Blog

Here you can find my writings, mostly about my favorite types of things such as web technologies, physical computing, 3d Printing and artsy fartsy stuff in general.

Hooking into WordPress OEmbed for Responsive Video

Embedding videos in WordPress is simple thanks to WordPress excellent support for oEmbed enabled content on a number of popular sites. Just pasting in a video link is enough – WordPress handles turning it into an embedded player. This is…

Adding Jade to Yeoman’s Webapp Generator

Based on this article: http://phuse.ca/short-circuits-using-jade-templates-with-yeoman/, but modified for the current version of the yeoman generator at the time of this writing. npm install generator-webapp yo webapp npm install grunt-contrib-jade --save-dev Then edit your gruntfile to match the pastebin snippet below, and you are…

WP Engine Git Password Prompt

While setting up my developer key for use with WP Engine’s most excellent git functionality, I managed to mess up the process due to my impatience. It gives you a prompt to wait ten minutes, which I ignored, like many…

Using background-size:cover to Highlight an Image Feature

Most implementations of background cover I have seen and used myself in projects tend to use the cover style with background position center center (or 50% 50%), scaling from the center. This works great most of the time, since usually…

EM Calculator

I had a nice surprise while going about my business on Codepen today – another of my pens was featured! Yay! This time it was a simple tool I designed which aims to help calculate and understand px to em…

Using Text-Align Justify for Layout

Lately I have seen a lot of people using text-align:justify with display:inline-block to create layouts that would normally be done using a variety of other techniques. This post offers the simplest explanation I could muster and has a CodePen embedded…

Fun with HTML5 Canvas on Codepen

I have been really into Codepen.io recently. Not only is it a great place to share fun snippets with others, it’s also a handy tool for sharing an idea with other developers or designers. It has helped a lot for…

Pulse Sensor

I started looking into ways of setting up an Arduino to monitor heart rate data some time ago. The idea of building things that react to a heartbeat seems like such an interesting thing – a visualization of something very…

Automated Fish Feeder Project – Follow Up

Good news! My fish feeder worked as intended. We retuned from our vacation and found our little fishies happily swimming about, looking chubby and happy as can be. The hopper was emptied entirely (as I anticipated) so I would need…

Automated Fish Feeder Project

Here is a project I whipped up because I needed it, STAT! Derpy II, Pish and Zeet’s lives depend on it. Thanks to Instructables, Tinkercad and the Printrbot, I was able to get this all designed assembled and programmed in…