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I ran into a sneaky bug in a recent Cordova app I was building. It would run fine on Android and iPhone but when I tried to run it on an iPad, it would crash. And it was a sneaky crash as well. Nothing out of the ordinary in the Apple Console app and the errors thrown in the Safari console were all about plugins not being defined. The actually HTML and CSS ran fine, just all the plugins came back undefined.

So this was a first for me. One of my clients has a MySQL database cluster in Amazon’s RDS service and they then store any media related to the data in Amazon S3. During the course of normal operations data gets deleted from both the database and S3 (No sense paying Amazon for hosting data you aren’t using). The issue is they now want to maintain that data for potential machine learning purposes in the future.

I decided with how much I rely on Goodreads to keep track of my books I should probably have a backup somewhere. So for anyone interested in what yours truly plans to read, as well as my ratings of books I have already read, you can find my digital bookshelves here: Read To Read Meh I will update these lists periodically with any new books I have read or plan to read.

If you say it can’t be done, I will try my best to find a way :) One of my clients utilizes the 8x8 service to handle their office phone system and in turn it is their defacto office messaging platform as well. It is a great system and does what it does well…. except there is no Linux client. This means I am always stuck writing messages through the Android app and manually typing out urls and error messages.

I am a huge fan of the game Elite Dangerous. As a testament I bought my Xbox One for the sole reason of playing Elite from the comfort of my couch. So it was really frustrating when about a week ago I started getting “Taupe Cobra” and “Gold Cobra” errors every time I tried to jump into and out of hyperspace. I tried all of the suggestions on the Frontier support sites and was about ready to give up when I stumbled across this post:

What follows are the steps I use to make an Active Directory user account a local administrator in Windows 10. The first step is to open the control panel. You can search for the app by typing “control panel” in the bottom left search bar. Click on the option called “User Accounts” In the next screen click on the link titled “Give other users access to this computer” In the pop-up that appears click on the button titled “Add…” Click the button titled “Browse…” On the select user screen click on the button titled “Locations…” Expand the tree and select your Active Directory domain.

I recently was tasked with removing Teamviewer from all of the computers in a client’s network. Rather than go from workstation to workstation I thought there must be a way to do this by utilizing Group Policy in Active Directory. After some time spent searching the web I found a way. I am posting my steps here for my own reference and in case it may assist someone else in the future.

I’ve worked on many different PLC logging projects over the years and have always needed to have a PLC available for testing. Then the other day I started thinking, I wonder if anyone has made PLC emulator software that I could just run on a Raspberry Pi? I always have spare Pis kicking around the office so this would be ideal. That is when I stumbled upon the OpenPLC project. It it exactly what I had been hoping for.

A few months ago I decided to try out Mastodon again. I had previously posted about my main issue with a federated social network being that I find it very similar to when free email services were just coming out in the 90’s. You would sign up for an address like cool.dude@freemailxyz.com and then a year later freemailxyz.com would shut down. You would lose all your email and all your friends could no longer contact you as they only knew you as cool.

When I decided to make the jump from coding just native Android apps to a cross-platform solution a few years back I choose Cordova. This meant that some of my simpler apps could very easily be converted in Progressive Web Apps (PWA) which is fantastic for the very important reason that your users can install your app without needing to go through the Google Play store or the Apple App store.