
A simple rundown on the build of my Raspberry Pi controlled lightorgan. This lightorgan is being used to run a synchronized Christmas light and music show.
I’m a programmer by profession, so I have a lot of thoughts to share about it sometimes. Or sometimes I come up with a useful bit of code to share. Or maybe it’s just a funny joke or observation about geeks.
Inspiration can come from anywhere; several years ago while watching an episode of Sons of Guns I was hit with the idea to create a device to electronically ignite fireworks. Eventually it occurred to me that I needed to revisit my HellBox, and instead of merely making it work better, I had no choice but to integrate the Raspberry Pi.
I am sitting in the very last session of this year’s Future Insights Live web development/design conference in Las Vegas. The speaker just put up a slide that says “Stop Building Web Applications.” Seemingly radical phrases like this have been the norm this week as the presenters try to get the crowd’s attention and get […]
I have been building an inventory and order management system for my wife’s home business recently. This system relies heavily upon data retrieved from outside sources, thus it uses APIs to fetch this data. Notably it uses APIs from Paypal, USPS.com (US Postal Service,) and Etsy.com. This past week has been fraught with frustration as […]
The classic menu in Android apps may be deprecated, but I still use them and develop apps that support them. The fact is there are an awful lot of devices out there that are using Honeycomb, Gingerbread, Froyo, and the like. I, for one, have always been a proponent for backwards compatibility. My biggest complaint with […]
If you aren’t using PDO instead of mysqli (or just plain’ol’mysql) functions by now, it probably is time to look into what you are missing out on. If you are anything like me, mysql_connect() and mysql_query() were probably some of the first PHP functions you ever learned; it seems that many PHP “developers” think that […]