If you're using DD-WRT with DNSmasq and "No DNS rebind" enabled (the default,) add the following to "Additional DNSmasq options" to allow xip.io to work:

rebind-domain-ok=xip.io

Then save and apply settings in DD-WRT.  Alternately you can directly edit dnsmasq.conf.  Give it a quick test with

dig 127.0.0.1.xip.io

This probably also works for similar services like ngrok.com, nip.io, burrow.io, etc.

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Er, wait, it's almost 2016!  Anyway, I've lately felt compelled to write something, in part because I haven't been doing much open source or work that I can otherwise publish.  

What I've been doing lately:  At VoltServer, I'm back in embedded land, writing C firmware which I actually find sort of fun, if not tedious occasionally for lack of the comforts we take for granted in high-level development.  Most of my time is more traditional web-based code though, and I've had some ...

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In deciding which client side MVC framework to choose, it's enlightening to look at the Github stats for the main contenders:  Angular, Ember and Backbone/ Marionette.  My main goal was to try to ascertain community momentum & relative maturity of these solutions.

Backbone

Ember

By looking at the above, Ember also has some pretty good velocity and set of core contributors.

Backbone & Marionette

For Backbone, I needed to include Marionette as well since I assume most people are not using just Backbone.

 

Conclusion

As people love to point ...

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A quick script I wrote to batch create photo thumbnails for use with FancyBox.  This means each thumbnail gets the same filename with '_m' appended before the extension.  It uses the ImageMagick command-line tool convert to perform the actual image processing.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys, os, subprocess


def convert(directory=None, size='300x300'):

 if not directory: directory = os.getcwd()
 print('Dir: %s' % directory)

 if not size: size='300x300'

 for f in os.listdir(directory):
  parts = f.split('.')
  if len(parts) < 2:
   print('Ignoring file %s' % f ...

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Grocery stores need to build a decent mobile app.  This idea seems incredibly obvious, so it pains me that none of the major grocery chains have done it (at least that I know of... if someone has, please let me know I will shop there!)  Here's why...

Little keychain barcode fobs suck and so do paper circulars.  Making a weekly shopping list is a chore, especially when you care about buying stuff on sale and have to flip through those (sucky) paper circulars to find what's ...

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Check out my open source report card.  Pretty neat use of the Github API.

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So a number of folks have described how to use Octopress with S3.  However most of them don't describe how to easily publish to S3, or require an external command-line tool to upload the generate files.  I solved this by using the aws/s3 gem and creating a new rake task. 

rake deploy_s3[blog]  # deploys all blog files

I also added a task to ping Google and Bing when the sitemap updates:

rake ping # tells Google & Bing to crawl updated sitemaps

You can see the full code ...

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Here a shot of the widget on the lockscreen:



And here's a view of Twitter post details (including linked photo previews, and linked @mentions and #hashtags!)

   
Hoping to release v1 soon!

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Because all of the social homescreen widgets out there suck, and I hate opening the Twitter app.  The default FB and Twitter widgets aren't even scrollable. 

LauncherPro has a good one but it only works if you use the LauncherPro home screen, and it is constantly unresponsive.  (It must be doing DB/ network fetching in the UI thread...  Naughty!) 

So naturally, I write my own.

I will probably release this on the Play Store, maybe free with a paid version that supports more services (Facebook, Instagram, etc.)

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Remoht.us is a demo I created that parallels in many ways the work I do during my day job: push-based device control and telemetry.  Remoht.us a web app and client software that let you monitor environmental sensors (in this case temperature, light and occupancy) and also allows toggling relays.  It also uses technology that is accessible to the average joe: Google AppEngine for the UI, the Raspberry Pi as the hardware gateway and the Arduino for the low-level sensor control. (I am tempted to also add ...

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