For my first venture into using Home Assistant, I went with a Raspberry Pi 3 to keep costs down and because it seems very well supported by the Home Assistant community. Once the hardware was assembled, I followed the installation instructions for HASSbian, which flashes a disk image to the SD card for the Pi […]
I’ve been using Vagrant with VirtualBox to handle WordPress local development, but it’s a bit tedious. I’ve never really mastered setting up multiple WordPress installs using a single image, so I end up with multiple images taking up a bunch of hard drive space. When I heard about Local by Flywheel I was intrigued, and […]
I’ve been dabbling in smart home devices over the past couple of years, and while many of them do enhance quality of life, I have some concerns. Namely, a dependence on cloud services, eroded privacy, security vulnerabilities, and a lack of interoperability. A smart home should be smart. It should know what you want/need at […]
I’ve been working on my first mobile app (download Pool Wise for iOS today!) in my spare time for the past 18 months or so. Being a web developer, I decided to use Cordova and stick with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript rather than learn to code native iOS and Android apps. Getting a prototype up and running […]
I’ve been working on an iOS app using an upgraded mid-2009 MacBook Pro, but I ran into a roadblock the other day when I wanted to test the app on a real device instead of just the iOS simulator. My iPhone is running the latest iOS 10.3 as of this writing, but the version of […]
A Quick Note: This blog post is long overdue. It’s been sitting in my drafts for about six months, so keep in mind that most of this is in the context of late 2016. It’s been a few years since I paid much attention to my personal website from a development perspective, so I decided to refresh the […]
I haven’t looked at any Linux distros in a while, so I thought I’d see how Ubuntu was running these days. First let me say that I think Ubuntu is pretty sweet for a free OS and the installation process is generally very smooth. However, in this particular instance I ran into some issues. I […]
I should be able to specify that I want my computer to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, and it will go to sleep as expected and only wake back up when I press a key or move the mouse or something like that. Unfortunately my PC has had some issues in the past waking […]
The Hibernate power option is a great way to keep everything where I left it when I’m going to be away from my PC for a long time (e.g. when going to bed or even on a vacation). Sometimes I’ll have several applications, a couple dozen browser tabs, and a bunch of Windows Explorer folders […]
I wanted to make a bootable Ubuntu 16.04 disc the other day for an older PC and I wasn’t sure how to burn the ISO image to a disc. It’s not that I’ve never done it–I’ve created dozens of bootable discs since the days of Windows 98–it’s just that I haven’t needed to burn a […]