How To Put A Custom ROM on a Verizon Samsung Fascinate (SCH-I500)

Old Android phones are really neat. They still have a decent amount of computing power and a multitude of neat hardware (sensors, cameras, WiFi connectivity and Bluetooth all in one). But with so much bloatware and carrier restriction, these devices are almost useless. A great way to get around this is to put an entirely new Android ROM onto the device. This blog outlines my adventures in trying to root the Verizon edition Samsung Fascinate (Galaxy S SCH-I500) so you can do it too. Heads up, I probably made it harder than it needs to be.

Live Streaming Headless Processes To YouTube

The use cases are endless but useless all the same. In a hell-bent effort to waste Google's resources, I'm going to design a Docker image that allows you to stream a graphical process in the background. Sound interesting? Great, because this is a very short and straightforward blog post and I'm running out of things to write before the fold.

Make A Slackbot From a Google Spreadsheet

In this episode of "probably useless", I'll quickly write about how to make a SlackBot that runs in the cloud using data from a Google Sheet. The example I'll be using was made by me and my friends to handle commuting to and from school, but I've generalized it to many carpooling situations. Because I don't have a lot of time to work on projects right now, I'll be explaining briefly how this works and how you can apply it to your own Slack (or otherwise) bot and maybe pick up some neat tricks for code like this along the way.

Some Comments on Comments

Code comments. You probably have an opinion on when, how, or if they should be used. To me, this debate is as heated as "tabs or spaces." Except, this is probably a more important discussion to have, since comments are visible and there are no automated tools to convert from one to the other (bad comments to good comments, there are some that can remove comments completely if that's your thing). I'd like to set forth my own opinion here for the record.

One Weird Motherboard and its Three Friends

A while ago I picked up a very interesting looking motherboard. I had never seen something with its configuration. It has many USB ports - some of which are pointing up from the board, two ethernet ports, and its form factor was pretty small. The most interesting part of the board: it has no labeling. What is this thing?

Making a Smart Speaker - Part 5

Calvin is coming together. The software is moving along slowly, but I think it's time to assemble Calvin so there's only a single cable coming from him. The power cable. Everything else is optional, the way smart speakers should be. We'll add neato features like lights and working in its own microphone. Let's get to it!

An Interesting Laptop Makes A Good Emulation Station

I'm all about breathing new life into devices that just sit on a shelf and wait for the day they'll get recycled. I'm not trying to personify these devices, but recycling these components seems to take more effort for minimal gain compared to reuse. Reuse makes a lot of sense to me, and it's the reason I have a lot of computer parts laying around my room. Even old hardware, like a Gateway Laptop I picked up from a surplus shop for a few bucks, has use to me. If it were just any laptop, I would have passed on it. But this one had an interesting feature that made me jump to the "Emulation Station" idea.