I recently had some success installing OpenWRT 19.07.2 on my TP-Link WA801ND v5 wireless access point, which I was happy to do since the stock firmware was untouched since 2017.

I’ve documented the process in a video. This isn’t a tutorial with absolutely everything covered — I don’t want to encourage people to brick their devices, so you’ll need competence and proficiency with configuring your network settings in your operating system, and running a TFTP server.

It’s all, obviously, at your own risk. Stay safe and don’t brick your only access point!

Sorry for the inconsistency in audio quality.

Following on from my previous video, showing how to install PHP 5.5 on CentOS 6, I now complete the tasks needed to meet the requirements for installing Moodle 2.7 on CentOS, and replace the Oracle MySQL distribution with MariaDB 5.5.

As always, feedback is appreciated!

I have been inspired once again to fire up my screencasting rig, to show you how to install PHP 5.5 on CentOS 6 using Rackspace’s IUS Community Repositories.

More and more web applications now are likely to require versions of PHP beyond 5.3. CentOS 6 users are stuck with 5.3, with backported security updates, unless they diverge from standard repositories or compile PHP themselves! Until CentOS 7 is with us, those of us trying to run a rock-solid web server on CentOS will be left out in the cold running recent web applications like Moodle 2.7 which require a newer PHP.

In this video, I show you how to use the IUS repositories to get PHP 5.5 running. These repositories, with their Rackspace backing, seem likely to be nice and stable going forward.

As always, I’d love any feedback you might have.

Video and photos from a steam train making a journey on the Mid Hants Railway, Watercress Line, starting at Alresford — shot on 9th January 2011.

Watch the video on YouTube

It’s been a while since I last did a video tutorial explaining how to use SleekTabs, so I thought I would dig up the project again and try to explain how to use it a little better.

The result has been my day’s work today. It’s a two part tutorial, showing you how to first set up a simple three-tabbed static web page with Ajax support, and then moving on into part two to show you how to configure fallback support (something that I never touched on previously).

Part 1

Part 2

More info about this tutorial, including the source files for this demo project, and a link to a live working completed version, is available on my documentation wiki.

I am aware that the audio quality is far from good – there is quite bad noise on the audio track and some obvious audio transitions that I really could have done better. However, I still think it’s a good resource for explaining SleekTabs and I’d love to hear any further feedback on either this or the program itself.

What fun you can have by pointing a camera at a monitor displaying the video feed from that camera.

Enjoy.

You can do this with VNC if you’re not lucky enough to have dual monitors. Beware though, you can lock up your system if you use VNC. So save stuff first. 🙂