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ByGarf created updated

Welcome to my projects page. This bit should really be called “standing on the shoulders of giants” because many of these projects borrow heavily on the work of people who are much better at this programming malrkey than I am. Nevertheless, I have been playing with computers for several decades. In that time, I have flirted with lots of projects and ideas. Recently things have become a lot more interesting for me, as I learn to use PerplexityAI and LeChat as my own personal tutors. In fact it’s given me the desire to revisit a lot of my old software projects and make newer and hopefully better versions. In fact I could not have completed any of these these rebuilds without a bit of outside help.

Here is a list of some of my projects. Some worked quite well and are still active and many have received complete rebuilds to make them compatible with PHP8 and display nicely on mobile devices. Others are still in use but not actually under active development at the moment. Some were of their time but have been laid to rest. You can still see some of these but some of their original functionality has been removed. And some I have had to abandon completely, often because they are no longer useful and/or could pose a security threat by keeping them on line. For clarity, I have subdivided projects as follows:-

Most of these projects are based upon world’s ever increasing pool of open source code. Since many of these were created primarily for my own use and amusement, I find it handy to have them all grouped together here, so that  I can find them when I need them! :-). 

Active

These projects are in-use and under active development:-

Binary Watch

  • This “01” Binary watch emulation is based on original idea by Rob Davis http://jumpstation.co.uk/binaryclock/. The difference is this version is written in JavaScript and does not require Java to be installed on the user’s device. It also has a couple of rather nifty features that were absent in the original emulation.
    1. Colour button: changes the colour of the watches display LEDs.  Select blue (default), green, red or white LED display.
    2. Mode button: toggle between display modes. Select time (default) , date or seconds.

Eventually I plan to photograph my own physical binary watch with a decent macro lens, and produce a more detailed high-resolution version of this applet. I’d also add that I would never have got this far without the help of Perplexity AI. 

Browser Information (AKA “brinfo”) 

A bit of simple JavaScript that tells users a little about what their browsers are revealing about them, including IP address, ISP, approximate location and the “User Agent” string detailing the browser itself. This project has received a major facelift recently and finally plays nicely on mobile devices too. 

Browser Information Plus (AKA “brinfoplus”)

This replaces our old and abandoned PHPSniffer based project.This application performs a technical analysis of your browser and device features using two open source libraries:

Browser Information Plus, AKA “brinfoplus,” attempts to display all the information that your web browser reveals about your computing device whenever it connects to a site. In this instance, no personally identifiable information is stored or shared by this applet. 

Calculator

This replaces the old Carpe calculator we used here for many years. Unlike Carpe, which we borrowed from elsewhere, this new calculator was pretty much written from scratch, albeit with a lot of help from Perplexity.  It is essentially a “schoolboy” calculator that does basic arithmetic, trigonometry and logs, similar to an early Casio FX82.

Count-up/Count-down

This is the count-up/count down timer that used to grace the front page of the old Joomla GarfNet. I intend to spruce it up and deploy it in the new CMS too, in a similar fashion. Meanwhile, I have stuck it here in the projects section, while I sort it out..

Depth of Field (DoF) calculator

This was another dead project that I brought back to life recently, with an almost total rewrite. It has been heavily influenced by an innovative web application originally developed in 1996 by Michael C Gillett. This latest incarnation has been rewritten to include a fairly modern interface combined with“responsive CSS” code, that tries to make it scale and display nicely on mobile devices. 

Experimental reference table database viewer

This is a new project. It allows users to view all the data in our “info” database. This is the database that is used to populate our reference tables, software projects and various other parts of the GarfNet site. This project is very much a work in progress, and is probably of more value to site management than it is for readers. Indeed it started-out as a management tool.

Nevertheless, since all the data it contains is essentially public knowledge, we felt it would be good to make this data accessible to the public from a single database viewer. Note that table and field names are the original names contained within the underlying database. This gives the viewer a rather geeky feel. This arises because these table|field names were intended for internal use and under normal circumstances users would never actually see them.

Flash collection

in the late 1990’s and early 2000s, Macromedia Flash presentations were all over the worldwide web. This project is about curating them and making them available again using Ruffle. NB.These are not my work. Rather, this is is a little collection I made of some of the more interesting ones, many years ago,  before Flash dropped off the IT fashion radar. Indeed, many people would consider these Flash presentations to be abandonware. Certainly many of the original author’s sites have disappeared without trace. But I like these things and I think they certainly have a place in IT history.

Internet Radio Player (experimental)

This is a redux of our old Joomla Internet Radio Player. it is still a bit buggy and needs a lot of polish. Nevertheless it plays most of the BBC HLS and DASH streams quite well. It is unusual insofar as it gives the user the option of playing as stream with its own internal player,or using the users own player.

METAR Weather Station Viewer

a once dead project effectively brought back from the grave. It was originally based on phpWeather open source METAR interpreter. It was quite excellent too. However it had some security flaws and its original developer seems to have abandoned it completely. So I built my own virtually from scratch, c/w a nice “responsive” mobile friendly interface.

Units Converter

This is a complete rebuild of the original GarfNet Unit Converter. Despite its greatly simplified user interface, this version has a lot more conversions. It also offers new “Force” section, together with a greatly improved computing section that includes bits and bytes, as well as ISO and IEC multipliers. Its new extensible codebase makes it much easier to add new conversions. Importantly it now plays nicely on mobile devices. 

Bible Concordances

These are Bible (ASV) searchable American Standard Bible, and Bible (KJV) searchable King James Bible. Both were originally based on Paul McEnery’s open source “PHP Bible Search”. We eventually abandoned the original project in 2019, because it required a very old version of PHP and the had some fairly major security issues. Then I thought it would be interesting to rewrite them for PHP8, as part if a personal reskilling programme. I’ve also made them public again because some readers might find them interesting or useful. However, GarfNet is not a religious site and these concordances are not intended to promote or denigrate any particular religious viewpoint. 

Dormant

These projects are still in daily-use and maintained, but there is no development work going on here, at the moment:-

  • Mr Goose’s Webfooted Weblog – this is partly a project to allow my imaginary friend Mr Goose to sound off and partly to experiment with an excellent blogging content management system called WordPress. He has been a bit quiet lately. And now Garfnet CMS uses WordPress too, Mr Goose’s contribution is somewhat less valuable than it used to be. 🙂

Moved

These projects are not appropriate to host here. Setting up Linux web servers for local (LAN) use is so cheap and easy, it is silly to waste internet  bandwidth trying to host them remotely:-

  • DEOSS – to some extent quite a lot of the work that used to take place here at Garfnet has been taken over by the DEOSS (Development and Education using Open Source Software) project. DEOSS currently hosts a number of commercial websites and internet services for customers.
  • Zoneminder – hosted privately on customer’s home servers.
  • EyeOS – hosted locally on one of my office servers.
  • Pydio (formerly AjaxExplorer) – hosted locally on one of my office servers.

Retired

These projects have reached their useful end of life. We keep them here because some people are still interested in them. And we don’t want to upset the search engines, if we don’t have to:-

  • Media Library based on Coppermine. Almost all of this has now been absorbed into the WordPress CMS site now. The Coppermine gallery will close shortly.
  • MGFaulty – very old but amusing project detailing the disaster that was MGRover and the badly-built cars it produced. Nothing clever or technical – just my ex-girlfriend and me having a jolly good grumble. MG Rover went bust shortly afterwards – nothing to do with us though!
    Direct Link: https://garfnet.org.uk/mgfaulty/
  • New Millenium EZine – The Milly was a very early EZine that ran from 1995 through to 1999. Most of it still works, even today. This link takes you to a brief introductory page, which then links to the final incarnation of the EZine.

Shelved

  • Earthquakes – a couple of scripts that collect national and global earthquake data, based on the work of Ken True. Seems there are more earthquakes than one might imagine. Unfortunately the UK script is no longer available on Ken’s site and frankly there are much better resources for this sort of thing than I could ever hope to provide. I may revisit this in the future but it is not a priority.

Abandoned

  • Browser Info (detailed) – based on phpSniffer). Doesn’t work on PHP7+ and frankly there seemed little point trying to make it work. However we do have a modern browser interrogator called BrinfoPlus that uses a couple of php code libraries to  inform users what their browsers  are revealing about their computer devices. 
  • Calculator (Alternative PHP-based) I thought I’d have crack at writing an alternative style calculator in PHP. As it turns out, it was a daft idea and it doesn’t really hang together as I had hoped. But it kinda worked and it was fun trying!
  • Carpe Javascript Scientific Calculator – Replaced with our own built-from-scratch GarfNet Scientific Calculator.
  • FlamPlayer – the GarfNet MP3 player. Well it was. But it was never open source and never really fitted in with the site particularly well.
  • Joomla – I used this both for GarfNet and for various customer sites between 2006 and 2018. But the thought of having to do yet another horrendous migration to a new version of Joomla, filled me with horror. So I bravely ran away! Dumped Joomla completely and decided to focus on WordPress instead.
  • Orbtrak – Andrew T. West’s satellite tracker, based on Predict. This was basically only a demo and even though it had been here for nearly ten years, I never did anything with it. However Orbtrak itself is still going and looking rather good.
  • SimpleViewer – this was a demonstration of a free (but sadly not open source) Shockwave Flash image viewer. It was subsequently replaced by Ruffle.