Categories
Hardware Mobile What I’m Up To

Soon…

I’ll admit it. I’ve been watching my new phone — a RedMagic 6R Android gaming phone, which I wrote about in this article — travel from the factory in Hong Kong all the way to my house in Tampa.

As I write this, it landed in FedEx’s Memphis facility two hours ago.

Soon!

Categories
Current Events Tampa Bay What I’m Up To

Hanging out at Sparkman Wharf tonight!

Want to meet up tonight? Anitra and I will be joining friends from the Masterminds Tampa group tonight at 7:30 p.m. at Sparkman Wharf’s Fermented Reality Biergarten to catch up.

This is just a friendly gathering in the fresh air to see old friends and make new ones. I may be bringing the accordion, but the business cards are staying at the home office.

Categories
Design Process What I’m Up To

Working on an article for the Auth0 blog

Tap to view my scribbling at full size.

I like drawing out my article ideas for the Auth0 Developer Blog before firing up the blog editor and typing. Here’s an example, which I was doodling this morning, which I made at the dealership while my car was being serviced.

Categories
Programming What I’m Up To

Putting iOS 15 beta on the “sacrificial iPhone 6S”

My iPhone 6S during the iOS 15 installation process.

One of the two phones that I’ve held onto for sentimental reasons is my rose gold iPhone 6S, which I’ve had since late 2016. I got it during my all-too-brief stint in the fashion industry (I’ll save the details for another time), I used it in writing an app at a hackathon that was so funny that they made up a new prize just for it, it survived being driven over (thanks to its Otterbox case), and it was my test platform for my first app in the App Store.

It turns out that iOS 15 supports the 6S, which makes my old “sacrificial phone” a suitable candidate for the new OS and trying out iPhone development with the Xcode beta, Swift 5.5, and the new SwiftUI.

I’ll keep you posted.

Recommended reading

Categories
Current Events Podcasts What I’m Up To

Watch my live podcast recording with the Thunder Nerds tonight!

Tonight, May 6th at 7:30 p.m. EDT (UTC-4), I’ll be the guest of Tampa Bay tech podcasters, the Thunder Nerds, and you can watch LIVE it as we record!

With 279 episodes so far, The Thunder Nerds have been at this for a long time. I’ll chat with hosts Frederick Philip von Weiss and Brian Hinton about all sorts of things, not the least of which is how their podcast was a key part of the research I did to land my job at Auth0.

I’m sure that a good chunk of our conversation will be about what working at Auth0 is like, authentication and authorization, and possibly the hardware and electronic music dabbling that I’ve been doing lately.

The Thunder Nerds record their podcasts in such a way that you can watch the recording process LIVE on YouTube, and can even type in questions or comments as it’s happening! If you’d like to see how the sausage is made, follow this link tonight at 7:30 p.m. EDT and watch the fun!

Categories
Current Events What I’m Up To

Watch my live podcast recording with the Thunder Nerds next week!

 

Next Thursday, May 6th at 7:30 p.m. EDT (UTC-4), I’ll be the guest of Tampa Bay tech podcasters, the Thunder Nerds, and you can watch LIVE it as we record!

With 279 episodes so far, The Thunder Nerds have been at this for a long time. I’ll chat with hosts Frederick Philip von Weiss and Brian Hinton about all sorts of things, not the least of which is how their podcast was a key part of the research I did to land my job at Auth0.

I’m sure that a good chunk of our conversation will be about what working at Auth0 is like, authentication and authorization, and possibly the hardware and electronic music dabbling that I’ve been doing lately.

The Thunder Nerds record their podcasts in such a way that you can watch the recording process LIVE on YouTube, and can even type in questions or comments as it’s happening! If you’d like to see how the sausage is made, follow this link next Thursday evening at 7:30 p.m. EDT and watch the fun!

Categories
Hardware What I’m Up To

New life for an old Raspberry Pi with a 3.5″ touchscreen

Since getting my Raspberry Pi 4 as part of the cybersecurity course I took last summer, I haven’t done any work with my older Raspberry Pi 3, which is still a decent computer, especially considering its size and price.

That all changed when I finally unboxed my Kuman 3.5″ LCD display, (a steal at $20) which my in-laws gave to me for Christmas (they went through my Amazon wishlist for gift ideas). They had no idea what it was, but figured I’d like it, which I do!

Tap to view at full size.

With a 3.5″ diagonal and 480 by 320 resolution, this screen isn’t meant for reading web pages or PDFs or writing code, documents, or spreadsheets. It’s meant to be a display for an IoT project that doesn’t need to display a lot of information, such as a weather app, smart thermostat, or even low-res videogames.

Tap to view at full size.

The screen’s not just an output device, but an input device as well, since it’s touch-sensitive. Once you’ve installed the driver, the Pi treats the screen as if it were another mouse, treating taps as mouse clicks, and the location of your tap as mouse coordinates.

Tap to view at full size.

The screen plugs directly into the Pi’s GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output), a 40-pin connector located along the top edge of the board, which it uses for power. It’s also what physically holds the screen to the Raspberry Pi.

Tap to view at full size.

The video signal is fed to the screen through a U-shaped HDMI connector that connects the Raspberry Pi’s HDMI port to the screen’s HDMI port.

Tap to view at full size.

I’ll post the results of my noodling with this new Raspberry Pi/screen combo here on Global Nerdy. It should be interesting!

Tap to view at full size.