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Articles

This page lists all articles in reverse chronological order. Use the Categories page to view the list of categories or Search to locate a particular article.

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  • 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).

  • Automated Public Cert to Arduino Header Conversion

    Posted Monday, January 20, 2025 at 07:59 PM  in ESP32, 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

    Posted Thursday, January 16, 2025 at 07:34 AM  in 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

    Posted Tuesday, January 14, 2025 at 05:32 PM  in 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

    Posted Sunday, January 12, 2025 at 08:10 AM  in 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

    Posted Saturday, January 11, 2025 at 08:11 PM  in 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

    Posted Saturday, January 11, 2025 at 08:57 AM  in 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

    Posted Saturday, January 4, 2025 at 09:07 AM  in 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

    Posted Wednesday, January 1, 2025 at 12:01 PM  in 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

    Posted Monday, December 30, 2024 at 11:05 AM  in 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

    Posted Sunday, December 29, 2024 at 11:25 AM  in 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

    Posted Sunday, December 29, 2024 at 10:11 AM  in 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.

  • Upgrading Old Flutter Apps

    Posted Saturday, December 28, 2024 at 11:31 AM  in Flutter, Mobile Development

    I recently purchased a Google Pixel 9 phone and migrated all of my stuff to it. The transfer process is very thorough and gets all of my app store apps plus existing data. Unfortunately, Google's migration process doesn't migrate applications I deployed to the device via side-loading (installing them directly on the device using Android Studio). These are Flutter apps I wrote for myself and I only update them when I get a new device. This post explains my process for upgrading the apps for new phones.

  • Audi Q7 Drive System Failure

    Posted Thursday, December 26, 2024 at 07:52 PM  in Miscellaneous

    I am an Audi driver, and have been for many years now. Until recently anyway. I was even making plans to trade in my current vehicle, a 2018 Audi Q7, for an Audi SQ5. However, while driving to Asheville NC to help with Helene cleanup, I experienced a nightmare *Drive System Failure and haven't had access to my car in over three months. This post describes my nightmare and the apparent Audi design flaw that ruined my vehicle and therefore dramatically reduced the value of the car.

  • Parkit Scam

    Posted Monday, December 23, 2024 at 07:03 AM  in 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

    Posted Friday, December 13, 2024 at 07:30 AM  in 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

    Posted Tuesday, November 26, 2024 at 10:12 AM  in 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

    Posted Monday, November 25, 2024 at 07:54 AM  in 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

    Posted Thursday, November 21, 2024 at 07:18 PM  in 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

    Posted Saturday, November 16, 2024 at 06:47 PM  in 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

    Posted Saturday, November 16, 2024 at 02:32 PM  in 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.

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