Programming

I show you how I permanently un-adblock Google Analytics to get full visitor insights on my pages through some zany techniques. I thought about patenting these, but it’s more fun to share. Enjoy total visitor analytics despite regex-based adblockers and DNS blockers (e.g. Pi-Hole).

Let’s write a Python 3 daemon to animate an RGB LED according to the CPU load. Let’s also learn Python 3 from scratch as a Java developer and see all the gotchas we can encounter along the way.

Prevent the screensaver from activating by jiggling the mouse periodically with an inexpensive USB hardware mouse jiggler. Here I show how to create a mouse jiggler from a two-dollar ATtiny85 Digistump and about 15 minutes of time.

My project this weekend was to fork both the BlinkStick C firmware and the Java API to make the Digispark USB hardware with the AVR ATtiny85 microprocessor do something never done before: execute color patterns on the microcontroller, not the host CPU. I outline how I failed many times, and how I eventually succeeded with links to my Github repos and pictures of my hardware hacks.

Why use AWS Glacier for big data backup? It’s exceedingly inexpensive to archive data for disaster recovery on Glacier. AWS Glacier is only US$0.004 per GB/mo, and their SDK is beautiful. Here I outline a pricing matrix for cloud storage providers, and I take a look at the Java SDK for working with AWS Glacier to effectively archive 200GB a week.

This is a problem story about how I preferred Java to other languages to communicate with a troublesome financial REST API endpoint because Java is a strongly-typed and verbose language where it is easy to write unit tests and build up solid modules to make a complete, resilient project.

Sometimes you need to be alerted when a website string is present or absent. Here I outline a quick and easy method to alert you to such changes specifically in JSON data using just a free Chrome browser extension. I then showcase two case studies how this has helped me with retail shopping and domain name purchasing.

This would make a good interview question: There are about 120,000 public North American securities, bonds, rights, and index symbols. You have a paid API that can access all of them in OHLCV format if they are quotable. There are two critical API constraints: 15,000 calls per hour 20 calls per second Napkin math Minute […]

I’d like to share my efforts to prevent page breaks in the middle of paragraphs and maximize the use of page space when printing web pages to PDF. I’ll outline how this PHP+NodeJS+Chrome tool and algorithm accomplish this. The motivation is to prevent pictures from being cut off, cut halfway through, or from being pushed […]

Among friends let’s agree we’ll be privately caching videos and not permanently saving them, or we’ll be using them for Fair Use, and we’ll certainly not upload nor share these videos outside of the originating platform (e.g. YouTube.com). Existing YouTube downloader scripts: YouTube-Downloader (does not work with videos using a cipher signature) YouTube video downloader […]

When getting started with LINE API messaging, you need to know the mid of a message recipient. It’s not his/her username. It’s a string that looks like ub8dbd4a12c322f6c0118883d839c55a4. LINE utilizes a callback URL that you can set for your trial LINE bot. At this endpoint you can place a script, shown below, which will report […]

Using a fabulous WordPress plugin called External Links to put little arrow icons beside external links was the task this morning. Installation and setup took less than 60 seconds and all worked well. But wait, there are arrow icons in my header navigation links. Surely as per the documentation I can add the noicon class […]

Sometimes one of my sites is under attack from a click-fraud campaign. I needed to devise a way to detect such an attack and instantly and automatically change my Cloudflare security level from ‘medium’ to ‘under attack’. When in under-attack mode, Cloudflare performs additional browser checks to filter out robots. It doesn’t stop all the […]