Neil Turner

One mouse to rule them all

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A photo of the Arteck multi device Bluetooth wireless mouse

Back in September 2002, I bought this multi-device Bluetooth mouse from Amazon (sponsored link). As a multi-device mouse, it can be used to control three separate devices.

I bought it so that I could use it both with my desktop, and my iPad – because yes, you can use a mouse with an iPad. It supports two Bluetooth devices, and can connect to a third using an RF USB dongle. I use the dongle with my desktop, as RF uses less power. Switching devices is as simple as pressing a button on the side.

As a mouse, it works quite well – clicking is quiet, and I’ve been using it for almost 18 months with no complaints. It’s a comfortable size too – not as big as some mice, but larger than some laptop mice. However, this model is designed for people who are right handed; I had a look for left-handed multi-device mice on Amazon but couldn’t find any.

The battery life is also really good – I recharge it about every three months. It has a built-in battery which charges using a USB-C cable, and this plugs in at the top so that you can still use it whilst charging. This makes it better than Apple’s Magic Mouse, which has its Lightning connector on the bottom and so can’t be used while charging. The USB-C port is just for charging though; it won’t turn your mouse into a wired mouse. There is also a small slide-out compartment to store the USB RF dongle if you’re not using it.

As well as the device switch button on the left side, there are two additional buttons which, by default, act as back and forward buttons in a web browser.

Whilst I’m sure there are other multi-device mice out there, this suits my needs and has worked well for me. It’s reasonably priced at around £19, at time of writing.

Back to posts every other day

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When I re-started blogging regularly again, my aim was to post a new blog entry every other day – so 3 or 4 new entries per week. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been posting daily. This is because:

There was no new blog post yesterday, and there won’t be tomorrow, as I’m now going back to posting every other day. Whilst I still have lots of blog post ideas, if I try to post a new blog entry every day, I’ll burn through them quite quickly. And now that I’m back at work full-time, I won’t have as much time to write. I’ve tried having a new blog entry to post every day in the past, and it’s hard work.

22nd blogiversary

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An AI generated image of a birthday cake with two candles on it showing 22

It’s been 22 years to the day since I wrote my first blog post. Which is a very long time in technology.

Last year, I referred to the blogiversary as a ’21st-ish blogiversary’, mainly because I took a break from blogging for four years and all my pre-2018 where lost. However, I’ve been able to reinstate the first one, so you can read what 17 year old me had to say about starting a blog.

For the first few months of blogging, my posts were made using Blogger, which I’m almost surprised is still around. Google bought Blogger over 20 years ago, and hasn’t done much with it. It’s still there, and you can still create a new blog, but apart from a new responsive UI in 2020 it seems to have stagnated.

I switched to Movable Type in September 2002, and bought the neilturner.me.uk domain that I’m still using today. Over time, I switched web hosts a couple of times, but I’ve been with Bytemark for many years now.

In March 2011, I moved from Movable Type, which was becoming a commercial product, to Melody, a community fork. Alas, there just wasn’t much interest elsewhere in the blogosphere in either Movable Type or Melody, and so this was a short-term change. Just a couple of months later, I switched to WordPress, and have been using it for almost 13 years now. That’s longer than any of the other blogging systems that I have used in the past.

Over this past year, I have been trying to get back into blogging, and, since October, I have (for the most part) published a new blog post every other day. I’m enjoying blogging again and wish I’d re-started sooner, although at least with a 4 year break, there’s plenty to talk about. I still have plenty of ideas for future blog posts which should see me well into the spring. So, happy birthday blog – you’re looking better than you have done in years.

WordPress backups with UpdraftPlus

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A meme featuring Anakin and Padme from the Star Wars films. Anakin is saying 'I've reinstated my WordPress install after everything got wiped' and Padme says 'so you've got backups now right?'

It’s a little while until World Backup Day on the 31st March, but I’ve set up UpdraftPlus to create automatic backups of my WordPress installation to my Dropbox account.

It’s a straightforward plugin to set up. You install it from the WordPress plugin directory, select your cloud storage provider, choose what you want to backup, and then run it. If it all goes well, you can then set a schedule for automated backups.

The free version offers Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 and some others, and you can also upload your backups to any FTP server, albeit over a non-secure connection. If you want to use WebDAV, SFTP, SCP, Microsoft OneDrive or UpdraftPlus’ own service, then you’ll need a premium account. At present, it’s £54 per year for up to two personal sites, which is pretty reasonable – the equivalent of a little over £4 per month.

Your backups can include everything if you want, but I’ve excluded plugins and themes from my backups. I haven’t modified the theme that I am using, and I’m not using any custom plugins – everything is from the WordPress plugin directory.

Backing up my files to Dropbox makes the most sense to me. I pay for Dropbox Pro and so have 2 terabytes of storage, of which I’m using less than 7%. Whilst VaultPress is the officially-supported solution for backups for WordPress, it’s not a free service and I’m already paying for Dropbox Pro.

The best time to set up backups is now

There isn’t a ‘best time’ to set up backups for any system apart from, well, now. So, if you haven’t got a backup solution in place, this is your reminder to sort something out. I lost all my blog posts in 2018 because I didn’t have adequate backups in place when doing a server upgrade. I would say I learned my lesson, but I’ve been blogging again for 18 months now and only set up UpdraftPlus last week.

There are many other WordPress plugins that offer backups – some free and some paid. I chose UpdraftPlus as it seemed to be the one which offered the features that I wanted, but you may find another suits you better. Just make sure that you have something in place.

MakeMKV review

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Screenshot of MakeMKV on Windows 10

If you want to make backups of your DVDs or Blu-Ray discs, or watch them on a device without an optical drive, then MakeMKV is a tool that you should consider.

MakeMKV takes the content of your DVDs, and creates a Matroska (.mkv) file that can be read by many media players, including the likes of VLC, Plex and more recent versions of Windows Media Player. Matroska is a very forgiving container format that can accommodate just about any video and audio codec, and has excellent support for subtitles.

What sets MakeMKV apart from tools such as Handbrake is that there’s minimal transcoding. That means that the MKV file will match the quality of the original source, with the same aspect ratio. Handbrake will typically transcode the video into another format and offer to up-scale the video to HD. This will probably result in a smaller file, as newer video formats are more efficient, but every time you transcode a file using a lossy compression algorithm, you lose some of the quality. It also takes longer to convert files using Handbrake because of the transcoding.

The files created by MakeMKV will include subtitles, where these are provided on the original disc, and they’re not ‘burnt in’ so can be enabled or disabled by playback devices. Chapters are also retained.

Overall, it’s easy to use, and doesn’t offer the dizzying array of options that Handbrake offers.

Currently, MakeMKV is beta software, and has been for over a decade – this may explain the rather dated-looking web site. It is shareware, albeit free to use whilst in beta. However, if a final release is ever made, expect to be asked to pay for it. If you want, you can buy it now for $60 (currently £54.25 including VAT).

Be aware that it’s currently illegal to copy DVDs in the UK, even for your own personal use.

New old posts from the archives, part 3

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I’m gradually bringing back some of my old blog posts that were lost. You can have a look at part one and part two, and here’s the list of latest posts that I have brought back:

  • WeeMee (September 2003). I mentioned this in last week’s blog post about avatars, hence why I brought it back. The site that lets you generate a ‘WeeMee’ is long gone, and I’m not sure that an archived copy would work as, if I remember correctly, it used Adobe Flash Player.
  • Secret Starbucks Sizes (July 2015). This seemed to show up quite a bit in my 404 (missing page) logs and so I brought it back. It lists the sizes of coffee cups that Starbucks may or may not offer besides their usual Tall, Grande and Venti sizes.
  • Coffee (February 2012). Linked in the above blog post, so it made sense to bring this one back too. I never used to be a coffee drinker until around 2012. Now, I drink coffee most weekdays, although it’s usually a sachet of pre-mixed powdered coffee with a flavouring. Starbucks is a once a week treat on the way to work.
  • My Podcast Diet (August 2018). Well now, this is a post that I never finished; it was sat as a draft on my iPad and didn’t get published. So you can now read it for the first time. I should probably write an update soon, as I’m listening to some different podcasts now.
  • Going into print (August 2004). A prime example of announcing something before it’s ready. I agreed to contribute a couple of chapters to a book about Movable Type, the blogging system that I used to use before switching to WordPress. And whilst I did start writing them, it clashed with my final year at university, so the book was published without my contributions. You can still buy the book (sponsored link) but no-one uses Movable Type any-more so I don’t know why you would want to. Almost 20 years later and I still haven’t co-authored an actual printed book.
  • Why I’m not switching to WordPress (August 2004). Oh wow. This was a 1000+ word rant that WordPress, barely a year old and only at version 1.2, lacked many niche features that I was accustomed to in Movable Type. It even garnered a response from Matt Mullenweg himself, which you can read if you’re willing to track it down on the Web Archive. Of course, less than a decade later, I would switch to WordPress, and Movable Type is basically dead as previously mentioned.

How to: install Home Assistant Supervised on a Raspberry Pi

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Screenshot of Home Assistant showing Supervisor installed 
Important note: As of the June 2025 release of Home Assistant, the 'Supervised' installation method has been deprecated, and will be unsupported by the end of 2025. I'm keeping this guide online for those interested, but please consider installing Home Assistant Operating System or Container instead, which are the two methods that will be supported in future.

There are several ways to install Home Assistant. The easiest way (besides buying a dedicated device such as Home Assistant Yellow or Green with it pre-installed) is to use what is known as ‘Home Assistant Operating System’. This bundles Home Assistant with a system manager called Supervisor and an underlying Linux distro.

There are other methods, and I’ll probably write another blog post comparing them all later. Probably the most difficult is Home Assistant Supervised, which includes the Supervisor from Home Assistant OS (HAOS), but with a self-administered Linux operating system. I’ve got over 10 years of experience working with Debian Linux, as this blog runs on it, but it took some trial and error on my part to get working.

By setting up Linux yourself first, you gain more control over your system than is offered by HAOS. For example, whilst you can enable shell access on HAOS, it’s a limited user account with no root access. And, bizarrely, HAOS doesn’t support USB mass storage devices. So even though you can install Plex from within HAOS, if your media is on an external hard disk, you can’t grant Plex access to it.

At the weekend, I set up my Raspberry Pi 4 with Home Assistant Supervised. Here’s how I went about it.

Note: This guide was current in January 2024. The instructions below may not necessarily work on future releases of Debian and Home Assistant.

Step 1: Installing Debian 12 (Bookworm)

I strongly advise you to start with a fresh Linux installation; trying to bolt this onto an existing Linux image may break other things. Home Assistant is designed to run on Debian 12 – and not Raspberry Pi OS, although I’ve seen some forum posts from users who are using this. For this guide, I’m using Debian 12.

For the most part, you can simply follow the instructions on this guide to flash an SD card and complete the initial setup. The newer versions of the Raspberry Pi imager may ask if you want to configure Wifi and SSH access for your image; don’t bother, as this won’t work on Debian. The other thing to bare in mind with this guide is the Wifi settings, where you un-comment several lines in a configuration file if you’re not using an Ethernet connection. This is fine at this stage, but you’ll need to re-comment those lines later.

The other thing that I did in addition to this guide was type in dpkg-reconfigure tzdata and set my timezone to Europe/London rather than UTC.

You can stop following the guide at the point at which it tells you to install a graphical user interface, as this isn’t needed for Home Assistant. Of course, if you’re planning to use this device for other things and a graphical UI would help you, then follow the whole guide by all means.

Step 2: Install the necessary additional packages for Home Assistant

Here, we start following this official guide from HA. You’ll need to install various additional packages to enable the Home Assistant Supervisor to run.

Once installed, I found that I had to edit the /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf file and change managed=false to true. This was also the point where I needed to re-comment the wifi settings. Without doing this, my Raspberry Pi wasn’t able to connect to the internet for the next step.

Step 3: Install Docker

As per the official instructions, run curl -fsSL get.docker.com | sh to install Docker. This took quite a while, so maybe go and grab some lunch.

If you’re getting an error about being unable to resolve get.docker.com, then go back to step 2.

At this point, I found it easier to continue the installation remotely over SSH, rather using the keyboard and a screen.

Step 4: Install the OS Agent

Next, you’ll need to install the latest version of the OS Agent. For a Raspberry Pi 3 or later, you’ll need the aarch64 version. I downloaded the ‘os-agent_1.6.0_linux_aarch64.deb‘ file and then uploaded this using WinSCP, but you could also download it using curl or wget. You’ll then need to run the command dpkg -i os-agent_1.6.0_linux_aarch64.deb as root.

The next command to run is gdbus introspect --system --dest io.hass.os --object-path /io/hass/os . This should give some multi-coloured code and not an error; if you get an error about the ‘gdbus’ command not being found, then you may have missed the libglib2.0-bin package in step 2.

Step 5: Install Home Assistant Supervised

Finally, we’re at the stage where we can actually install Home Assistant. Here’s the command to run:

wget -O homeassistant-supervised.deb https://github.com/home-assistant/supervised-installer/releases/latest/download/homeassistant-supervised.deb apt install ./homeassistant-supervised.deb

Once this is complete, wait a few minutes and go to http://[your IP]:8123/ and you should be greeted with the Home Assistant web UI. It may take a minute or to before you can start the onboarding process. If you’re migrating to Home Assistant Supervised, then you can also restore a backup at this stage, but be aware that such a backup can take a long time to restore.

And then you’re done. You may get some warning messages about the system being ‘unhealthy’ but these seem to disappear after a reboot, in my experience.

Things to consider

Although installing Home Assistant this way does allow it to co-exist with other software, bare the following in mind:

  • Even if you mount a USB hard disk/flash drive to your device, Home Assistant doesn’t seem to want to know about it, or let you attach it to any addons.
  • Although you need to install Docker for Supervisor to work, you’ll get errors in your Home Assistant settings if you install any other Docker images that are not managed as Home Assistant Addons. So, if you want to install any other software, do it manually, or in another container system like Snap. Or you could try Kubernetes I suppose, if you really hate yourself.

Installing Home Assistant Supervised is by far the most difficult method, but for me, it offers the best balance of overall control, and ease of use once set up. If you can find the time to set it up, then once it’s up and running, it’s easier to add new devices and configure on an ongoing basis. Whereas setting up HTTPS and HomeKit can be a challenge on Home Assistant Container, enabling these on Supervised is much more straightforward.

That being said, if you can dedicate a device to running Home Assistant on its own, then I would definitely recommend just running Home Assistant Operating System.

Simplenote

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Screenshot of the web version of Simplenote

Last year, I decided to switch my go-to note-taking app to Simplenote. For years, I’ve used Evernote, which is a very powerful app that lets you capture web pages, scan documents, save voice notes and link notes to events on a calendar. Which, is great if you need those features.

I don’t. I just needed somewhere to keep track of ideas, lists and important notes. And so really Evernote was overkill for what I used – its apps are huge and it can be slow to open, especially on the web. The same applies to Microsoft’s OneNote – both it and Evernote are big, powerful apps that incorporate way more features than I need.

Simplenote, meanwhile, is just what it says it is – a simple app for taking notes. There are apps for all common platforms, and its web interface offers the same features. Furthermore, the official apps are open source, and there’s an open API, so you can use third-party apps as well. ResophNotes is a very lightweight app for Windows, for example.

You can use Markdown, so when you enable a preview mode, any headers, list items etc will show up with formatting. You can also add tick-boxes next to any list items, so that you can tick off items on a shopping list, for example.

Your notes are kept in sync across your devices, and the service is free to use.

I’ve found that I’m much happier using Simplenote, and make more notes as a result. When you’re easily distracted like I am (squirrel!), being able to keep track of important information is really useful.

Broadband speeds

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Speedtest.net results from our Vodafone broadband

So last month, we switched our broadband to Vodafone, which also meant that our internet speeds increased from about 30-40 Mbps to around 70-80 Mbps (as per the above Speedtest.net result).

80 Mbps is sadly the fastest speed that we can probably get here. I live in Sowerby Bridge, a small town in the Calder Valley and our options for internet access are limited. In some respects, we’re lucky to have access to Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC). This means that the cables providing fixed line broadband internet are fibre optic as far as a metal box a couple of streets away. But the cables from that box to our house are a series of thin, copper cables, and current VDSL2 technology means that much higher speeds are unlikely to be possible.

Over Christmas, we stayed with my parents in York. Being a bigger and more affluent city, there are more options available for broadband internet. In addition to the FTTC service provided by BT Openreach, there’s also:

  • Cable broadband from Virgin Media. These cables were laid in the 1990s by Bell CableMedia, which became Cable & Wireless, then NTL, and finally Virgin Media. Whilst they’re also an FTTC solution, the cables from the cabinet to the home include a much larger coaxial cable.
  • Full fibre broadband from Sky and TalkTalk. York’s streets and pavements were dug up again in the late 2010s to install a FTTH (Fibre to the Home) network, which takes fibre optic cables all the way into people’s homes.

My parents have had cable broadband since this became available in the early 2000s. Initially this was just 512 Kbps, but speeds have increased over the years, and this was the test result whilst I was there at Christmas:

Virgin Media broadband test result

So my parents get broadband speeds that are six times faster for downloads, and nearly three times faster for uploads. And if they wanted to, they could switch to a FTTC broadband solution that could easily double those speeds.

Here in Sowerby Bridge, our best hope for faster broadband is that CityFibre bring their FTTC network in a few years time. So far they’ve installed fibre optic cables in Pye Nest, which is the community between Halifax and Sowerby Bridge, but their web site says there are currently no plans to reach us. Virgin Media did install some cables nearby a few years ago, but they seemed to bypass our street unfortunately.

There is wireless broadband to consider, but we get a weak 4G signal as we’re in a steep valley. 5G is available up the hill in Halifax and may make it down here in future. But, for now, I think 80 Mbps on a fixed line is the best that I can expect.

SoundPrint – an app for finding quiet spaces

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Screenshot of the SoundPrint app

Today I want to share with you an app called SoundPrint, which is an app for finding quiet spaces to eat and socialise.

You can install the app on your phone (iPhone and Android), and it’ll pop up a list of places nearby where other SoundPrint users have done a brief sound test. The venue database is from Foursquare, a site where I’m a superuser and still an active user of its Swarm app.

Incidentally, Swarm came in very useful when writing my review of 2023 and 2023, quantified, as I could see exactly where I had been all year.

Using the SoundPrint app

You don’t have to register an account if you’re just browsing to find a venue. However, if you want to contribute your own sound checks, then you can register an account. A sound check is as simple as holding your phone up for 15 seconds to measure the noise levels, and then telling SoundPrint where you are. You can also specifically recommend places for SoundPrint’s ‘Quiet List’ if they are particularly quiet, and submit noise complaints for very loud venues. SoundPrint will try to reach out to such venues with suggestions for how they can become quieter.

Venues are categorised as ‘quiet’, ‘medium’, ‘loud’ and ‘very loud’ with the number representing the decibels (dB) recorded by user’s sound checks. It’s worth noting that the repeated or prolonged exposure to noise above 85 dB can lead to hearing loss.

I found out about SoundPrint from Samantha Baines’ excellent book ‘Living With Hearing Loss and Deafness’ (sponsored link). I saw it whilst out Christmas shopping and subsequently borrowed from our local library. I’m partially deaf and wear hearing aids, and this book has lots of helpful tips, both for deaf people and their friends and family.

That being said, SoundPrint isn’t just for people who have hearing loss. If you are autistic, then you may benefit if you find noisy places overwhelming. I can see my wife using this app as well, as though she has good hearing, she struggles in noisy environments.