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.

Designing and Building a File Vault Part Two: My Turn

So I built my parent's file vault/media center a few months ago and it was a big hit. UPS was pretty rough with shipping it, but a little super glue and hope brought it back and it worked beautifully. I don't think my parents were totally up front and honest with me at first when they said they loved it, but now there's no question in my mind. My father has never been into binge watching shows, but now I'm pretty sure he'll get into some of the shows I've been recommending for years. He's already rewatched the Newsroom from both inside and outside the house thanks to Plex, and I've already trained him on how to add his own music. My mother loves it because all of the family photos are now much more secure (thanks to RAID) and we've watched a few movies on the TV thanks to Kodi. However, the system wasn't without its bugs, and we'll try to address them with the one I'll be making for myself, and I'll try to apply the software fixes remotely. Let's get into it!

Toggle Switch to Pulse Conversion Circuit

For my next computer build - my filevault and media server - I wanted to take a less microcontrollery way to turn the computer on and off. My parents' build required a microcontroller because I didn't have the parts for this when I built it, so I had to make do. But, as I said before, I don't like cutting sandwiches with chainsaws. It seems wasteful to me to use a whole microcontroller to do one simple task and sleep the rest of the time. So I designed a specialized circuit to do it. I'm by no means a electrical engineer, so this may be a poor design. But stay with me to the end, because this simple thing works (and it's a very short post because it's so simple).