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).

• 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.

• Amazon Delivery in 2036

  Date: Posted Sunday, November 10, 2024 at 12:06 PM  | Categories: Miscellaneous

  Imagine my surprise when I received an email from Amazon letting me know that an album I purchased a while ago, (Opeth's Last Will and Testament), wouldn't be delivered until 2036.

• Adding Sidebars to an Eleventy Site

  Date: Posted Sunday, November 3, 2024 at 02:43 PM  | Categories: Eleventy

  I decided recently that one of the things missing from this site was the ability to have call-outs in the content. My buddy Scott Good was here this weekend working on something in my workshop, so, while we waited for some glue to dry, I asked him to add some call-out CSS to the site. After he left, I added some code to the site to make it all work.

• No Posting

  Date: Posted Tuesday, October 15, 2024 at 07:53 PM  | Categories: Miscellaneous

  Wow, no posts from me in a while. I apologize for that, but I've been spending a lot of time in my workshop making sawdust, and I've not had much I wanted to blog about.

• Flame Throwing Pumpkin

  Date: Posted Tuesday, October 15, 2024 at 07:34 PM  | Categories: Arduino, Internet of Things (IoT)

  Back in 2019, I decided to finally start work on a Flame Throwing pumpkin project for Halloween. I saw some projects like this in the past, and I wanted to do my own version. Some projects do some pretty sophisticated things to make a flame thrower in a pumpkin (like using a solenoid to push down the nozzle of a spray can (hair spray or WD-40)) but others use a simple air freshener (short spurt) in front of a candle.

• Cloned Tool Shopping

  Date: Posted Wednesday, July 24, 2024 at 07:26 PM  | Categories: Woodworking

  As you probably know from this site, I'm a geek and a software developer. I'm also a woodworker and it feels like I'm going to pull in more woodworker stories this year - mostly because I've been doing more woodworking than coding lately.