Continuing my Internet of Things journey from my earlier post My IoT Exploration – Part 1 – The Failure, I got a Raspberry Pi with a Sense HAT. The Sense HAT has all the features I need, integrated in one shield: temperature, humidity and barometric pressure and a LED as a bonus. Given my goal that I wanted to push the data to a hosted service, I now had a much better foundation for succeeding with that. Read →
Before I got an Arduino for Christmas I hadn’t heard about it. I had heard about Raspberry Pi though, and I was told that it was roughly the same thing. It’s true that the two devices have some common characteristics, but to me the differences are fundamental. As someone who does high-level programming for a living, I am appealed by the idea of being able to read values from analogue sensors in my code, and the plethora of sensors available for the Arduino is impressive. Read →
Last Christmas I got an Arduino starter kit for present. It took me a long time to finally open the box and have an idea about what I should do with it. What I’ve found challenging about learning new stuff that I don’t have an immediate use for, is the lack of a clear goal. Making an LED blink isn’t all that exiting in my mind and even though I like the projects in the starter kit, I didn’t do them until I had a project of my own figured out. Read →
A web feature I liked when it came was the ability to resize textboxes. Especially multi-line textboxes (<textarea></textarea>) have a tendency to be too small and this feature really helps there. To my disappointment I find that many websites disable this feature to favour design at the expense of usability. Inappropriately sized textbox with disabled resizing Inappropriately sized textbox with disabled resizing To re-enable this I use the Stylebot extension for Chrome. Read →
A way of bringing up motivation when you have been working with the same software system for an extended period of time might be to add an Easter egg. When you know the system and the people around it well, you have a good opportunity to implement an Easter egg in a good way. These are the things I try to keep in mind when creating an Easter egg. 1. Do not break anything The first and most important rule when creating an Easter egg, is to not cause a bug. Read →