel Kinderdijk Windmills Warning: This post contains many photos of windmills in this UNESCO World Heritage site. I probably took at least 1000+ windmill photos and videos. They are really beautiful machines, and many operate and still have people living inside.
travel Exploring Rotterdam After a pretty strange cycle of thunderstorms, I went for a walking tour around the city's most popular parts. There is lots of really interesting architecture in this city.
travel Off to Belgium 🇧🇪 A day wandering & cycling in Brussels Tomorrow is Bruges! Hopefully I don't run into many bunches of touristy elephants!
travel Travel to Paris, France 🇫🇷 Taking the Eurostar from London to Paris was pretty easy once I figured out what the fuck was wrong with my seat reservation. Wrong company purchased from! All good. They sorted it out. The train's speed was quite impressive. I was curious and tested this using a speedometer
travel First day in London 🇬🇧 After successfully fighting and (almost winning) against jet lag I activated tourist.exe and did some typical sightseeing around central London, starting in Westminster. I then proceeded to walk along the Southwalk to the pretty epic Tower of London. And my favourite... An 11th-century building with 21st-century robotic lawnmowers keeping
travel Featured Melbourne to London via Doha, Qatar I now have a new personal best for how far I can sit in a plane covered in red wine... Fourteen and a half hours are seated in the king of the skies, a fully laden Qatar Airways Airbus A380. All was well until 40 minutes later when they served
development PiHole + Wireguard Road Warrior Setup I have set up a basic VPN while travelling to prevent tracking and annoying ads on unsecured public WiFi networks. It all runs on a tiny t2.nano, costing less than $5/month. The box All this runs on a single t2.nano AWS instance running in the nearest region
udraw udraw is now serverless The udraw project no longer requires servers for its API and storage back-end. The NodeJS + Express app has been ported to run inside AWS Lambda & API Gateway with tile storage backed in S3 with an Elasticache Redis sitting in as a tile cache and WebSocket message broker. But....
Traffic Shaping Large Uploads to S3 with MikroTik RouterOS I currently have a very large collection of Canon Raw DSLR images I want to backup in the cloud in case the unthinkable happens to my external drives. There is one problem: I have 100Mbps down / 20Mbps up Internet speed. Having this going for a few days will destroy the
development Motion Sensing with Raspberry Pi Camera and Cat Face Scanning with AWS Lambda + OpenCV I wrote a Python script that detects camera motion with a Raspberry Pi camera and uploads photos to S3. The frames are then searched for cat faces using OpenCV running on AWS to alert them of heightened 'cattivity' in the house. This could also be done using Amazon’
development udraw: Multiplayer Drawing Canvas udraw is a multiplayer drawing application like many other drawing apps that have surfaced since the rise of WebSockets. Mine expands in size, allowing huge drawings on an unlimited-sized surface. Each canvas area is broken into 256x256 pixel tiles drawn on a single HTML5 canvas seamlessly to make drawing on
Bye Bye WordPress. Welcome to Jekyll! 11/06/2015 Horay for static site pages. This will definitely make writing web pages fun again Update 2019: It wasn't fun! Running Ghost now and enjoying time not spend fixing broken Ruby Gem dependencies and loosing hours I'll never get back waiting for to Nokogiri
