Connecting to Eduroam on Linux

Posted on September 9, 2019 by Roy

Today I returned to university to do a postgrad after an 11 year absence. A lot had changed since my undergrad, mostly on the tech support side. My student webmail is on gmail now, printing costs money and WiFi is managed by something called Eduroam. This last point caused me some trouble on my first day since my work laptop runs Linux (ubuntu 16.04) which meant I had to change some settings to make it connect. Since Eduroam is used in a bunch of institutions the world over there is plenty of random blog posts and help pages filled by students who have been in a similar position. However, as with a lot of software of this nature, updates between blog posts have resulted in out of date advice. After some finagling I was able to get it working and I’ve decided to join in the tradition of giving Eduroam help on blog posts by posting my own advice. Here is how to set up Eduroam on Linux in 2019.

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ELI5: Python @property and setter

Posted on June 17, 2019 by Roy

For this ELI5 I’m gonna go over the @property and setter decorators. In my objects tutorial I mentioned that you can access and alter the content of attributes directly, but this is not always ideal. In other words, these allow you to create “getter” and “setter” methods that are common in other programming languages.
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How To Share Songs Between Devices On Spotify

Posted on February 17, 2019 by Roy

I recently started using spotify and immediately ran into a very frustrating issue – a bunch of my favourite songs were not available on the platform. While I had my own versions of these songs I needed a way to play them via spotify on any of my devices – my phone, laptop, work laptop and desktop computer. While this is something that isn’t officially supported by the platform, I was able to figure out a system to do so through some digital trickery. If this is a feature you’ve been hoping for to, feel free to read on for instructions!
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ELI5 Tutorial: @classmethod and @staticmethod

Posted on February 7, 2019 by Roy

In this week’s ELI5 tutorial I am going to combine my last two ELI5s and talk about special decorators in classes. The first two I will deal with are @classmethod and @staticmethod. These decorators can be very powerful and allow you to make a an object that is very easy for a user to interact with.
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ELI5 Tutorial: Objects in Python

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Roy

In today’s ELI5 I will go over objects in python. This is going to be a long one, but by the end of it you will understand the basics of objects in python.
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Adding Features to Dicecord Discord

Posted on January 28, 2019 by Roy

I’ve spruced Dicecord’s discord server up with a few features using webhooks and the IFTTT automation service. The discord will be updated when I push new commits to github and when I post new blog posts here. I’ve decided to write up how I achieved this so anyone interested can give it a try on their own servers.
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ELI5 Tutorial: Decorators in Python

Posted on January 28, 2019 by Roy

The next stop on our ELI5 tutorials is going to be decorates. These are another example of a very powerful bit of code that can be hard to understand. The quick description would be that these are ways to add code that runs before and after a function call. Read on for a more in-depth explanation.
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ELI5 Tutorial: Python *args and **kwargs

Posted on January 26, 2019 by Roy

In the past my quick tutorials are mainly focused on advanced or weird issues that I had trouble figuring out on my own. I’ve decided to shake that up a bit and do a new tutorial series: ELI5 Tutorials. For these tutorials I am going to go over some more common features of python that I feel people tend to explain too abstractly for novice programmers. I’m going to start my series with something pretty simple but very unintuitive: *args and **kwargs.
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Dicecord on Discord

Posted on January 25, 2019 by Roy

I figured that it was about time to make a Dicecord server on Discord. You can join it here.

Currently it is very barebones, just some basic channels with a dedicated channel for dicerolling via the bot.

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Quick Tutorial: Setting Custom Resolutions on Ubuntu

Posted on January 19, 2019 by Roy

I have decided to get to grips with linux by installing Ubuntu on a VM on my machine using VirtualBox. Setting up VirtualBox was pretty straight forward, but I had a minor issue I needed to solve. You see, since I was going to be mainly programming on it I wanted to give it a portrait resolution for my second monitor, but when I tried to set that up it rotated the screen 90 degrees in the VirtualBox window!

I tried looking for a way to stop it from rotating but all I found were snarky forum posts from people who didn’t seem to quite understand what the issue is. In the end, I had to figure out a way to set a custom resolution for a “landscape” mode where the width and length were appropriate for my portrait screen. Here are the step to do so.
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