This is a shock, honestly! I would normally pay by bank transfer for whole year up front.
But OK... Except.
Err, OK, so do I have to turn up each month with cash which they cannot accept?
To be fair, if that saved me over £3k a year in council tax, I'd do it. I'd video record each attempt to pay, obviously, for a judge if they tried to take me to court.
You may or may not know, there is a porn site called xhamster - I have literally no idea why it is called that.
Yet, it is reported a forum for people with pet hamsters has shut down, along with hundreds of other sites and forums run by volunteers and individuals, because of the risk of fines and cost of compliance with this crazy new law.
OFCOM reportedly consider the costs of compliance for small sites “are likely to be negligible or in the small thousands at most”. Even without the risk of a fine of up to £18,000,000.00, the costs of "small thousands" of pounds, which OFCOM considers negligible, is more than a small volunteer site can bear, understandably. We are not talking businesses with income and a budget for legal fees here!
What is especially frustrating is the unknown - I don't know if this blog is in scope, and if so whether google or I personally am at risk of a fine. Worse - actual lawyers don't know either. I don't know if my GitHub repositories are in scope, and if so whether GitHub or I am liable. I don't know if my single user mastodon instance is in scope, etc... OFCOM have even admitted that they have no definition of "email" (one of the exceptions - yes you, or kids, can be on a porn email mailing list with no restrictions under this law). I have, again, written to my MP asking these questions.
A fun one, I do not know: If my blog is in scope as it has user generated content (comments), if I stop publishing comments (i.e. they get emailed to me, which is out of scope, and maybe I paraphrase and reply by an edit on the blog post) does that make it out of scope, or do I have to delete the user comments from before the new law came in to force as well?
Think of the Children, indeed, but making millions of individuals with small sites comply, at a cost of thousands of pounds each, is just crazy, especially when the law is not even doing what it aimed to in the first place.
By the way, my personal view on porn is that we need better education for children on the nature of porn as entertainment, and how actual relationships are not the same - after all we allow crazy violence in TV films and shows as entertainment, which people know is not "real" (even for <18 rated films where someone blows ups the planet, etc), but have a hang up over porn for some reason. At the end of the day nothing will stop a teenager with hormones from seeing porn, so let's accept that and educate to make that safer for society. But that is just my view. You may disagree, which is fine.
“There is a simple solution – the Secretary of State can exempt small, safe websites from onerous Online Safety duties, and protect plurality online.”. In practice this could be suitably worded so that small sites (by some measurable metric), and non business sites, etc, only need to comply if explicitly notified by OFCOM. This would mean no loophole for small sites that are actually porn sites, but provide the reassurance for those with pet hamsters to be able to continue their forum.
The NHS have been very thorough investigating the stroke I had.
Thankfully the ongoing effects are slight - my typing is still more iffy than it was before, but good news.
They even did an ultrasound on my heart to try and find the underlying cause.
However, the one thing I find odd is the NHS efficiency here. The letter arrived this week (13th March 2025).
The European Convention on Human Rights protects the right to respect for private life, the home and correspondence. This includes protecting the privacy of messages, phone calls, and emails.
But UK and EU governments are trying to break that right in various ways.
So some thoughts.
What this means is that even slightly savvy criminals are safe. The tools all exist and are easy to use. The only issue is if non criminals like you and me can expect that right to privacy.
The Investigatory Powers Act (on which I commented, and was a witness at parliament) did, and does, try to crack encryption as a legal process, maybe, the wording is not ideal. Apple's news on this is one of the key examples. Not the first and not the last, and not something that actually tackles criminals using encryption, it will just make normal people way less safe. Remember criminals can use encryption!
One of the challenges for most normal people is how to use encryption. Most people do not care, or know, why they should even. But there are many ways. The old school ways are using PGP email, which is complex but that is no longer the case. There are many apps and ways to communicate securely, and the obvious ones are things like iMessage (for now). Apple designed it to be secure. But also WhatsApp and Signal.
The problem is that any organisation operating any messaging system that is secure is subject to secret orders from governments to impose back doors.
There are even calls for scanning content for illegal material, which only works if a service has access to the content. This has so many problems, apart from breaking basic human rights. And, I remind you that the "bad people" with "illegal content" can always encrypt what they do anyway, and even secretly if they want to. They actually have an incentive to take the extra steps that normal innocent people do not. The only problem is removing privacy for normal people.
So now to come to the main point of this blog...
This is an app that works with email, it connects to your provider's email server (not all providers work, but many do, using IMAP and SMTP), and allows a more traditional style messaging app that makes encrypted communications simple.
It is clever, well done.
What is extra clever is this is just an email client. It is not a service that is subject to either Investigatory Power Act or Online Safety Act. Indeed, the latter explicitly excludes email, a term OFCOM consider everyone understands (really!).
But it makes secure encrypted chat a thing anyone can do, easily, in a way that legally there is very little that can get in the way.
So worth considering.
I have been advised this is all a little muddled, and I agree.
My previous code allowed a number of settings to be stacked up to suit all sorts of needs - a clock, day of week, sunrise/sunset, and even bin collection details.
I have started a new version now, at https://github.com/revk/ESP32-EPD
This would seem a simple approach - and each widget can be positioned and aligned as needed. The idea is to have at least the same functionality as before, but allow me to work on more and more widget types over time.
So the basic widgets are:-
But even then it is not simple - I have some content substitutions to allow display of $DATE, $TIME, $DAY, $IP, $SUNRISE, $SUNSET, and so on. This makes a simple clock very easy to do.
Whilst most of the above are simple, I have done a few extra bits - allowed multiple line text. Added some characters to 7 segment font to allow display of hexadecimal and the like, etc.
Images were, however, a major change. previously I had full frame (for this 480x800) 1 bit per pixel (48000 bytes) file. Easy to make with some scripts. I also had some similar (smaller) icon files for the bin collections, but they need to know the image size to work.
I wanted more, and I wanted easier.
For a start, for E-paper, there are some more things I need from images.
None of these work for the simple 1 bit per pixel images.
So, for that reason, I have moved totally to PNG files (as per previous blog post). I have yet to code the black/white/red, but I can now.
One change I realised I needed was a plot mode - does text plot black background and white text, or just white text, or maybe just black text, etc. So I now have invert and mask operations on all widgets.
The system still has a season letter E=Easter, M=FullMoon, X=Xmas, etc. And allows that season code letter in the image url, so that works.
Bins (i.e. which bins to put out next and when) are the remaining widget to re-do. PNGs for the icons will make it way easier. No need for fixed size icons and pre-converted images.
I plan to define a simpler and clearer JSON format and implement (and document) that first, but that will be soon.
There are a load of obvious ones to add...
This is one of those more personal blogs.
This week, well, started last week, I had a small technical challenge. The exact details do not really matter for this. But I'll explain.
I wanted to code something - something that was not quite readily available (some people had things very close to something I could just use, but not quite, which is where it gets fun).
The boring bit: It was a system to decode PNG image files, and allow me to use them in an embedded system driving a e-paper display. The details do not matter.
All that matters is that it was not easy to do - it involved understanding a detailed technical specification (PNG), and a new thing (zlib) which I had not used before. For a change the specification is a really really good one, which, in many ways, makes it easier.
A biggie for me is should I, can I, even embark on this project.
To be clear, I have no reason to. Nobody wants this (well they may now), nobody needs this, nobody is asking for this, nobody is paying me for this. It is solely to make an e-paper thing I have easier to use. It is educational for me, a challenge.
Indeed, many of the helpful suggestions are to use a different file format, and not png. I do that already, but I wanted to make it simple - all can handle "save as png" I feel, so can I make it handle png. All and every format for png though?!
The protocol - the file format, which I literally sat in hot tub for over two hours reading, is good. But has some tricky bits. One is the compression/expansion using zlib, something I have never done.
I was seriously concerned I could make this work at all. Could I do it? Could I do it in a way that fitted in memory on an ESP32? Am I up to the job?
I decided to go for it, in linux and then ESP32 code.
Each step worked well, and was not an issue. Minor changes as I coded. Lots of testing. zlib is easy, it turns out. zlib works on ESP32 too.
PNG has a lot of options, and as a decoder you have to handle them all. As an encoder you can be picky, but decoders cannot. I had to slog over the different options - make every one work properly.
I spent a day, well, until early afternoon, and then a couple of hours next day. Total time under one day's work.
It works!
It went perfectly - the bugs were simple to fix. When I slept on it, all the remaining bugs came to me in my sleep, like they used to.
So no, I have not lost it!
The work was not as easy as it used to be - younger me would have worked on in that evening and not next day. Younger me would not have made as many typos (way more since I had a stroke). But the results is good.
I worry about "losing it", and "imposter syndrome" all the time. I hope this is is a good sign I am not a losing the plot, honest.
Here it is https://github.com/revk/ESP32-LWPNG
Some time ago I made my own drivers for various e-paper devices including the Waveshare 7.5" 480x800 mono display.
The only complicated bit was working out a fast LUT to allow things like the clock update without several seconds flashing the whole display black and white. If you have used e-paper, you will know that a normal update is a muti second sequence of black and white flashing, even if only for a region of the display.
This is problematic in many ways, leaving some level of shadow of the changes, and possibly causing charge to build up and create ghosting. I ensured we do some full updates (only once a day), but that seemed to be fine. I have used this on signs for some years now, and they work well.
Applying the fast update a couple of times also works well to kill off the initial shadow of the change.
So yes, this works well.
However, having used this for some years, I ran in to a snag.
The problem is down to the choice of black and white on the image as a whole. I did check, and adding some heavy capacitors on the power lines did not help, so not that. A choice of image with a lot of white (even as shown here) was enough to create some extra ghosting on change and look messy.
So I tinkered some more. I got a very clean effect initially but greying and fading within seconds, arrrg! I then decided to leave the power on, PON, and that works to hold the black and white cleanly. Yay.
This was creating a nasty cumulative effect, over several hours the display did a nasty burn in. It is not a real burn in, but charge on particles in the display. It meant that the display got more and more ghosting of previous segments and text. After a day it was really terrible.
So back to the auto PON/update/POFF, which is what I did before, but that again left it grey.
Finally after yet more tweaking, I have a settled on PON, update, POFF manually, i.e. not using auto mode, and setting a 4 frame setting on POF (not 100% sure what that does). The result was that the final fading was very slight, leaving a pretty clean display even when there is the problem image.
I then had to do a lot of black/white full refreshes to try and clear some of the burn in and it is working, but taking time. I have added an option for over a hundred full updates in middle of night, now.
So I think I have it sussed, again.
My E-paper code allows clock, date, sunrise/set, QR codes, (seasonal) images, and a few other bits, even (at a push) bins that are to be put out (Monmouthshire). The effects are configurable and stack up from the bottom of the display (well, bins at top).
But I think I will start a new version.
The plan is a series of widgets that you can set anywhere on the display and any size in any order. This will allow me to add more and more widgets - maybe weather as well, simple text, images of other sizes. All sorts, and easily extended over time.
Finally the plug, I have sourced 100 of these very nice 7.5" displays, and selling on Tindie with and without my controllers.
Regardless of my work on this code, you can always load esphome, or other code to run these displays.
Apparently I have to pay my council tax by CASH monthly... This is a shock, honestly! I would normally pay by bank transfer for whole year u...
