Recent content in Blogs on Projects and Coding Adventures
Our home WiFi coverage is … not great. We’re getting by with the old router
from our ISP, and while it mostly works alright, the coverage isn’t fantastic
everywhere. The upstairs rooms furthest from the router sometimes don’t get much
signal at all. Updating that with new WiFi mesh devices might be awesome, but
I’d also like to have the speed and…

 tl;dr: Mastodon is not Twitter, and that’s great for many reasons, but I have no
idea what, if anything, will end up filling the giant void that’ll be left when
the birdsite disintegrates. 
 I’ve found a happy new home in the Fediverse , but I find myself wondering what
the broader effects of Twitter’s implosion will be. Navigating…

 

 Now that I’ve got a house again, I can really start playing with home automation
projects a lot more. The first thing I plan to do is come up with something to
monitor and automate the garage door, as I’ve already panicked from not
remembering whether I’d closed it when leaving the house. It turned out I had
closed it, but I can definitely do…

 

 It’s hard to feel positive about this year’s Transgender Day of Visibility . On
the one hand, trans visibility is extremely important. It’s because of out trans
people that I was able to understand my own identity. The more cis people really
see, talk to, and come to understand trans people, the easier it will be for
them to understand that…
A while ago, I posted about my experiments with the Phillips Hue API
to create an automated morning sunrise effect. The end result was
nice, but all that mucking about with their HTTP APIs was a hassle any
time I wanted to tweak something. I wanted to define what I wanted in
a more declarative style, and have all the API calls managed behind
the scenes. Home Assistant allowed…
I recently got myself a set of Phillips Hue White and Color Ambiance
lights. One of the features I was looking forward to in particular
(besides playing with all the color options) was setting a wake-up
alarm with the lights gradually brightening. This was pretty painless
to get set up using the phone app. I’m pretty happy with the result,
but there’s certainly some…
Continued from part one, Recursive HTTP Requests with Elm . 
 In my last post , I described my first pass at building a library to
fetch data from a paginated JSON REST API. It worked, but it wasn’t
too clean. In particular, the handling of the multiple pages and
concatenation of results was left up to the calling code. Ideally,
both of these concerns should be handled by…
So I got the idea in my head that I wanted to pull data from the
GitLab / GitHub APIs in my Elm app. This seemed straightforward
enough; just wire up an HTTP request and a JSON decoder, and off I go.
Then I remember, oh crap… like any sensible API with a potentially
huge amount of data behind it, the results come back paginated . For
anyone unfamiliar, this means that a…
I’ve been using material-theme lately, and I sometimes switch around,
but I’ve found that solarized produces the best exported code block
results. To avoid having to remember to switch themes when exporting,
I wrote a quick wrapper for org-export to do it for me: 
 (defun my/with-theme (theme fn &rest args)
 (let ((current-themes custom-enabled-themes))
 (…

 Digging through Derek Feichtinger’s org-babel examples (which I came
across via irreal.org ), I found he had some great examples of
displaying git-style graphs using graphviz. I thought it’d be a fun
exercise to generate my own graphs based on his graphviz source using
elisp, and point it at actual git repos. 
 Getting Started 
 I started out with the goal…
I have a few computers I use on a daily basis, and I like to keep the
same emacs and shell configuration on all of them, along with my org
files and a handful of scripts. Since I’m sure other people have this
problem as well, I’ll share what I’m doing so anyone can learn from
(or criticise) my solutions. 
 Git for configuration and projects 
 I’m a…
This logic puzzle has been floating around the internet lately. When I
caught wind of it, I thought it would be a great exercise to tackle
using Prolog. I’m not especially good with the language yet, so it
added to the challenge a bit, but it was a pretty worthwhile
undertaking. When I got stumped, I discovered that mapping out the
birthdays into a grid helped me…
A few days before leaving work for a week and a half of flying and
cruising to escape frigid Pennsylvania, I came across a Joe Armstrong
quote during my regularly scheduled slacking off on twitter and Hacker
News. I’d come across a couple times before, only this time I noticed
it had a source link. This led me to discovering (and shortly
thereafter, buying) Peter…
Back in May, a coworker and I got the idea to start up a little
seminar after work every couple of weeks with the plan to set aside
some time to learn and discuss new ideas together, along with anyone
else who cared to join us. 
 Learning Together 
 Over the past several months, we’ve read our way through the first
three chapters of the book, watched the related video…

 I’ve been using Emacs Org mode for nearly a year now. For a while I
mostly just used it to take and organize notes, but over time I’ve
discovered it’s an incredibly useful tool for managing projects and
tasks, writing and publishing documents, keeping track of time and
todo lists, and maintaining a journal. 
 Project Management 
 Most of what…
Hopping through Joe Armstrong’s blog , I happened across Erlang: The Movie.
More programming languages need videos like this. 

Part One: Lambdas? In my Python? 
 Over the past few months, I’ve decided to take a stab at learning some
functional programming. I’d been doing python for a few years (and
completely falling in love with it), and so I’d been exposed to a few
functional concepts it offers - primarily higher-order functions and list
comprehensions, both of which allow for very…
I’m a huge fan of XBMC . My pc (currently running Ubuntu 10.04) has taken root in my
living room, piping all my movies and tv shows straight to my HDTV. 
 While my pc is set up as a DVR using MythTV to record shows off my FIOS box, it tends to be a little unreliable, which can suck when it’s time to catch up on Daily Show and Colbert episodes.
I’ve had Transmission…
<? php 
 if ( ! defined ( 'meh' )) define ( 'meh' , null );
 
 class Meh {
 public function __set ($name, $value) {
 }
 public function __get ($name) {
 return meh ;
 }
 public function __isset ($name) {
 return true || false ;
 }
 public function __unset ($name) {
 }
 public function __call ($name, $arguments) {
 return meh ;
 }
…
Got my hands on Portal 2 and finished a run through the single player campaign. Was a lot of fun, the characters were bursting with humor and personality. Just like the first game, it was hard to stop playing. Unlike the first game, it’s got some length, so I stayed up late a couple nights with my eyes glued to the television. I already want to play through it again to find any little things…