Rattle Noise on 862D Solder Station
I’m really quite happy with the 862D+ soldering station, it heats quickly, user-controllable temperature, and overall good design. Except for my unit rattles. Oddly, only when it is under no load (when both soldering and hot air disabled). At first, I thought this was a fan inside that wasn’t well tightened. But to [...]
Building Floating Shelf with Wine Glass Rack
After looking at a few different stores, I was very disappointed with the sizing selection of floating shelf and that most wine glass brackets are too long to install under anything but cabinets. So I set off to build my own. The Design Floating shelves are purposely designed to be thick as a way to hide the standard L brackets that [...]
Erratic Google App Engine 401 response when GOOGAPPUID set to x
I ran across a strange issue on an angularJS application that makes backend calls to a Google App Engine API. Every so often, the request would fail out with a 401 unauthorized request, but if you hit the reload button, the page would reload fully logged in. Looking at the AJAX request, it looked like the request didn’t change and [...]
Add a CISS to your Printer for Cheap Ink
If you are sick of spending a lot of money replacing ink cartridges, you might consider retrofitting your printer to use a CISS (Continuous Ink Supply System). Once installed, a CISS has large tanks of generic ink held outside of the printer and has supply lines feeding into a special cartridge in the printer. Your overall cost [...]
IOS8 Swift Base64 Conversion on Xcode 6.2
If you google search you will find many articles that have swift code to create Base64 encoded text. However Swift keeps changing and if you copy and paste the code, it just won’t run. “my plain data” >>> “bXkgcGxhaW4gZGF0YQ==” (base64) let plainString = "my plain data" let plainData = [...]
Convert a UITableviewController to a UIViewController
If you add a new Navigation Controller to an IOS Swift project you will find it adds a new TableViewController. But what if you want a UIViewController instead? There is no good way through interface builder to convert a UITableviewController to a UIViewController so you will have to dive into the XML source code that is your storyboard [...]
IOS 8 Swift Detecting Lost Bluetooth Connection
Once your IOS app has paired to a Bluetooth device, there is no delegate call to let you know the device is no longer connected. You have a few different approaches for polling if the device is still around. Check RSSI signal strength Query the Bluetooth device and wait for a reply Check the peripheral.state (recommended) [...]