LAMP!

15 May 2011 Electronics

So I’ve been moving in to hardware hacking rather than software. I’ve been working in IT software for 8 years now, so something new is fun! Plus if you get hardware wrong you definitely know about it. First thing I noticed was lighting adequate for software work is useless for tiny hardware work, so I set about building a custom lamp for it. So, I started with a cheap clip-on desk lamp, and with some components from eBay and a LED pattern laser cut by Ponoko I set to work (pics in full post)

sitharus

Super bio with markdown support COOL

New Zealand

Npgsql, multiple Entity Framework contexts and enum mappings

Sep 9, 2018

One of the cool features of PostgreSQL is in-database enumeration types. With Entity Framework Core 2.1 and the latest Npgsql packages these become (almost) first class types in EF. I say almost because migrations can only create enumerations, any changes have to be manually added to the migrations. My personal project ended up with multiple EF contexts. No real reason, it just ended up like that. Following the Npgsql documentation I used a class static constructor to map the enumerations to Npgsql

Cookbook Review: Wheat & Gluten-Free Home Baking

Jan 1, 2018

Wheat & Gluten-Free Home Baking by Lola Workman, unfortunately not available on Kindle. This is one of my newest cookbooks, but it is rapidly becoming one of my favourites. I purchased this late last year from Cook The Books, a local cookbook store and a very dangerous place for my wallet. It’s well worth a visit if you’re in to any sort of cooking. Wheat & Gluten-Free Home Baking concentrates on breads and buns and it does these really well.

Cookbook Review: Bunner's Bakeshop

Dec 12, 2017

I have many gluten free cookbooks, so I’ve decided to start reviewing them so everyone else can pick the best. Back in 2013 my wife and I visited Toronto, I’d managed to convince her that the Toronto Indycar race would be fun to watch. While over there we went to the amazing Bunner’s Bakeshop, a completely gluten free and vegan bakery. I’m not vegan but I was seriously impressed with their cakes and cinnamon rolls.

Webpack, Typescript, Typed CSS modules and .NET Core

Sep 9, 2017

I’ve been working on my side project on and off and I finally decided to get with the times and upgrade my gulp kludges to modern Webpack.

Gluten Free Bread Improvements

Sep 9, 2017

Since I posted my gluten free bread recipe I’ve been trying different things to improve it, mostly varying the flours and binder quantities. It’s a slow process as I have to eat a loaf of bread after each attempt!

I’ve updated the original recipe for ease of use.

Gluten Free Bread Recipe

Aug 8, 2017

Since being diagnosed with coeliac disease in 2005 (Or thereabouts. My medical records were lost…) I’ve been trying to make a decent gluten free bread. It’s tricky since gluten is the very thing that makes bread work, but with a lot of experimentation and some Science I’ve found a recipe that works pretty well. This loaf is gluten, diary and egg free, and could be made soy free as well.

Moving To Hugo

Jul 7, 2017

After many years using an ancient GPL version of MovableType (4.32, the last to support PostgreSQL. I have aversion to MySQL) I’ve gone to a new static site generator - Hugo. I’ve previously looked at Jekyll but the complexity of migrating my MovableType content over was just too much. Finally I got sick of paying for a server that gets no use and moved my blog to S3 storage and had to do something.

The Server-side JavaScript runtime

Jan 1, 2016

I’m back, after a short break and much swearing at third party libraries. I was going to use React.NET as that bundles up all the things required, but it has too many opinions about how you call your React components. Since I’m using Redux an react-router this makes most of the code redundant, so I went back to using the raw components. Additionally, I switched from V8 to using Microsoft’s Chakra runtime because the existing V8 interop libraries do not support .

The Web UI

Dec 12, 2015

Time for the web UI! I’m building this using ASP.NET 5 and ASP.NET MVC 6 for the controller side and React, Redux, Immutable and TypeScript for the view layer. I’m not a fan of node.js, but I do like the web view being defined in one place so running React on the server side appeals to me. I could run it fully in the browser but servers tend to be faster than clients, especially mobile clients.

Api controllers

Dec 12, 2015

The backend Api servers are going to use the WebAPI component of ASP.NET 5 to make a RESTful api. Since I’m using entity framework for the database layer this is a remarkably simple piece of code, especially since most of it will be automatically generated. Right now I’ll focus on the basic create/read/update/delete (CRUD) methods, later on I’ll get to some more interesting logic when it’s time for automatic transaction posting and budget forecasting.