Tech Tidbits & More

Welcome to the Internet Home of John M. Wargo; I created this site back in 2009 so I could post articles about things that interested me. Herein you’ll find articles on a lot of different topic areas: Mobile development, Web development, Internet of Things (IoT), and a lot more. Every time I learn some new technology or complete some cool or interesting development or IoT project I publish an article here.

You’ll also find information about my books, source code projects on GitHub, and articles published in or on other sites or magazines, even videos of my many conference presentations or project demonstrations. I’m also especially fond of the series of Stupid Developer Tricks posts.

You can view all articles in reverse chronological order, or you can find articles by category. Of course, if you can’t find what you need in those views, use Search to find anything anywhere on the site.

Recent Posts

• Note: An AI Generated pill displayed in the list below indicates that the post description displayed on the page was generated from the post content using Generative AI (GenAI). The post content itself was written by a human (me).

• Parkit Scam

  Date: Posted Monday, December 23, 2024 at 07:03 AM  | Categories: Phishing

  I received an interesting phishing/scam text message this morning. It seemed to come from a Charlotte Parking company notifying me of an unpaid parking invoice in the amount of $4.35 but there were a lot of things about the message that made me realize it was a scam.

• Shop Store Delivering Package to the Wrong Address

  Date: Posted Friday, December 13, 2024 at 07:30 AM  | Categories: Miscellaneous

  Many online stores today use Shopify and the Shop app to manage payments, shipping and so on. I like the convenience of this approach, but there are a couple of issues I uncovered with it over the years.

• American Express Contact Details Scam

  Date: Posted Tuesday, November 26, 2024 at 10:12 AM  | Categories: Phishing

  I received an interesting email today that seemed to be from American Express indicating that someone (most likely a hacker) updated the phone number associated with my account. The email subject said: "Request To Update Your Contact Details Was Successful." and I almost panicked and clicked the link before I gave this careful thought.

• Google Identity Confirmation Failure

  Date: Posted Monday, November 25, 2024 at 07:54 AM  | Categories: Miscellaneous, Mobile Development

  Google recently started asking for ID verification for Play Store developers. The time came for me to submit mine and I dutifully submitted both a scan of my passport as well as a scan of my driver's license (both sides). Google, of course, repeatedly failed the verification process without telling me anything about what was wrong with my submission.

• Scammers Getting Slightly Smarter

  Date: Posted Thursday, November 21, 2024 at 07:18 PM  | Categories: Phishing

  In Postal Scam Urtye dot com, I pointed out a lot of different ways you can easily tell when a text message you receive is crap. I received a lot more of those types of text messages lately and it's fun to watch them evolve.

• Suspended Presidential Campaign

  Date: Posted Saturday, November 16, 2024 at 06:47 PM  | Categories: Miscellaneous

  A few weeks before the 2024 election, I suspended my campaign for president. I didn't want to keep votes from the candidate I wanted to win. I'm getting ready to delete the web site for my campaign but I thought I'd share with you links to the campaign store in case you want to pick up any Wargo 2024 branded items as a form of protest against our political system.

• Added Automated Mode to Link Checker

  Date: Posted Saturday, November 16, 2024 at 02:32 PM  | Categories: Node.js

  After publishing my link checker utility, I realized I wanted the ability to write the utility's settings in a project folder so I could quickly scan links for that project.

• Validating Links On This Site

  Date: Posted Saturday, November 16, 2024 at 10:47 AM  | Categories: Web Development

  When I migrated this site from Joomla! to Eleventy, one of the things I didn't spend much time on was validating the links in the site (both internal and external links). I recently decided to spend some time to check all of the links in the site and ended up spending time building a utility that automated the process for me.

• Yet Another Link Checker Utility

  Date: Posted Friday, November 15, 2024 at 06:03 PM  | Categories: Web Development

  Describes a node.js-based utility I created and published to validate web links in a web site or page.

• Conditional Prompting Using Prompts

  Date: Posted Sunday, November 10, 2024 at 12:18 PM  | Categories: Node.js

  Over the years, I published a variety of Node.js modules and CLIs; the CLIs because I wanted to automate some operation I needed to make easily repeatable. For my CLIs, I started building them using command-line arguments, but I quickly forgot the arguments and order. Next I used configuration files, but then that tied me into a specific file or set of files for different operations. Eventually I started using an npm module called prompts that allows me to prompt for all of the configuration options either as the only input into the program or for writing the settings to a default configuration file. Yesterday I spent some time figuring out how to do conditional prompts, so that's the topic of this post.