Cross Dominant

I’ve been using Node-RED for many years, mostly for fun and personal projects. The coolest thing I did with it was to build the prototype for the NodeConf EU 2018 badge back-end. But 2024 is the first time I’ve worked with it in production, with the ServisBOT team doing some pretty incredible things using it. One aspect I’ve been interested in recently is local persistence beyond context stores. Of course my first port of call was the world’s greatest database, SQLite. »

Over the past 18 months or so, I’ve been replacing various IFTTT and Low-Code functions with my own code running either in GitHub Actions or AWS Lambda. The latest one is a simple function to save all my latest GitHub Stars to Pinboard once an hour. This way, no matter what IFTTT/Zapier/etc decide to change this month, I don’t have to change anything. Some of my Serverless functions have been running for years with no updates required. »

My wonderful late mother-in-law Mary bought us an original massive George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine more than 10 years ago. Like most people we discovered it was pretty rubbish at cooking almost everything but was a superb toasted sandwich maker. With 5 kids, we have easily toasted thousands of cheese-based sambos. Unfortunately, as with all non-stick surfaces, eventually it wore away on the grill until it became a stick surface. »

Yesterday I was amused and faux-shocked to see that the company who did more to damage RSS than any other, got rid of the RSS feed for its Chrome Developer Blog. So this morning I gave ChatGPT a few nudges/samples and it generated a basic Python script to create the feed. GitHub Copilot took care of some refinements and GitHub Actions took care of generating the feed once per hour and providing it via GitHub Pages. »

Whilst there is a ton of useful data on the EPA Ireland web-site, it’s not exactly easy to track what’s going on. After my recent RSS post, I got a request from Ashley to see if something better was doable with the EPA data. After a bit of playing around I was able to scrape the thousands of individual RSS feeds and generate what is hopefully helpful to those of you who wish to monitor submissions on the site. »

Bring out your dead I’m that guy, the one who never gave up on blogs and never ever gave up on RSS. “Let me tell you, young whippersnappers, what the Internet was like in 2007, it was glorious,” etc. My GitHub account is mostly just a collection of scrapers to turn webpages into RSS for all those companies who have killed their feeds over the years. RSS and advertising never really made good bedfellows. »

Sir Clive launched the greatest home computer of all time on April 23rd 1982, almost 40 years ago. I got mine in late 1982 and I still have it. Better, faster, stronger. I wanted to do something to mark the occasion and decided to play around with Z88DK, a C Compiler and toolchain for 8-bit micros like the Speccy. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and it turned out to be ridiculously easy to write programs using it. »

Two things happened in early 2012 that have made the past almost-decade a geeky joy - I discovered the Arduino project and the first Raspberry Pi was released. Since then I’ve had a ridiculous amount of fun with both and built a ton of useful and useless projects. Despite having a Masters degree in Electronics, I’ve never worked as a Electronic Engineer and have always lived in the software world. I’d often wanted to dabble over the years but everything seemed just too difficult. »

It looks like I first started talking about MongoDB online back in 2011 - We’ve come a long way baby. Right, need to finish watching the MongoDB vids (easier than I thought) and then do an Amazon ELB setup for kicks. — Conor O'Neill (@conoro) May 28, 2011 Mongo has remained one of my favourite tools for getting things done. I always think that’s why it succeeded. Whilst the factions argued it out on HN, developers just got on with using it for practical purposes. »

Every Halloween for the past decade or so, I’ve built something silly to scare or entertain the trick-or-treaters. Some years it works brilliantly, other years, not so well. But the basic idea is always the same - detect arrival of kids and use sound/light/motion to jump-scare them. And every Halloween is a last-minute race to assemble electronics, plastic, duct-tape and code. That code is often a horrendous unreliable mish-mash of Arduino, Espruino, Python, Node. »