Blog

Over the past year, I've been experimenting with various technologies for building web applications. It is fun hosting them somewhere so other people can see them and writing blog articles about them. In the past web hosting cost money, not a lot of money, but enough to defer me from putting applications on the web. It also required a do-it-yourself approach to setting up the infrastructure, building the websites, uploading the website somewhere. If I wanted to make the site…

In this post, I'm going to be turning the COVID-19 statistics web application I've been building into a Progressive Web Application (PWA). PWAs are a modern way to provide an app like experience with a web application without having to build a native application or using a wrapper such as cordova to put it in the store. In short the main experience I'm looking for is the ability to install the web app as an application on a phone. Like many of the posts in this series…

After publishing my original application, I decided to add a few graphs to it to show daily test results and a few other trends. This is a short post to describe the changes. Charting in Angular There are several good charting libraries in Angular to use. For this, I decided to use ngx-charts. Mainly since my app was using SVG to render the USA map, I wanted a charting library based on SVG too. A lot of charting libraries will render based on the HTML Canvas element. While…

I've been working with Angular as my primary platform for building web applications for over a year now. I love it. I've typically used Angular Material as my UI component framework. However, there are several other good frameworks out there to build high quality applications. One of these that's always intrigued me has been the Clarity Design. It's an open source framework that's supported by VMware. I finally decided to give it a try for a small web application. The…

Last summer, my work place put into place a remote work policy. I jumped at the opportunity to work from home a few days a week, and overall it's been something I think is very positive for me personally and the company. One of the challenges to this was figuring out my setup regarding my monitors. I previously had two smaller monitors I had used as a work station at home. They were typical 1080p monitors, but not very large. They worked ok, but I always wished I could fit…

In my previous posts, I've introduced my pi-plate project and described how I set up a Raspberry Pi to work as a kiosk. In this post, I will briefly describe the application I built. I put the application I wrote up on Netlify to see, and the source code for the application is on GitHub. A link for the running application is here. The main application utilizes a few different technology stacks to build and deploy. These are: Angular Nginx Docker This blog will focus on the…

In my first post, I gave a brief introduction to the pi-plate. In this post, I want to talk about the work it took to get my Raspberry Pi to run as a kiosk. When I reference ‘running my Raspberry Pi as a kiosk’, I generally mean: The pi displays a window or application without any of the window manager chrome. A user cannot exit or switch to another application. The application running in the kiosk starts up automatically on boot. I had to read a lot of blogs to put this all…

I've recently been thinking of a few different projects around my home to build some sort of "kiosk" to display information. An example of this is a display for some SmartThings sensors I have around the house, another is calendar information by the door instead of the traditional paper calendar we have. Before I go all in and try to accomplish any of these, I wanted to build a basic proof of concept. So, I decided to make a Raspberry PI driven kiosk. This PoC is a nameplate…

I've been upgrading my home networking lately. My house was built with CAT5e cable running through it for phone service. However, I don't have a landline. So, I've been changing the wall plates to terminate with CAT5e and wired a lot of my home devices. The change isn't noticeable in most places. I've seen a difference in better buffering times in videos online, and improvements in latency-sensitive workloads (aka video games). I've been looking at other changes to my home…

I've been working for about a year now building applications in Java with Spring Boot. Don't get me wrong, I think Java is capable, and Spring Boot is a great framework that has no comparison in .NET. However, in terms of being able to get things done C# and .NET are by far my favorite language/environment. One thing I recently ran into is the use of generics in Java. In particular, I have a set of APIs and I'm conveying their requests and responses with DTOs. I also have a…