I'm a 34 year old UIUC Computer Engineer building mobile apps, websites and hardware integrations with an interest in 3D printing, biotechnology and Arduinos.
Most Popular Mastodon Instances
One of the hard parts of getting started on Mastodon is trying to pick what instance you want to create your account on. Once created you can access the entire federated universe but much like old email addresses in the past (you know before everyone mostly uses gmail now), the server you pick will be visible after your username. (Feel [...]
7zip CLI to Generate sha256 Checksum File
On Windows, you have a nice right click menu option to have 7zip generate a sha256 file that sits next to the original. I wanted to script up a linux system to find all iso files and place the sha256 hash next to it. As you can see from the menu, its not the easiest thing to get to. But with this script you can just type And it will run [...]
Add fa-mastodon to Older Font Awesome
If you went to use the fa-mastodon but instead got a blank glyph, chances are you are running an old Font Awesome. The best fix is to just upgrade to Font Awesome v5.0.11 or higher but sometimes you are working on apps that make the best path difficult to actually do. For example, this site uses a third party theme which is [...]
CLI Fix Audio Level on Video Files
Sometimes you have video files that have very quiet audio and this simple command line bash script will find how much gain it can add to the file without clipping and apply it for you. fix-audio-levels <filename> Install To install this simply run (ideally in a folder that is in your path like /usr/local/bin or ~/bin if you have [...]
Improve WikiJS Search
Out of the box, wikijs uses the “Database – Basic” as its search option which works ok for simple content but there are better options that you can enable. I recommend switching to ElasticSearch, it will greatly improve the search quality and the overall user experience of finding content in wikijs. When using basic or [...]
Adobe Photography Plan vs Photoshop Only
If you are in the market to get Photoshop, you will find lots of strange pricing option with very little explanation about the difference. At the end of the day, Adobe wants you to buy the All Product Plan and lock in with a year commitment at $55/mo. Here are the differences between the Photography plans and why each exists. (Prices [...]
Continue Printing When Toner is Low on Canon Laser Printers
Here we are in 2022, and printers are still the worst (check out this very accurate comic by The Oatmeal). Canon laser printers will annoyingly warn you when the toner gets low requiring you to press a continue button on each print, then they will stop letting you bypass the message. I have a Canon MF634 Printer that stopped [...]
