Matthew Grove | Blog

I finally have a custom ROM! My Moto G5S Plus is now running LineageOS 16 - far better than Android Nougat (v7.1.1) which was provided by Motorola. I have been very disappointed by their update speed since they were taken over by Motorola; on the contrary, I love the new navigation layout in Android P! Recently I have started a few projects as well: AquaPi ( aquapi.ml ) - an innovative water-saving solution for the smart home, involving Raspberry Pis connected to flow maters at all water points around the home, which send their data to one main RPi - the hub - which in turn broadcasts a localhost website. We also aim to integrate this with the new Google Home app  The FLL (in Black Thunder - blackthunder.ga ) - Reading School's FIRST LEGO League team has begun preparation for this year's competition. See our blog ( blog.blackthunder.ga ) for more info. An RC car with VR capabilities built-in, with a range of around 150m. Stay tuned for a link to our blog and more detail...

It's been a while since I lasted posted, but have been rather busy. I travelled to Mojácar, South East Spain  and Bekonscot Model Village & Railway , where I have taken lots of photos - which will be appearing on my Instagram account soon. The model railway at Bekonscot was truly amazing; I spent many hours there and would thoroughly recommend it. Spain was also brilliant, but very hot and barren. Recently, I have also shaken up the design from Black Thunder's (notice the name change from Black Thunder FLL) website, along with rebranding everything to Black Thunder . This meant changing our web & email addresses and social media handle to  www.blackthunder.ga  and  rs_blackthunder . I originally planned to create two main pages for our website: one for Pi Wars (another robotics competition that we plan to compete in this year) and one for the FLL. However, on contemplation, I thought that it would be better to have one main page - like before - expl...

I have just launched a new photography account on Instagram: @mgrove36.photos ! Please go and check it out; follow if you're interested. Here's a taste of what you'll find: These photos were all taken at Cobnor Point or Emsworth, England, and are © Copyright Matthew Grove 2018.

I have given up on using Zoho Mail for custom email addresses, but have just discovered a different service: Yandex.Connect. This provides what is seemingly the same service as Zoho Mail, except it allows .tk , .ml , .ga , .gq and .cf  domains (notice that these are all of the free ones from Freenom) - although when you sign up, make sure you do it through connect.yandex.com , as opposed to domain.yandex.com , which is an older service (they are migrating to Yandex.Connect) that doesn't allow all of the free domains. Yandex.Connect is a free service, with unlimited mailboxes of an unlimited size (as far as I know); I have now got a customised personal email address (matthew@grove.gq), along with ones for www.aquapi.ml and www.blackthunder.ga (a water-saving project and Reading School's Robotics Club, respectively). You may have noticed that I'm rather keen on finding money-saving (i.e. free) ways of doing normally costly things. So far, I have 8 domains, three of which...

Wow. The Territory is such an amazing book. I definitely recommend it. Back on topic: recently I've acquired some domain names - for free! I've been using Freenom to get free .tk, .ml , .ga, .gq and .cf domain names; I think this service is great, as you have full access to the DNS (unlike with FreeDNS ). Thus, I am now hosting my blog at blog.matthew-grove.ml (the website you're most probably on now); I plan to get custom email addresses, through  Zoho Mail . I have found Zoho Mail  to be the only free email hosting service I could find that supports custom domains. However, I have run into a rather sizeable problem. They block .gq domains. This means that the domain name I was going to use is now redundant. Yay. I am yet to find an alternative, as it seems all of the free domain names are blocked on Zoho (although they still haven't confirmed this) - so any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Please leave them here . Also this week, I have been ex...

I haven't posted for a few days, and in that time I have begun reading 'The Territory' , by Sarah Govett, and finished Black Thunder FLL's website! I have greatly increased the efficiency of the JS; have been working mainly on this file  (see the file history by clicking the History  button, or going here ). Firstly, from what I have read, 'The Territory' is a very good book: I love fantasy. Secondly, I have made Black Thunder FLL's home page a lot  more efficient (and hopefully bug-free). I used to use setTimeout() statements to remove the underscore from the end of the title and main text. This was very inefficient, for multiple reasons: Sometimes the typewriting code was delayed, so the underscore was never removed; CPU usage was slightly higher, as the computer was running a timer; Instead of utilising the already running function, I ran another; The value of the final text was hard-coded, so there were two variables with the same contents...

Over the past few months, I have been working on improving the experience on Reading School's Robotics Club's website ( https://blackthunder.ga ). I have worked on numerous animations, and spent a whole weekend coding a cookie notice (instead of revising!). Most recently, I have been incorporating this beautiful link styling from @ lukemeyrick on CodePen . I was browsing the internet for the most aesthetically pleasing link/ button animation I could find; I stumbled across a reference to @ lukemeyrick 's beautiful design. I tested it on CodePen, and immediately fell in love. Credits to him for creating such lovely styling. The implementation stage began, and the within 48 hours, it was up-and-running. I altered the colour slightly, and removed the container background, but overall it was very easy to include. Currently, I'm working on an animation bug in which the YouTube channel and Twitter feed temporarily cover the main text. This can be reproduced by cli...