Here we go, the first monthly blog follows on from the pilot blog when I talked about MiniDisc and Platinum MD. 

So what's been happening in February 2022, well the MiniDisc obsession hasn’t petered away, and now fully engrossed in the world of physical music media, another great app called CD to NetMD which builds on the same premise as Platinum but copies the music directly from CD to NetMD has joined my arsenal of applications. 

I now own the web domains www.theminidiscgeek.co.uk and .com god knows what I’ll end up doing with them, but I feel some Apple Geek - MiniDisc inspired merch is coming at some point.

The end of January and early February has purely been a sit-down and study, in any free time I’ve had type month, getting my head around the world of Amazon Web Services and taking exams for the first time is 22 years, it's been difficult to get the brain working in that way again. 

Music has been a massive help, I’ve rediscovered some old albums I forgot all about, discovered new genres and artists on the wonderful service called Bandcamp, and further expanded my use for RaspberryPi’s creating a Volumio headless deck, to play music and forget all about. 

Expand on Homebridge Plans - localised weather / environmental reports.

The world of weather is going crazy, and I’m a firm believer climate change is happening. Tech can teach and also help us prepare or at least get a headstart on things. 

The massive volcanic eruption in Tonga sent a pressure wave around the globe on multiple laps, and my Homebridge/HomeKit/Eve weather “station” picked the drop-in in air pressure as it passed. 

I’m a proud Stockport lad, and the river Mersey confluence is about 1.5 miles down the road from me, with the first Environment Agencies measuring station about 3/4 a mile away, this recorded a new recorded high at 4.39meters after the 3 names Storms of Dudley / Eunice and Franklin - there is an API available and I want to investigate pulling that data straight into Homebridge to trigger an alert when it goes over a certain point. 

Storm Franklin arrived with bonkers wind speeds to my corner of the ‘port and it's another area I want to expand home bridge or even email alerts on, working on a maximum level before an alert is triggered, this can be done via a RaspberryPi and some good old DIY making skills. - I also think maths and physics are involved so my brain is going to be taking a proper workout over the forthcoming weeks, but there may be power tools involved too.