Blog

My Semi-Technical Blog

6 min read

You're either wondering what page scraping means or why on earth you would do such a thing instead of using an API like a sane person. Both will be covered in today's post as we explore page scraping with Python's delightful Beautiful Soup package.

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4 min read

Have you ever wanted to make your own Google Home? While it won't have nearly the same features, you can build your own with Google's AIY (artificial intelligence yourself) Kit! In this post I recount my experience attempting to reproduce the Google Home's ability to play music on demand.

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6 min read

Chances are you use or at least have heard of Ad-Block or some variant of browser-based ad-blocking. But what if you could take it a step further, blocking not just ads in any browser (apps included), but also telemetry and malicious sites across every device on your home network? Today we explore setting up network-level ad-blocking with a Raspberry Pi. It's a lot easier than it sounds.

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5 min read

Undoubtedly if you're in tech you've heard about VPNs. What happens when you decide to host your own VPN at home and combine it with the Pi-Hole? Way more site-blocking power than you had before!

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3 min read

Another UConn Open House for prospective students has come and gone. Thankfully, this one didn't involve any show-stopping calamities. The biggest problem was that I had only gotten 3 hours of sleep the night before and, as a result, my focus was obviously impaired. This meant it was very difficult for me to reliably control the drone with my mind as I alter my focus for different commands like taking off and spinning.

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