Category: Technology
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Christmas Countdown!
Sometime in 2016 I came up with an idea for a project: A Christmas ornament that counted the number of days, hours, minutes, and seconds until Christmas. But I wanted it to be nerdy and interesting, and something that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. So I started working on an ornament that would count down…
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I wrote a Nintendo Game
About six months ago, I wrapped up my formal schooling and graduated with a Bachelors of Science in Software Engineering. My final course was a Senior Project where I got to dictate the work that I wanted to do. Because it’s been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, I proposed to write…
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Bash Command Prompt Flair on a Mac
A couple of months ago I was going through Apple’s Introduction to Swift, wherein they mentioned that Swift’s support of unicode allowed that you could use emoji as variable names. They were quick to point out that it was a bad practice, and you shouldn’t do it, but it was kind of fun. More recently,…
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Weekend Project – Ghost Message!
Many years ago, I thought it’d be a fun idea to have an RGB panel that would display game sprites on demand, connected to the internet, so people could display a sprite on demand. Just a sort of fun thing to have on my desk. One evening last week, I decided that I wanted to…
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Programming AVRs using a USBasp on a Mac
I loaned out my trusty USBTinyISP to a friend a while back and it was easier to go find an alternative than to coordinate schedules. So I bought a USBasp – another type of open source programmer for AVRs. I ran into an number of problems getting it to work because there is so much…
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Early Morning Project: RasPi Zero Roomba
I can’t sleep. Instead of sleeping, I’m hacking robots. Last year during my winter holiday I wired up a Raspberry Pi to my Roomba, to drive it around and such. More recently I got a Raspberry Pi Zero and wanted to do the same thing.
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Programming an nRF52 on a Mac
Several months ago, I went to promotional conference for a microcontroller on a whim. I’d heard about it the night before, and after some investigation I found out I could get a free development board out of it. Did somebody say free??? Yeah, that’s me. So I got the board and promptly did nothing with…
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Weekend Project: Wireless outlet control
I mentioned briefly in my post about controlling LEDs with my Amazon Echo that I have some wireless outlet switches that I wanted to control. At the time I didn’t have a transmitter that could switch them on, and it didn’t really want to crack open the remote and mess with it. Weeks later, the transmitter that I’d ordered arrived.…
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Weekend Project: Amazon Echo LED Control
As I mentioned last week, I got an Amazon Echo for Christmas. The first time I heard about it I thought “Meh, I already have a phone that does that”. Then I heard people raving about it on Podcasts and thought “hmm..” Then I heard the thing that really got me excited: The Echo has…
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HTTPS; Get yours today!
You’ve seen it before, that little lock next to the URL on a website. Typically, we associate it with banking, or online shopping, or something else that needs to be “secure”. I am of the opinion though, that every single website should be using that security. Just this month that became a real possibility via LetsEncrypt.