It’s super easy to get a slew of 5-star Amazon reviews. All you have to do is throw away your integrity and tempt your customers to succumb to bribery. A few years ago one of my doctors had a free iPa
I’m just getting into 3D modeling and I’m searching for the perfect software. I do relatively small maker type enclosures and product designs. My requirements are: free or inexpensive, easy to use, pr
A Microsoft customer from Uruguay was trying to purchase Office 2013 Spanish Language Pack, but wasn’t able to because on the Billing Address page the country was set to United States with no obvious
Here’s how you blink an led with just an led, capacitor, transistor and two resistors. This post is a complement to Dick Cappel’s “Simplest LED Flasher Circuit” post. I’ve added a Fritzing diagram and
It took me a good hour to resolve this issue. I’m hoping that the search engines pick this up for you and save you some time. I’m thinking about switching from Blogger to Jekyll, which is built with R
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a Lync Status light called “beakn”. I joined the Windows IoT Maker team not too long ago and have been immersing myself in the Maker space – I’ve bee
I’m continuing to build out “beakn” my DIY Lync Status light. This is what I’m calling a “maker experience” project. I want to know what a maker goes through to build things so I’m building it with as
I’ve spent a good part of the last 15 years doing .NET development. When I joined IoT and started getting ramped up, I quickly discovered that it is largely an unmanaged non-.net non-Microsoft world.
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