Hardware The RPi The Raspberry Pi is a (I think) Pi 3 with Wifi I found in the garage with a cheap clear acrylic case. It might have been a RetroPie rig in a prior life? Or one I was “gonna get around to” doing something with and finally did? Then for this project I bought a Raspberry Pi camera and a small acrylic...

Running the software Frontend server The frontend has three responsibilities: Display information Perform access control (don’t let strangers on the internet print out jobs) Forward appropriate calls to the backend I’m using Go’s base templates for dynamic content, the Echo framework for the webapp endpoints, and...

Problem Space To automate the process of printing and reporting back a ZPL payload, we need: A way to get the ZPL from the user A way to send the ZPL to a printer A way to take a picture A way to send it back to the user A way to get the ZPL from the user A web service makes sense here. We want an API or a frontend...

Introduction In my spare time on weekends in between errands and mornings before everyone wakes up, I’ve been working on a little project I’ve been having a lot of fun with: ZPL-O-Rama. The Problem A large part of my employer’s line of business is creating shipping labels, and a large number of those aren’t simply...

Introduction A while ago I was bored with the Mechanical Keyboard rabbit hole and started looking into other, equally strange rabbit holes to dive into. At around the same time I hit my iPod Classic’s 160GB limit. I’m not yet ready to hack it up to have bigger storage: I plan to keep it in working “original”...

So it’s 2021 and about the entirety of my job is integrating third party systems with internal ones, which then reach out to other third-party services. A lot of stuff uses SFTP still. In this day and age anything not on HTTP seems barbaric, but SFTP does have its advantages. SFTP is format agnostic This goes for...

This was initially a blog post I wrote on my employer’s internal system, but it’s interestingly useful and it doesn’t contain any trade secrets so I figure I’ll share. A common pattern that seems obvious when you need to shuttle data around in file form is to use a temporary file against the filesystem using the...

I’ve been using the Rectangle window manager for mac for the last couple of weeks and it’s been the most helpful thing since Mission Control (and setting up a hot corner to activate it). I’ve tried to use full tiling managers before but I’ve found it difficult because 1) Irregularly sized window totally mess up the...

I moved to the Bay Area 6 years ago after stubbornly refusing to for over a decade before because I wanted to be in the middle of the world of software. 2020 made some of that luster wear off. Our office closed at the end of March, 2020, for what was scheduled to be 2 months, which eventually stretched out into over...

As the parent of an almost three year old, I don’t get much time to myself, and I’ve given up on video games that don’t have playtimes under 15 minutes (that discounts anything with load times or cutscenes). In my spare time I have to find other things to do that are low impact and can be cut into small amounts of...

So I bought that dang Chromebook over three years ago at this point and it keeps chugging on. Google has continued to ship OS updates (which I only notice as weird, arbitrary UI changes) and I can still use it to code but its main purpose now is its new life: ChromeOS runs Android apps pretty well, so I put an SD...

February 8th marks the fifth anniversary of me moving to the Bay Area to work for tech startups. In retrospect it’s been a great experience despite it being the Bay Area. Culture Living in the Inland Empire, I was an hour away from LA and all that culture, but I never bothered doing it. Living 5 miles outside of San...