“Where Am I?”
Introduction
This is part of an accidental series on a small Node.js app I’ve built to keep me abreast of Philadelphia Department of Streets’ trash/recycling collections status. Like many things this past year, trash/recycling collections have been pretty wonky in the city due to the pandemic and the sudden onslaught of winter 2021 storms dumping mounds of snow and ice in our region.
Why set out my trash on Friday if it’s not going to be picked up til Wednesday or even next Friday? This little Node.js app is an attempt to alleviate that and keep my trash from blowing all…
Bugs I found and how I fixed them
What I’m Building
It should come to no surprise to anyone who has been alive for the past ten months in the U.S. that things are …different, unexpected, and dare I say: unprecedented. Due to COVID and the sudden shift for millions to work-from-home, or worse yet, surprise-you’re-unemployed, has created a monumental uptick in residential trash output. This led to a lot of delays here in Philadelphia that were unpredictable and often signalled by a tweet from the Streets Department that there would be delays followed by estimates of when collections would resume.
Introduction
Recently I was tinkering with a React app to control my Philips Hue smart LED lights that we have around the house. I wanted to play around with something low stakes that I want to eventually host on a local touchscreen-connected Raspberry Pi that’s always on and maybe even wall-mount it!
If you don’t know, the Philips Hue smart light ecosystem exposes a REST-ish API to your local network where you can query general settings, status, schedules and config via GET requests and then making changes with PUT requests. …
Overview
- What the heck is UUID?
- Why would I want to use a UUID?
- Rails Setup
- DatabaseSetup
- The Big Reveal!
- Epilogue
1. What the heck is UUID?
A universally unique identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit number used to identify information in computer systems…While the probability that a UUID will be duplicated is not zero, it is close enough to zero to be negligible. — Wikipedia
Here’s an example:
2. Why would I want to use a UUID?
Bad actors: and no, I don’t mean Steven Seagal and his perma-sunglasses face.
As a performing artist I had always been drawn to and needed music. As time went on music production became more and more integrated with and facilitated by technology and computers. Before long I was making my own sounds, songs and video with entry-level digital audio workstations and video editors like GarageBand and iMovie. This gave way to Final Cut Pro and Ableton Live. Ableton Live led to performing my music out in the world in unique and increasingly spontaneous ways with the adoption of USB MIDI controllers and wearables. …
