I’ve had a wish to learn electronics for a very long time, and this year I took the plunge and bought some kit to get started. Here’s the stuff I bought and some other resources I found useful.

Hardware

• Keyes electronics kit SMP0051
• NodeMCU ESP8266 Lua WiFi Internet Development Board (alternative to Arduino)
• Raspberry Pi3 Official Desktop Starter Kit 16GB
• XL830L Multimeter

Books

• Eléctronica para makers – Guía completa
• Hacking Electronics
• Make: Electronics
• Make: More Electronics

Websites

• Startingelectronics.org – used their tutorials to build my first real circuits.
• Sparkfun.com – Great tutorials and quiz to learn the basics.
• Programming Electronics
• Building Electronic Circuits
• Electronics-tutorials
• Thingiverse
• Predictabledesigns
• Speedway Motor’s All about electronic circuits for kids

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There are three ways to post to Instagram from your desktop:

• Grids
• IGdm – for chatting
• HopperHQ in-browser service

I bought the Grids app since I found it most reliable for my needs. What’s your favorite?

For more details on how to do this, check out this post on SoftwareHow.

Linking Your Instagram to WordPress

Another cool thing you can do with Instagram is to display your feed on a WordPress website. As I discussed in my article on the subject, there are several reasons why you would want to do this.

The best plugin for this purpose is Spotlight, which can be downloaded for free on WordPress.org but also has a premium version that adds more features such as curation of imported items.

I love riding my Brompton in Barcelona and other places when we travel. In fact, I’ve taken it with me all over Europe since it’s so easy to travel with it, whether it’s by plane, train or car.

It’s a great means of transport, but it’s also true that if you live in hilly regions it can be a challenge to use it on a daily basis as a means of transport. The same thing applies if you’re not that young anymore and don’t have the same energy and stamina as before.

Enter electric bikes. They’re not a new concept but recent advances in battery size and capacity, as well as electric motors, have really made possible and driven the market for electric bikes.

The official electric Brompton is now a reality and has been selling like hot cakes. There are however several alternatives that don’t require you to buy a new bike but just convert your existing one.

In this post, I’ll summarize the options available, and continue updating it with new developments as they happen.

I own several Bromptons, and have also bought the official electric version which I love.
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I use Spotify all the time and find it highly annoying when the play button on my keyboard opens iTunes instead of controlling Spotify. This happens with other media buttons too once iTunes is open.

I don’t use iTunes at all so I found a solution to prevent this nonsense from happening. Follow the steps below if you want to do the same.

The first step is to diable Apple’s SIP. Once you apply the command to disable execution of iTunes you should perform the steps again to re-enable SIP.

1. From the Apple menu, choose “Restart…” > “Restart“.
2. Simultaneously press and hold the “Command” and “R” buttons. This will start you in Recovery Mode.
3. Select “Utilities” > “Terminal“.
4. Type one of the following, then press “Enter“:
   • Disable System Integrity Protection: csrutil disable
   • Enable System Integrity Protection: csrutil enable

Then restart and let the login proceed as normal. Once you’re in, run the following command:

sudo chmod -x /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes

This will prevent iTunes from opening, so make sure that is what you really want. If you still want to use iTunes for any purpose (for example iPhone and iPad backups) this method above won’t work for you, as it will prevent the backups from taking place.

If you want to go back to default behavior, you can enter Terminal once again (make sure you disable SIP again before) and type in the following:

sudo chmod +x /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes

Alternative: Using an Application

Applications such as “Karabiner-Elements” or “BetterTouchTool” can be used to remap your keyboard keys or disable specific key functions.

That’s it! Enjoy your newly found freedom from iTunes.

 

In this article I will show you how to install Gmvault on a Synology Diskstation and have it back up your Gmail accounts. This will eliminate the need for your computer to be on and also saves processing power on your system, since everything is handled by the Diskstation.

Installing Python 2.7

The first set of steps will have us install Python 2 on the DiskStation, since it’s needed for Gmvault to run.

1. Log into Synology NAS as an admin user (can be your own username if you are in the Administrators group) and go to Main Menu -> Package Center -> Settings and set Trust Level to Synology Inc. and trusted publishers.
2. In the Package Sources tab, click Add, type “SynoCommunity” as Name and “https://packages.synocommunity.com/” as Location and then press OK to validate.
3. Go back to the Package Center and install the Python 2.7 package (“Python”) in the Community tab. (Synology provides Python 3, so if a later version of GMVault is made compatible then you won’t need to do steps 1-4).
4. Remove the Package Source and reset the Trust Level to “Synology Inc.”

Set up Folders for Gmvault backups

We now have Python 2.7 installed. Nex,t we need to set up the folders to keep the backups in. Go to Control Panel -> Shared Folder. Create a new folder called Gmvault.

[Optional] You can also encrypt the contents of the folder by clicking the folder then clicking on the Edit button and then on the Encryption tab. Then click the checkbox next to Encrypt this shared folder and enter an encryption key.

Enabling SSH

Go to Control Panel -> Terminal & SNMP -> Enable SSH service.

If you have Security Advisor enabled it might complain about the SSH service not being secure if you use the default port of 22, which I didn’t bother changing as I was only logging in via my local network.

Installing Pip, the Python Virtual Environment and Gmvault

Open a Terminal window on your Mac and SSH into the Diskstation using a user with admin access.

Make sure you navigate your way to volume1 or whichever volume you will be using to set up Gmvault on and store the backups. In that volume, you should find the Gmvault folder we created earlier. Make sure you are in that directory then follow the next steps:

1. wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
2. sudo python get-pip.py
3. sudo pip install virtualenv
4. rm get-pip.py
5. virtualenv gmvault_env
6. cd gmvault_env
7. sudo pip install gmvault

What we did above is to install the pip utility that is needed to install Python packages/modules, followed by installing virtualenv. Virtualenv is a tool to create isolated Python environments. It creates a folder which contains all the necessary executables to use the packages that a Python project would need. More info about it and how it works can be found here.

With those in place we created an environment for Gmvault and installed it using pip.

Setting up Gmvault

We are now at the stage where we already have Gmvault and can start having some fun with it.

To make sure that Gmvault has installed correctly, type in the following command:

• gmvault -h

This should display the help for Gmvault, if it does, you’re good to go. Follow the next steps:

• gmvault sync -t full –db-dir /volume1/Gmvault/backups/YOUREMAILADDRESS/ –emails-only –no-compression my_email…@gmail.com

1. Gmvault will then prompt to open a web browser to grant OAuth2 access.
   Press Enter to open the browser – which won’t happen!
2. Highlight the web address that Gmvault displays.
3. Open a new window in your web browser and paste the web address into the address bar.
4. Login to Google Mail and grant access to Gmvault.
5. Copy the authentication token that Google will display and paste into the SSH session.

That’s it! Gmvault should now continue and download the emails.

If you’re curious about the parameters I used when executing gmvault, have a look at the in-depth guide on the Gmvault site which details all the possible parameters.

Note: For security purposes, you can now disable the SSH service. It is recommended to only activate this service whenever you need it, especially if you make your Diskstation available over the internet.

Encryption

While you can choose to encrypt using gmvault itself, however, I decided to use Synology’s own facility for encrypting folders. For more information about Synology’s encryption, you can refer to this article. The official Synology guide is also a handy reference, as is their page on managing keys.

Further Improvements

There are additional steps you can take to improve this workflow, for example setting a recurring automated task that runs, say, on a daily basis. This would make the backups work without your intervention.

Have you set up automated backups for your Gmail accounts? What’s your take on the subject?