About this blog

The name of this blog is small alley. As in an alley, I hope to post a variety of things that I find interesting and as you walk through the alley, you would find things that you like.

I have posted some songs that I wrote. I am not a great singer. I sing and play the guitar purely for fun and I hope people who thinks they can't sing can be inspired by me. No former singing lessons and no former guitar training. Just pure fun......

The recording is also done at home with a drum machine and one guitar through a small amp. The sound file has been touched up slightly by removing the noise. Otherwise the songs are as original as it gets.

I practise Taiji regularly. For me, it is a great exercise requiring control of mind and body to perform well and for it to be enjoyable. You can get more videos of Taiji from YouTube.

Other posts include places and events that I think are interesting and more important, which I have time to upload.

Enjoy your walk through this small alley.....

Tuesday, December 31, 2019

We Wish You A Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad

My interpretation of We Wish You A Merry Christmas and Feliz Navidad.

You can download the transcription here.






Saturday, December 21, 2019

Santa Claus Is Coming To Town (again)

I did a video of this song before.  Am doing it again and I have included my transcription of the song for reference (I do not play exactly according to the transcript).

You can download the transcription here.

Hope you like it.

Merry Christmas.





Will put up more transcription in due course (means I don't know when).

Monday, December 16, 2019

Tinkering with Raspberry Pi

From one of my previous post, you would have known that I have played around with the Raspberry Pi.  I have used it to create a wifi hotspot and also created a music pager application using the GPIO pins and Python.  I have also set up Lighttpd with the Bottle WSCGI framework where Lighttpd acted as a proxy for the Bottle application - to speed things up.

Currently I am running Kali Linux of the Raspberry Pi 3 to learn hacking and digital forensics.

Recently I have also installed LibreELEC using the Raspberry Pi 1.  It is really fantastic!

But in this post I really want to highlight DietPi (see https://dietpi.com).  It is a super light weight distro which makes using the Pi 1 as a computer bearable.  On the Pi 3, I feel that it is really working wonderfully.  I used the LXDE and the XFCE desktops and I feel that the LXDE Desktop is really wonderful (writing this post on the Pi 1 running DietPi and the Chromium browser).

I won't go into the detail of DietPi - please visit the very well documented website.  However I just want to point out that for the filemanagers to connect to Windows (Samba) shared folders, please install the following

gvfs-backends and gvfs-bin

from the repositories.  It took me some time to get this working and I hope this post can help someone.

Finally I really recommend you checking out DietPi if you are tinkering with the Raspberry Pi.