As I am building out my “maker experience” product “beakn” I’m constantly thinking about ways to improve it with the goal of getting it to be completely wireless. I started with it being USB connected
I’m working on a “maker experience” project called beakn. It’s a Lync status light that lights up red, yellow or green based on your Lync status. beakn v0.1 was all about getting it working without it
Canon has a program called the “Customer Loyalty Program” that allows you to send in your broken Canon camera and get a refurbished camera at a discount. There’s nothing about it on the Canon website,
It took me a while to figure out the best way to automatically start a windows app when a user logs into their computer. There were a bunch of suggestions on StackOverflow, but the registry key approa
It took me a few mins to get the exact steps figured out to upgrade the firmware of the Arduino Wifi Shield. Hope this saves you some time. Here are the original steps: http://arduino.cc/en/Hacking/Wi
Part of my new job is to fully understand the process a maker goes through when developing their ideas into products. There’s no better way to do that than to build something. I believe that to truly
I was getting this error when deploying to Netduino Plus 2 from VS2013. Unable to communicate with device USB:Netduino It turns out that that particular Netduino had an old firmware version. Use the
This Intel page tells you to download the FTDI drivers and run as Admin. I appears that you first need to install the “Windows Driver setup 1.0.0” from this page. 1. Install Windows Driver Setup 1.0.0
It took me a few mins to get all the right firmware and sdks going for Netduino Plus 2 and Visual Studio 2013. Hope this post saves you some time. .NET Micro Framework and VS2013 Setup 0. Close VS20
I was running the following post-build scripts in VS2013… $(FrameworkDir)\installutil.exe /u "$(TargetPath)" $(FrameworkDir)\installutil.exe "$(TargetPath)" and was getting this error… "System.Securi
I’m working on an NFC project and to test things out I got a PN532 NFC shield working with a RaspberryPi via libnfc. Adafruit has a good step-by-step tutorial, but it’s not up-to-date and it’s for the
My career is progressing in what appears to be five year cycles. Back in 2004, five years into my software dev career, I made the move from independent contractor to Microsoft employee. Five years int
I was just messing around with Node.js Tools for Visual Studio and Azure and ran into a few gotchas while getting everything setup. Hopefully this helps you get going. 1. Install the Node.js Tools for
I’m still on Photoshop CS5 but haven’t had a DVD drive for many years, so I needed to find the online download version of it. I searched for a while and finally found the “Download and Installation He
I have a ton of interests and not enough time to give them all enough attention to be an expert at anything. All of my interests have one thing in common - they all take lots of time and energy to pe
<tldr>I need Microsoft stack and JavaScript dev contractors for a 3 month contract. Must be able to start immediately. Send me your resume and I’ll be in touch: /contact</tldr> I started a
Solution to “Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item” c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\ink\tabtip.exe w
UPDATE 3/5/2014. I reported this issue to the Azure team shortly after I posted this blog. The issue has now been resolved. Go Azure! If you click on the “try it now” button on the Preview Services pa
I recently switched from a ASUS ZenBook Touch to a Lenovo X1 Carbon. All was well until a few days ago when I let the battery completely drain while watching a movie. Since then the X1 Carbon was slug
Many years ago, I resolved to get a handle on managing the plethora of email that is part of the Microsoft culture. Email is a very important communication mechanism – it’s just a messaging system -