Dryer Done Notifications with Home Assistant and Iotawatt

I do the laundry in our house, and it often takes most of a day because I don’t hear the dryer finish. I set a timer on my phone, but it’s often not done when I go check on it. Today Darinee and I finally implemented a “Dryer is done” notification on my phone, so I’ll know exactly when it’s...

Aurora Projector Wi-Fi IR Remote

Editor’s Note: This is the first guest post from my wife, Darinee!

How to Performance Optimize Existing Code

You’ve got some existing code and you might want to make it faster. How hard is it to make it faster? How do you go about it? What tools do you need? Is it even worth doing?

Performance Tuning: From 1.5M to 50M DateTimes Parsed per second in C#

I love the Visual Studio C# Performance Profiler, and am shocked to find out how many engineers around me haven’t used it before. It’s very easy to quickly check the performance of your code and you’d be amazed how often there are significant performance bottlenecks there that are very easy to fix.

FFMPEG Cheat Sheet

I’ve been using FFMPEG to transcode gaming videos often lately, and I find the reference documentation confusing.

Regex Builder 2.10

Today I’m releasing a new version of Regex Builder, 14 years after the previous release, thanks to an email from a fan. Regular Expressions (regexes) are a powerful way to search text, but also hard to write and very hard to debug, kind of like SQL queries. I wrote Regex Builder originally around 2004 (!!) to help me...

CloudFlare Pages Custom Domain Setup

This blog is hosted on CloudFlare Pages with CloudFlare-managed DNS, and I finally have DNS resolution working fully. The documentation was confusing and incomplete - here is what I needed to know.

Photo Optimization

I recently decided to make a local and second-cloud backup of our digital photos, and decided to see if I could optimize them in the process. I figured our phones would produce decently optimized JPG photos directly, but it turns out that a quick pass with an optimization tool reduced the sizes by half with no difference that I could...

GitHub Pages and Domain.com DNS

After some (mis)adventures, I finally got my custom domain name directed to my GitHub Pages site successfully. Here is what worked, in case someone else has the same problem.