Forem: howbotnik

Create Simple & Good Looking Buttons

howbotnik — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 08:46:02 +0000

Use Google's Material Icons and CSS to Create Good Looking Buttons

Would you rather not read this article and go straight to the JSFiddle? Click here

Let's get started

Creating the button

We're going to start by creating a standard button in our html document.

Unfortunately, that means that it will come with it's own style and appear with sharp edges, grey colour and harsh borders. We want our button to be a bit more eye-catching than that so the first step is...

Remove the default style in CSS:

border: none;

outline: none;

Adding our own style:

I like my buttons to have a transparent background so that the text or icon contained within them stands out. Buttons also look cool with rounded off edges and a hover effect to highlight your interactions:

height: 35px;

width: 35px;

border-radius: 15px;

background-color: transparent;

color: white;

Also, adding a hover effect class:

.circle-button:hover {

background-color: yellow;

color: orange;

}

So, we now have a fully styled button that looks the business. Wouldn't it be great if there was a collection of icons that we could use to insert an appropriate image into our button instead of some boring text?

There is...

Adding Google's Material Icons

Google have kindly made their icons available to everybody through the use of their html header link. Here are just some of the icons available:

All you have to do is include it in your HTML document header like this:

<head>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/icon?family=Material+Icons">
</head>

Applying it to our button

All we have to do is include the icon inside our button in the HTML document like this:

<button class="circle-button centre-text">
        <i class="material-icons" style="font-size:25px;">cloud</i>
</button>

Which results in buttons like this:

The text we place inside the icon tag tells the Google API which icon we want. To explore Google's available icons click here.

Everything discussed in this article is available in the JSFiddle example code available here:

https://jsfiddle.net/howbotnik/287065rw/1/

Home Network NAS for Cheap

howbotnik — Sun, 12 Jan 2020 08:15:09 +0000

What I did to save money on NAS storage

Problem

My home network is slowly growing and I have had a cheap DLink 2 bay NAS drive for the last few years. The Network Attached Storage has served its purpose for the things I have needed and supports Time Machine backups, media server, and file storage solutions.

I was starting to out-grow the 2-bay drive after wanting to backup the backups of year's worth of files with the ever growing collection of photos and documents. I also found that large transfers were taking far too long and hovering around the ~30mbps range. So I did some shopping around...

Solution

A lot of NAS drives are aimed at workplaces and were way out of the price range of my budget so I looked for other solutions and here's what I did.

Purchased a 4 bay USB 3.0 external drive enclosure
Filled the enclosure with my old drives (plus one new!)
Installed Ubuntu on an old dual core laptop
Formatted the drives to ext4 (for better performance)
Installed a samba server and configured it to share my drives
Installed an AFP server for Apple Time Machine
Installed Plex Media Server

Outcome

The old laptop had a very early USB-C port so I managed to get a Gigabit Ethernet adapter to improve transer speeds. Overall, I am very pleased with the outcome. I feel like I have achieved transfer speed and storage space that will keep me satisfied well into the future all for about a 5th of the cost of the commercially available NAS drives. I am currently getting ~115mbps transfer rates and I believe this is due to the restrictions in disk speed.

Are you interested in mining using solar power? Read this

Leaving IOS for Android

howbotnik — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 06:26:21 +0000

I made a decision to leave IOS

I have spent the last 10 years in a love/hate relationship with Apple. I’ve given them a lot of my hard earned cash through iPhones, macs and various accessories but I’ve made the decision to leave the iPhone behind.

I really like Apple products in the way that they are designed exceptionally well and everything just works.

Recently though, I’ve not wanted to upgrade my iPhone 7 for the last 4 years because none of their latest products excite me. But also I feel like I am locked in or held prisoner by Apple. I’ve invested so heavily in their infrastructure that I can’t step outside for fear of losing out.

Little things over the years have become annoyances like the way Apple treats its customers, the way they fail to adopt standards like USB-C, or the way their stuff just doesn’t play well with other devices.

I am quite stubborn and made a similar decision over 5 years ago when I closed my Facebook account. The external pressure begging me to stay part of the club ends up pushing me away further. So, when I’ve made my decision that’s it.

I ordered a Google Pixel 4 XL yesterday and have taken the biggest tech leap in my phone ownership. I’m excited in a way that waiting for the latest Apple phone never made me.

Change is good right?

Mining When the Sun is Out

howbotnik — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 12:13:51 +0000

Beginning

For my first post I will introduce you to a piece of software I have been working on for the past few weeks.

Since getting into mining (in a purely recreational way) I have been trying to come up with a way to automate my miner. I live in a house with solar panels on the roof but no way to store the electricity generated. So I have been trying to solve the problem of turning on my mining software only when the weather is acceptable, therefore, generating your choice of cryptocurrency from free electricity!

Problem

I started with the idea that my software needed to follow these requirements:

Check to see if the sun is up
Check to see if the weather is acceptable
Start or stop the miner depending on the conditions

Project

Head over to https://github.com/howbotnik/sunmine to grab a copy and see how this could run on your system.

The config file needs building first and the project runs using Python:

[Location]
# for local weather information
country_code = GB
location = London

# for the sunrise / sunset api
latitude = 51.5074
longitude = 0.1278

[Tokens]
open_weather = **OpenweatherAPIKey**

[Communication]
# Emails user when turning mining on or off
recipient_email = test@test.com
sender_email = test@test.com
password = password

smtp_server_address = smtp.gmail.com
smtp_port = 587

[Miner]
# read the documentation for best practice
program_location = **path to your executable miner**

[Weather_types]
weather_codes=["800","801","802"]

This config file makes a lot of the program customisable and the program is set up to email when the miner switches on and off.

The Weather_types section allows the user to adjust the types of weather that are acceptable for mining using the https://openweathermap.org weather codes.

As for scheduling, I have had this running successfully as a Scheduled Task on Windows and you can also run it as a cron task on Linux systems.

Do you have a use for this? Have you found any problems with the code? Could you suggest any further improvement?

Other Uses

This program could be used to initiate any program and is not only limited to mining. Certain home-automation processes may only need to run during sunny periods. The rest is up to you!