The format is the same as it ever was; the six most interesting songs I've heard for the first time this year. It doesn't matter how old the songs are, or how late to the party I am - perhaps they're not even the ones I 'liked' the most, but the ones that sparked the most interest, and are worth sharing.

The Raspberry Pi team provide an easy way of testing the performance of your SD card, or other storage media, with the Agnostics tool. The only downside is that it's a graphical tool, and if you want to test your SD card while running headless, or without a GUI, then you have to do a little hacking to get it to work.

In September I wanted to focus on playing guitar to see if that could boost my sense of progress, but did it work? Sort of…

Over the last few years I've been struggling to find the time to play guitar, now I'm slowly getting a little more free time, but I'm struggling to balance that with other hobbies. In September I want to see if focusing on one hobby will help me make progress, and that I feel like I'm getting somewhere again.

YouTube tracks what you watch to create a profile that can be used to power recommendations and adverts. It learns what you like, what you don’t, when you stop watching, when you’re watching, on what device you’re watching. But it seems unfair that only advertisers learn about me from my watch history. If a person is shaped by the books they read and the music they hear, surely you can understand a lot about someone from the videos they watch? What could I learn about myself from my watching history?

Space is unforgiving and uncaring. Living in a fast moving pressurised tin can does not make life much easier. The Expanse makes this brutally clear from the beginning. It’s also one of the best science fiction shows I’ve ever seen. There are lots of spoilers after the jump, and a very rambling reflection on trying to figure out why exactly I think this show is as good as it is, so don’t say you haven’t been warned…

E-Paper makes a nice, unobtrusive display, that is great for displaying slowly refreshing information in a low power and flexible way. I wanted to create a little clock/calendar that would display the day of the week for the children, but that doesn't look like a glowing digital display.

If your Arduino is damaged so that the onboard USB-to-serial conversion doesn't work any more, or you bought a cheap clone that doesn't reliable upload, you can use an external FTDI board to upload the programs to your Arduino.

There are a lot of applications where knowing the right time is critical; logging sensor data, actions based on a time of day or making clocks or calendars. If you don't want to use a micro controller or computer that connects to the internet, then a real-time clock (RTC) is a must.

I like electronic paper, it appears more natural and less intrusive than other types of electronic display. It doesn't have the blockiness of LCD displays, it doesn't glow, and is more easily visible in natural light. All this makes it ideal for showing slowly updating information in an unobtrusive way. I've never tried using an e-paper display before, so armed with an Ardunio, here's how I got it to work.