Of all the many, mnay toys on my ’to buy’ list, a laser engraver definitely wasn’t one of them. I’ve had mixed success with 3d printing in the past, and whilst I’ve often thought a CNC could be fun, despite the appeal of burning things with fire and the occasional Austin Powers reference to frickin’ laser beams, engraving with lasers has never been high up my priority list.

So when an Atomstack A5 randomly showed up on Facebook marketplace, the inevitable happened. The seller had actually made a nice little side hustle doing personalised gifts and such like so there was maybe even a vague chance of recouping the cost and turning it in to something. Haha, yeah right, but hey whatever helps to justify it. With my motto¹ of ‘why let being sensible stand in the way of an opportunity to buy new dangerous tools’ the purchase was made and a rather spangly new frickin’ laser beam made its way in to my possession.

The code is all in Python is not that complicated. If you followed my previous guide on beginning web scraping with Python then there will be nothing here to catch you out.

The flow is reasonably simple:

1. Open a connection to the camera
2. Grab an image
3. Store a copy of it (possibly on an external USB stick)
4. Watermark that image with something
5. Upload it to Azure, always with the same name, so that the website displaying it doesn’t need to know the name of the latest file

The solution (moreorless) consists of 2 files:

I had no plans to change the original design, other than performing a little bit of maintenance.

Given that the Raspbian image on there was now 2 years out of date, it made sense to stick on a fresh copy. So that meant following pretty much my previous guide on setting up a Pihole on a Raspberry Pi, again choosing the Lite OS option, setting up static IPs for eth0 and wlan0 and enabling SSH. The only additional step is in raspi-config and to enable the legacy support for the camera.

A couple of years ago, peering lustfully out the back door of the 4th floor Cortex offices, I spotted an unusual sight - a plug on a roof top:

What could that be for? I wondered.

More precisely… what could that be used for? I immediately started thinking. Well, given the glorious view behind said roof top, it seemed pretty obvious that we could stick a webcam up there.

Something connected via wifi to our office network should do the trick. Since we are on a metered internet connection, I didn’t want to put something up that would completely flatten our internet connection, especially if a few people started using it, so I figured something that would periodically take an image and upload it to our storage CDN on Azure would be fine.

Another story of an issue created (inadvertently) by me, which when presented with an opportunity to perform amazing customer service, the business smashed a big fat own goal.

We live in Guernsey, in the Channel Islands. We visit the mainland infrequently. We were recently refurbishing our children’s playroom and given the size of the job and the relatively few local options available to us, and despite it requiring a special visit, we felt that using IKEA to achieve the result would make sense.

Whichever side of the ‘is pod coffee evil?’ fence you sit on, it is nevertheless incredibly convenient. We’ve been Nespresso customers for 10+ years and it has (well, had) always been a pretty flawless experience. A decent online / app experience to order from; orders would arrive within a day or two, well packaged and as expected. And at around 30p a cup for decent enough coffee, it makes sense for us.

Warehouse move

Until in March 2023, when Nespresso botched a warehouse move. By all accounts all things just went to shit. Nespresso have never (as far as I have found) spoken about the motivation to move warehouse, but one assumes it was cost. Whether this included a change in an outsourcing model, distributor or even possibly shipping/courier, who knows.

When I posted about climbing Elbrus in 2017 I asked the question “where next” - the literal answer to that question turned out to be Ben Nevis - but the ultimate answer (in terms of climbing big mountains) seems to have become Aconcagua, which I’ve moreorless just got back from.

Aconcagua, in the province of Mendoza in Argentina, and a stone’s throw from the border with Chile stands at 6961m. It is the highest mountain in the Americas, and the highest mountain in the world outside of the Himalayas. It is also the 2nd most prominent mountain in the world.

This is possibly one of the most disappointing tech business rants I’ve had to write because I’ve always genuinely liked Garmin as a company. Their products are generally (a) very well built and (b) work really well, it didn’t seem too much of a stretch to extend that to the company. I’ve had a load of Garmin products over the years… satnavs (including, for a time, a backup camera!), car head units with Garmin GPS built-in, a variety of sportwatches in preference to Apple Watch¹, cycle GPS and assorted accessories.

Whilst some big tech businesses are very much imploding publically in a high profile ball of flames (I’m looking at you Twitter and Ticketmaster) for so blatantly not caring about being evil, it would be easy to overlook some others who are doing exactly that, but just a bit more discretely. Except when you anger them, of course.

I could be talking about any number of tech companies and not even just generally - because more than one has behaved badly recently. Maybe I’ll write about Garmin another day because today I have my sights set on eBay.

I’ve talked in the past about my cynicism of so-called “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” and so on.

That’s not because I doubt the technology, but because of the way it is marketed. The technology is powerful, but it is not what people think it is (or want it to be.)

Lightbulb

And then a short while ago, this Tweet¹ from @MarkStockley appeared in my timeline:

YouTube is offering me ads for Gantt charts.

After showing me 9 million Grammarly ads and me not buying Grammarly it’s decided I might not buy Grammarly, so it’s moved on to selling me the singular representation of everything wrong with modern work.

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