Tons and tons of programming and electronics projects!
Author Archives: Eric Mesa
Review: A Man On the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts
A Man On the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin My rating: 4 of 5 stars The book that was used by Ron Howard, et al to make the Apollo 13 movie! I got this book as part of a space-themed Humble Audiobook Bundle. As I was choosing the next audiobook […]
Trying out the Code Syntax Block Plugin
I’m not a huge fan of plugins for key parts of the site. There are some blog posts that no longer make sense because they used, for example, the iframe plugin to embed Google Maps. That said, my previous solution for displaying code on the site – special CSS is also brittle because I lose […]
Review: Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 133
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 133 by Neil Clarke My rating: 4 of 5 stars As usual, the per-story reviews are below this section. But first, a ranking of said stories. The stories I REALLY liked: The Sum of Her Expectations, The Last Boast-Builder in Ballyvoloon, Intro to Prom, Shiomah’s LandGreat: Red Lights, And RainGood: The Psychology […]
I can’t believe this blog is 15 Years Old!
I missed the 15 year anniversary this February because I was busy with family visiting and then COVID-19 happened and next thing I knew it was the end of July and I was realizing just how long this site has been around. The crazy thing is that in my first blog post on this blog, […]
Opening Adabox 015 – Come to Your Sensors
I’ve been awaiting this Adabox forever because of the pandemic. It’s finally here. Celebrate my excitement at my first Adabox!
Today in Programming: MakeCode and Python
Python A user of my Extra Life Donation Tracker program discovered that I had introduced a regression for brand new users who didn’t have a persistent setting. I thought about it overnight and it was exactly what I thought it would be – when I switched away from threading for the GUI, I forgot to […]
Last Few Days in Programming: Python and Arduino
Python Spent the last few days finalizing the 5.0 release of my Extra Life Donation Tracker and then pushed ahead to get version 5.1 out. Here’s the PyPi page if you want to use it for your Extra Life live streams. Arduino I got back to my BBQ Themostat project and did some minor programming […]
Today in Programming: Microsoft MakeCode
With the twins, I messed around with a Neopixel strip. Not sure what I’d do with one in a future project, but at least I know how to program it in MakeCode now. Our project:
Today in Programming: Microsoft MakeCode
Since I’ve been making a lot of great progress programming with the kids in Scratch, I bought some Circuit Playground Expresses to program with the kids. The Circuit Playground Express can program in Arduino’s C dialect, CircuitPython, or Microsoft MakeCode, which uses blocks like Scratch. Today Scarlett and I made our first useful bit of […]
Setting up my Raspberry Pi Zero W for the Pimoroni Enviro Mini pHAT
As I mentioned before, I got a Raspberry Pi Zero W to replace my Arduino MKR WIFI 1010 and ENV board in the bathroom. My Pimoroni Enviro Mini pHAT (or bonnet, as Adafruit calls them) finally arrived a few days ago, so I setup a git repository for my code. The Pimoroni git Enviro+/Enviro Mini […]
Today in Programming: Python
I noticed that something had gone screwy with the Raspberry Pi 1B in the garage that was monitoring the garage door. I restarted it and discovered that last time I was coding and working on making it more robust if it had a temporary lapse in WiFi (so it wouldn’t crash), I’d created a little […]
Vivaldi on Windows Part 2 (plus a teeny bit about Vivaldi on Linux)
I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for about a week now. As I said in the penultimate paragraph of the post where I mentioned exploring various browsers, I don’t really use my browser on Windows for much more than uploading YouTube videos. And I mentioned last time that it wasn’t the best setup […]
Today in Programming: Python and Scratch
Scratch Once again I worked on some Scratch projects with the kids. This time it involved a sports theme. I let the kids choose which games they wanted to create and Sam chose to create the game where Scratch the Cat goes Skiing. Having done this for a few weeks now, it wasn’t too much […]
Upgrading main computer (Supermario) to Fedora 32
It’s been about a month since Fedora 32 was released, so I decided to try and upgrade Supermario to Fedora 32. First I had to disable the dropbox repo since they don’t have a Fedora 32 binary yet. Other conflicts included: bat in module gimp in module meson in module ninja in module pythnon3-pytest-testmon (doesn’t […]