Tech Tidbits & More

Welcome to the Internet Home of John M. Wargo; I created this site back in 2009 so I could post articles about things that interested me. Herein you’ll find articles on a lot of different topic areas: Mobile development, Web development, Internet of Things (IoT), and a lot more. Every time I learn some new technology or complete some cool or interesting development or IoT project I publish an article here.

You’ll also find information about my books, source code projects on GitHub, and articles published in or on other sites or magazines, even videos of my many conference presentations or project demonstrations. I’m also especially fond of the series of Stupid Developer Tricks posts.

You can view all articles in reverse chronological order, or you can find articles by category. Of course, if you can’t find what you need in those views, use Search to find anything anywhere on the site.

Recent Posts

  • Note: An AI Generated pill displayed in the list below indicates that the post description displayed on the page was generated from the post content using Generative AI (GenAI). The post content itself was written by a human (me).

  • Eleventy Navigation Set URL to First Item in Collection

    Date:March 24, 2024 | Categories: Eleventy

    I'm building a new web site for a software company I created using 11ty, and one of the things I want to do in this site is have the Products menu item open the product page for the first product in a sorted list of product pages.

  • Delphi ListBox Move Multiple Selected Items

    Date:March 23, 2024 | Categories: Delphi

    I was working on a Windows application project in Delphi that required moving items around within a Delphi standard ListBox. It's pretty easy to swap list item position when only a single item is selected, but once you enable `multiselect` on the component, things become more difficult. As I poked around on the Internet for solutions, I couldn't find a complete example, so I decided to create and publish one.

  • Google Cloud Exposed Service Key

    Date:March 22, 2024 | Categories: Cloud Development

    At the beginning of the year, I published a post called Leaked Credentials from Google Cloud Project that described an issue I had, well it was an issue I created, with my Google Cloud account. I wanted to show some Google Analytics stats on this site and the only way I, at the time, could figure out how to do it was to run some code at build time that collected the data I needed from Google's APIs and added it to the site. To do this, the code required an API key for my Google Analytics data. I created a read-only key and included that key in my site repository on GitHub. Google freaked out and sent me a series of emails yelling at me for what I did.

  • Microsoft Sunsets Visual Studio App Center

    Date:March 20, 2024 | Categories: Cloud Development

    Back in 2017, I had an opportunity to work on the Visual Studio documentation as a contractor. I was trying to find full time work, but jumped at the opportunity to write some docs for Visual Studio. I wrote/updated most of the docs for Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova (TACO) and since I had multiple books under my belt about Apache Cordova, I was a perfect fit.

  • Generating Eleventy Post Descriptions Using Generative AI

    Date:March 18, 2024 | Categories: Artificial Intelligence

    AI Generated   Using Generative AI to automatically generate post descriptions is a great way to save time and ensure consistency across your site. By leveraging tools like ChatGPT, you can quickly create engaging summaries that entice readers to click through and read more. The Describer GenAI extension for Visual Studio Code simplifies this process, allowing you to effortlessly generate descriptions for your articles with just a few clicks. With the ability to customize settings and easily integrate the generated descriptions into your site, this tool is a valuable asset for content creators looking to streamline their workflow.

  • FedEx Foibles

    Date:March 8, 2024 | Categories: Miscellaneous

    I noticed lately that FedEx seems incapable of knowing where packages are in their delivery network. As an example, take a look at the following screen shot taken this morning:

  • The Pace of AI Advancement

    Date:March 1, 2024 | Categories: Artificial Intelligence

    Comparing and contrasting the pace of technological advancement against AI advancement.

  • Bogus Wells SMS

    Date:February 23, 2024 | Categories: Miscellaneous

    AI Generated   I received a spam text message pretending to be from Wells Fargo, but I quickly realized it was fake. The phone number and currency format were not typical for the US, making it clear that it was a phishing attempt. It's important to pay attention to these details to avoid falling for scams.

  • New Post Skipping Category Prompt

    Date:February 11, 2024 | Categories: Eleventy

    I added the ability to skip Category prompt in my Eleventy New Post utility.

  • Added Folder Selection My New Post Utility

    Date:February 6, 2024 | Categories: Eleventy, Node.js

    Added an enhancement to my Eleventy New Post utility to support choosing the target folder during post creation.

See the Full List

All Articles

View the 510 articles on this site in reverse chronological order.

Categories

View a list of the 24 categories in this site; from there you can drill down into all articles by category in reverse chronological order.

Books

View details regarding the books I authored.

External Publications

View a list of all of the articles I published in other publications (besides here).

Projects

View some of my projects that span multiple posts on this site or multiple GitHub repositories.

Sightings

You can find me on more places than this site; the Sightings page lists the other places where you can find stuff I created.

Code

View the source code projects in my public GitHub account.

Events

View a list of all of my upcoming events (conference presentations, product demos, etc.).

Sites

View a list of the Internet sites I maintain.

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