I recently started setting up Frigate for my family to use for security camera recording on a Synology Diskstation NAS.

The first home automation project I embarked on was getting multicolor LEDs strung up around the two large bushes in front of the house.

I like to have a running playlist in my preferred music player (foobar2000) to show my entire library sorted by most recently added music first, since I have a tendency to want to play the hell out of new songs I find, and also enjoy taking trips through time by scrolling back to music from earlier eras and reliving memories from that period of my life.

Perforce’s p4merge tool has an excellent 3-way merge interface that VSCode (at least today) does not provide. The license also allows for free commercial use!

I’ve recently started messing around with Home Automation, part of that has involved setting up an instance of Home Assistant - I opted to use the ready-to-run VM image that they provide for Hyper-V.

There are a few obscure customizations I make to my router over SSH that I’m documenting here so I can remember how to do them in the future.

Microsoft 365 Groups (formerly known as Outlook Groups as far as I can remember) are an easy way to set up a shared collaboration space with a group of colleagues. Creating a group provides you with a mailing list, shared calendar, and SharePoint space for documents.

At work I was prototyping using some hardware with special buttons that I wanted to respond to, but I didn’t know exactly what key presses those buttons were simulating.

I had a folder full of raw disk images I wanted to compress down for storage long-term. Here’s a little PowerShell one-liner to enumerate a folder full of *.iso files and squeeze them down into individual, ultra-compressed LZMA2 7z archives.

Thanks to this blog post.

Updated: 2020 August 3

If you have a signed SSL certificate from a trusted authority, you can use it to prevent Windows from popping that annoying “this connection isn’t trusted” dialog when RDPing into the box with the cert’s hostname. Thanks to this post on StackOverflow.

I always forget this command, so I figured I’d write it down:

Some notes to myself on a recent adventure trying to get Minecraft running in a Windows Server Core virtual machine inside of Hyper-V. I’ll refine this post later.

This was much harder than it should’ve been.

My web apps tend to be a mess.

I bought the Microsoft Touch Mouse awhile back… you know, this one:

I recently installed the Windows 10 Technical Preview (how exciting)! I’m loving the experience so far.

I’ve just added artist images to Tunr! Looking pretty smooth.

I’ve started adding some visualizations to the Tunr web client - heavily inspired by those featured on the Zune. Here’s quick demo of the first “effect”.

Here’s a video I released awhile back with a quick demo of some Tunr features!

I’ve started development on Tunr for Windows Phone! Check out the first dev video below:

Life’s busy with my job ramping up, and summer classes. But TUNR.

I’ve started working for the summer. I’ve also started my summer classes. But nothing can stop me from working on Tunr!

Tunr can play music now! A quick demo video is below. (It is muted by default, un-mute it to hear the songs playing).

I’ve been working a lot on Tunr, and it’s going quite well. On the back-end, Tunr can now accept uploaded music, track the meta data, and store the file in the Azure cloud. On the front-end, I’ve started working on the library browser. Here’s a quick demo video!

When I was a Junior or Senior in High School, I started this little project called RhythmCloud. This was around 2009. The idea behind RhythmCloud was that you could listen to your music anywhere, from any browser or mobile device, without ever having to sync anything. You’d simply run the RhythmCloud server on your home computer and it would stream your entire music library to any web browser.

Windows Phone 8.1 was recently made available for Developers. The set of changes it includes are staggering, some of the most notable being the Cortana assistant, Action Center, ‘Shape Writing’ (okay, it’s Swype) keyboard, and so much more.

Just a note to myself, I tend to forget the names of great tools that I always use.

So I’ve been working on a new project as of late. And by as of late, I mean for the past month.

For some of my web projects, I need to test against other devices (phones, tablets, Xboxes, etc.). By default, IIS Express launched by Visual Studio only allows local access to the running web server. Thankfully, I found this Stackoverflow post that explains how to work around this.

Today whilst trying to debug one of my sites on Android, I discovered that the Android emulator running in x86 mode with HAXM won’t cooperate with Hyper-V. The workaround, unfortunately, is to temporarily disable Hyper-V. This can be done with a simple command run as administrator