Living in the city has shown me just how hard it can be to find an affordable apartment with a reasonable amount of space. Having two cats in such a small place doesn’t really give them much room to roam or pseudo hunt. Inspired by this cat tower, I decided to build an automatic cat …
In part one we discussed what exactly we’re trying to build, and what’s needed to begin assembling our cat laser pointer toy. Here in part two we’re going to take all the pieces we’ve gathered and assemble them into one beautiful creation. The goal of this part? Assemble the pan/tilt mount and servo motors. Solder …
You made it here to part four because pushing that button isn’t enough. No, you want to trigger this cat laser pointer toy remotely, or even on a schedule. Well you’re in luck, because I too wanted more ways to do the same thing. Part one got us on our way, part two was all …
At this point you’ve covered part one and part two (nice job!), or you didn’t and just happen to stumble upon part three of this guide (it’s good to have you). Here in part three we’ll be focusing primarily on writing the necessary python code to make our super evil laser contraption fully functional at the push of a button. …
Switching from subversion to Git was a paradigm shift that took some getting use to, but looking back now, the switch was worth it. Rather than getting tied to any one Git UI, I wanted to get a grasp of plain old Git and the commands it offers. With that, I’ve created this Git Cheat …
Suddenly I began receiving a “call to undefined function” error when accessing my website. The admin section worked without issue, and there were no changes to the website aside from the automatic updates, but the website decided to no longer function correctly. The full error message was as follows: Error thrown Call to undefined function …
Entity Framework very much relies on conventions in order to accomplish a lot of what it does. In many cases it can be a hands-off tool: so long as you follow its conventions you should be in the clear. What do you do when the convention just isn’t cutting it? Entity Framework Rounding to Two …
I’ve recently delved into the world of mobile development using Xamarin with Visual Studio. A tutorial on their website introduced me to the Android toolbar, and how it can be used as a more robust and flexible action bar. This was fairly straightforward to implement but I had a requirement that the toolbar overlay shouldn’t …
Using Xamarin and Visual Studio I created a sample application to test out the new Camera2ApI. The application is straightforward: provide a stream from the camera and persist the image when a button is clicked. After the image is saved it’d be nice to actually see it on the file system; that’s where the Android …
Using AutoMapper, I created a mapping for an object with many complex properties, one of which I wanted to map to a primitive type. Here’s how I configured the map from the child property to the primitive type: CreateMap<ComplexType, int>() .ForMember(dest => dest, opt => opt.MapFrom(src => src.Id)); This looks like your standard map configuration: …
Hi, I'm Sam.
I'm a programmer and a DIYer. When I'm not finding things to build I enjoy cooking, hiking, camping and traveling the world with my best friend. Say Hello!