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).

  • Playing Around with Info Orbs

    Date: Posted Saturday, February 8, 2025 at 08:59 AM  | Categories: ESP32, Internet of Things (IoT)

    A while back, I learned about this ESP32 project called Info Orbs; it's a simple project that pairs 5 1.8 inch circular displays with a simple stand and some pretty cool software. The kit seems to be designed as a first project for people interested in getting into Arduino; it requires a little bit of soldering and the entire software configuration and deployment process runs in Visual Studio Code. The assembly instructions are simple and easy to follow.

  • ESP32 HTTP Client Request with JSON Body

    Date: Posted Wednesday, February 5, 2025 at 06:57 AM  | Categories: ESP32, Internet of Things (IoT)

    A few weeks ago I published an article called ESP32 Connect Using HTTPS that demonstrated how to build an Arduino sketch for the ESP32 platform that connected to a remote server using TLS (HTTPS). I wrote that article because I wanted to learn how to connect to a REST API running on a server online and I knew that most (all) modern API servers required TLS.

  • Amazon Prime Invoice Scam

    Date: Posted Wednesday, January 29, 2025 at 07:25 AM  | Categories: Phishing

    Received a scam/phishing email the other day that really surprised me. The message is so clearly a scam that I wonder why they even bothered to send it. Here's the email message:

  • Phishing Email Elon Electronic Device

    Date: Posted Sunday, January 26, 2025 at 12:09 PM  | Categories: Phishing

    An interesting email showed up in my inbox this morning. Interesting because it appears to be from Oracle (and I work for Oracle) but there's a whole bunch of weirdness about the message. Take a look, here's the message:

  • Certificate Conversion Utility in Gemini

    Date: Posted Saturday, January 25, 2025 at 09:56 AM  | Categories: Miscellaneous

    AI Generated   I'm excited to find out that my Certificate to Arduino announcement post made it into Google Gemini.

  • Certificate to Arduino Command-line

    Date: Posted Friday, January 24, 2025 at 06:59 AM  | Categories: Arduino, JavaScript, Internet of Things (IoT)

    Before I created the web application described in Automated Public Cert to Arduino Header Conversion, I started with a simple node.js command-line utility. I like command-line tools and starting with the Node version made sense to me. I switched to the web app version once I realized that most people who needed to do the certificate conversion to Arduino wouldn't have node installed on their development systems.

  • ESP32 Connect Using HTTPS

    Date: Posted Wednesday, January 22, 2025 at 07:02 AM  | Categories: ESP32, Internet of Things (IoT)

    As I described in my previous post, I'm working on a project where I'm using an M5Stack device to interact with a Google Firebase Function I have running in the cloud. As I started planning my project's code, I realized that the SSL (HTTPS) requirement Firebase Functions forces on applications would be a problem for me.

  • Automated Public Cert to Arduino Header Conversion

    Date: Posted Monday, January 20, 2025 at 07:59 PM  | Categories: ESP32, Raspberry Pi, Internet of Things (IoT), Web Development

    AI Generated   I was working on a project using an M5Stack device to interact with a Google Firebase Function, but I ran into an issue with the SSL requirement. After exploring different options, I found that ESP32 devices could send HTTPS requests, but required the server's public cert embedded in the code. To simplify this process, I created a web app called Cert2Arduino that automates the conversion of public certificates into Arduino-compatible code.

  • 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.

See the Full List

All Articles

View the 564 articles on this site in reverse chronological order.

Categories

View a list of the 30 categories in this site; from there you can drill down into all articles by category in reverse chronological order.

Books

View details regarding the books I authored.

External Publications

View a list of all of the articles I published in other publications (besides here).

Projects

View some of my projects that span multiple posts on this site or multiple GitHub repositories.

Sightings

You can find me on more places than this site; the Sightings page lists the other places where you can find stuff I created.

Repositories

View the source code projects in my public GitHub account.

Packages

Public packages I published on npm.

Events

View a list of all of my upcoming events (conference presentations, product demos, etc.).

Sites

View a list of the Internet sites I maintain.