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).

• Amazon Refundable Order Scam

  Date: Posted Thursday, January 16, 2025 at 07:34 AM  | Categories: Phishing

  I received an interesting text message the other day purporting to be a message from Amazon letting me know about a "refundable order that needs to be processed." I could tell immediately that it was a scam or phishing attempt, so I thought I'd share what I saw.

• Refactored Goodreads Page Adjuster App

  Date: Posted Tuesday, January 14, 2025 at 05:32 PM  | Categories: Web Development

  AI Generated   I recently revamped my web app that helps accurately calculate reading progress in Goodreads. The app now looks much better thanks to MVP.css, and I upgraded it to React 19 while removing Bootstrap. The new design is cleaner and more visually appealing, making it easier to use.

• Timezone Fix for the Eleventy Stats Plugin

  Date: Posted Sunday, January 12, 2025 at 08:10 AM  | Categories: Eleventy

  AI Generated   I noticed a bug in my Eleventy Plugin Post Statistics where posts published on January 1st were counted as being published on December 31st of the previous year. The issue stemmed from the plugin converting dates to UTC. To fix it, I added the timezone offset to the date values, converting them to the local time zone. I also had to adjust some code to resolve a TypeScript compiler error.

• Eleventy Post Stats Plugin Broken

  Date: Posted Saturday, January 11, 2025 at 08:11 PM  | Categories: Eleventy

  AI Generated   I started blogging in 2025 and noticed a problem with my Eleventy Plugin Post Statistics. The plugin doesn't include posts published on January 1st in the statistics.

• Corrupt Arduino IDE Installation

  Date: Posted Saturday, January 11, 2025 at 08:57 AM  | Categories: Internet of Things (IoT)

  AI Generated   I recently encountered issues compiling code for an M5Stack project and struggled to resolve them. After finding outdated libraries on my system, I uninstalled everything, deleted leftover files, and reinstalled. I discovered additional files in the AppData folder that were causing the problem. Once I removed all the folders and reinstalled, my issues were resolved. It seems my system's configuration had become corrupted, preventing updated library installations.

• Eleventy Packages Page

  Date: Posted Saturday, January 4, 2025 at 09:07 AM  | Categories: Eleventy, Static Site Generators

  Describes an Eleventy global data file I created that allows me to easily display a list of my npm packages on this site.

• Welcome to 2025

  Date: Posted Wednesday, January 1, 2025 at 12:01 PM  | Categories: Miscellaneous

  Its the first day of 2025 and I thought I'd start things off a little differently this year. This post is both a retrospective on last year's activities and a look into the future of this site (at least for this year).

• Eleventy 3 Upgrade Fixed

  Date: Posted Monday, December 30, 2024 at 11:05 AM  | Categories: Eleventy, Static Site Generators

  In my Eleventy 3 Migration post yesterday, I described a process I used to migrate several Eleventy sites from V2 to V3. As part of that process, I was able to skip some important upgrade/migration steps because my development and deployment environments run Node.js version 22. Specifically, even though Eleventy 3 expects all modules to use ESM, a feature in Node.js 22 allowed my sites to build and deploy successfully without it. This post describes how I completed the successfully migration to ESM.

• Displaying Eleventy Version On A Page

  Date: Posted Sunday, December 29, 2024 at 11:25 AM  | Categories: Eleventy, Static Site Generators

  Describes how I display Eleventy build information on this site and how I had to change the process for Eleventy 3.0.

• Eleventy 3 Upgrade

  Date: Posted Sunday, December 29, 2024 at 10:11 AM  | Categories: Eleventy, Static Site Generators

  I run quite a few sites on Eleventy; you can see the complete list on this site's Sites area. The Eleventy team released version 3.0 a while back and I finally got around to upgrading some of the sites. This post describes the process I used to migrate a couple of the sites.