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

• zx for Simplified Node Process Spawning

  Date: November 26, 2023 | Categories: Developer Tools A recap of a portion of my All Things Open 2023 presentation covering the `zx` project.

• Visual Studio Code Progress Cancelled by Async Task

  Date: November 26, 2023 | Categories: Developer Tools

  I'm working on my first Visual Studio Code extension and as part of the extension's work, it calls a long-running external API that could take 30 seconds or more to complete. I started looking for way to display a progress dialog and discovered the vscode.window.withProgress. As I looked through the different examples I found out there, they all showed how the code that displays and manages the progress item decides when to close the window.

• Pumpkin Controller Native Apps for Windows

  Date: November 19, 2023 | Categories: Flutter, Microsoft Windows

  In the post I published earlier today I mentioned that someday I might make a native windows version of my Pumpkin Controller app (See Glowing Pumpkin). Well apparently today's the day.

• Accessing an Arduino ESP32 Web Server

  Date: November 19, 2023 | Categories: Internet of Things (IoT), ESP32 The third (and, I think, final) article in this series. In this post, I show the different options for connecting to the ESP32 web server highlighting the limitations and restrictions that apply to make your life miserable.

• Outlook Windows Delete Empty Inbox Folders

  Date: November 18, 2023 | Categories: Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Outlook Describes a free utility I published to automatically delete empty Inbox folders in Outlook on Microsoft Windows

• Eleventy Splitting Category Data Across Two Table Columns

  Date: November 18, 2023 | Categories: Eleventy

  The Categories list on this site is getting pretty long, so one of the things I wanted to do this weekend was migrate the Unordered List (<ul></ul>) the site used today into a two column table. I asked Bard and it generated relatively useless code for me; after three tries I finally got something that looked like it would work, but didn't.

• Using UDP Broadcast to Synchronize Actions Across Arduino Devices

  Date: November 5, 2023 | Categories: Arduino, Internet of Things (IoT)

  With my Glowing Pumpkin Project Refresh my ultimate goal was to synchronize LED Matrix colors across multiple devices so I could place one in a pumpkin in each of the front dormers in my house. I finally got it all working and published the project yesterday at Glowing Pumpkin Sync UDP.

• Arduino UDP Broadcast Receiver

  Date: November 2, 2023 | Categories: Arduino, ESP32, Internet of Things (IoT), Flutter I created an Arduino sketch that implements an UDP broadcast receiver which allows me to control multiple Arduino devices simultaneously.

• Read Pin State Between Two Arduino Devices

  Date: November 1, 2023 | Categories: Arduino, Internet of Things (IoT) As I worked on my latest Halloween project, I realized that one of the things I wanted to do was read the pin state from a different/separate Arduino device. My project used two Arduino-compatible devices for different purposes and I wanted to be able to send a signal from one to the other. I looked around for a while and found a bunch of Forum questions on this topic and answers for the most part, but I couldn't find a post that actually described it in detail. This post does that.

• Eleventy Date-only Filter

  Date: October 31, 2023 | Categories: Eleventy I noticed recently that the site's stats page displayed the first and last post dates with time information even though the values only contained dates. I created a simple Eleventy Filter to trim them to date only with the format I wanted. This post shows how I did it.