Most of the existing METAR/TAF websites are not great, in my opinion, and lack access to more powerful forecasts like NBM. Hopefully this fills in a very small niche

I used #Statamic a very long time ago and it's good to finally move back.

Notable additions: auto cross-posting from Mastodon to my blog (the reverse might come at some point), and being self-hosted in my #homelab Kubernetes cluster (plus Cloudflare Always Online to make up for my home Internet)

Check it out and let me know what you think, or if it breaks :)

@androiddreams

Note: it actually does abide by the poll results…

Disqus, a popular service that manages comments, alleviated the latter pain, however, the inability to have a simple contact form was huge. There are a couple third-party services that allow you to build forms, but many of them (such as Google Forms) are unnecessarily complex. They often embedded in iFrames or take you to their own domain to submit the form, meaning that they present visitors with a form that doesn't match the rest of the website stylistically, or are taken away from your website altogether.

To fix this, I built Formingo. Formingo is a new service that allows you to easily create HTML forms that get sent directly to your email address. It's completely free to use for up to 500 submissions a month, and there are a ton of new features coming. In fact, just today, I launched pre-verified email addresses and domains.

I haven't had a ton of experience with machine learning beyond Andrew Ng's amazing Machine Learning course and I recently set out to change that.

I have updated Needlepoint to version 1.0.5 in NPM. There's a couple changes, none of which should break if you use an older version and upgrade to this version.

This is beneficial for many reasons, including modularity, readability, and testability. With a dependency injected system, you can simply request that your application receives an instance of an object, and the DI container will do all of the work to initialize the object and all of its dependencies.

Docker Swarm and Compose are the "official" solutions to this problem-- they allow for you to build a giant, elastic Docker cluster that appears as a single machine to your client. Additionally, Compose allows you to scale your application easily to multiple instances.

Despite this, these two components are lacking a couple critical features-- cross-machine service discovery, as well as a built-in load balancer that distributes traffic to your scaled Docker infrastructure.

Tutum is a service that adds these remaining components, and to great success. Though you can use your own nodes with Tutum, sometimes it's desirable to use your own, self-hosted service.

Rancher is an open source Docker PaaS that includes features like service discovery and DNS, load balancing, multi-node support, cross-host networking, health checks, multi-tenancy, and more. Essentially, Rancher takes all the features of Tutum and packs it into a single Docker container that is hosted on your own nodes so that you have complete control.

Even better, Rancher is extremely easy to install in a matter of minutes.

To find out how, check out my new mini-course that I will be expanding over the next several weeks to cover new features in Rancher, as well as expand it to cover how to use advanced features such as service discovery. It's completely free, and I hope you find it useful!

The theme's look can also be customized to fit your personality, with the primary colors and hero image changeable. Northwestern also supports several of the Wordpress post formats, including "aside", links, and quotes.

Go ahead and grab it for free from my website, and feel free to use it for both personal and commercial websites. More information on the license can be found on the store page.

The device works like magic-- simply place the Fob or Card next to the magnetic swipe slot on an existing credit card machine, press a button on your LoopPay, and the reader will act as if a physical card was swiped. I've owned one of these devices for a little over a month (specifically, the LoopPay Card) and it has worked flawlessly every time I've used it on a traditional terminal, but there's one big problem that needs to be solved before LoopPay can become a major player in the mobile payments space.

For this course, I've also written a series of quizzes that help you keep on your toes-- simply register for an account, navigate to the course page, and click the button titled "Start Taking this Course". You'll be able to take the quizzes and see your results, along with keep tabs on your reading progress. All of this is completely free and you are not added to mailing lists of any kind (the email address is required so that you can reset your password if needed)!

I am an enthusiastic user of Plex, but recently I discovered that they were making the poor choice of hard-coding a bitrate limitation in their Chromecast application. Essentially, this enforced a 12,000 kbps (~12 mbps) limitation on media, meaning that anything that has a higher bitrate would be transcoded. This isn't a problem when you have a decent server running Plex, but I am running it on an old laptop that can barely keep up with 4 mbps transcodes.

I was able to get around the hard coded limitation (the technical how-I-did-it is also available), and you can do it to:

I also have several Chromecast devices-- they're great little media streamer sticks that simply plug into your HDMI port on your TV. Using your phone as a remote, you can "cast" media from an app (such as Netflix, HBO, or Plex) and onto your TV. Chromecast also has a browser API, so Plex's website also allows you to cast media to your local TVs.

There's one major issue, however, in terms of compatibility between Plex and the Chromecast-- and it's not actually the Chromecast's fault. Plex, for whatever reason, has decided to limit the maximum bitrate of a video file to 12 mbps when casting to a Chromecast device. If you have a powerful PC running as your Plex server, this is fine-- the server software will transcode the higher bitrate videos on the fly to 12 mbps. But, I am using an old laptop that can barely transcode to 4 mbps, 720p video files, so the video playback stutters.

Plex claims this forced transcoding is due to "performance issues" with media over 12 mbps, but this is not true¹. Not only have users casted media higher than 12 mbps from other apps, but I have successfully gotten around this hard coded limitation and streamed 20+ mbps video without a problem.

View the Visualization

But, considering the device is attached to my apartment's WiFi network, it's not so useful outside of the premises. Netgear provides a client application called "ReadyNAS Remote", which provides remote access to the NAS device presumably by relaying your traffic through one of their servers. However, this can be slow and potentially a security concern. As an alternative, I compiled ZeroTier One, a mesh VPN, to connect to my NAS remotely.

Today, I'll briefly go over how to setup and use one of these tools--Panamax--and create your own application template to produce a fully internet-accessible web application that requires zero configuration.

By design, PHP does not have explicit typing-- a variable can be any type, and can change to any type at any time. This is in stark contrast to other languages, such as Apple's Swift, Java, and many others. Depending on your background, you may consider PHP's lack of explicit typing to be dangerous.

Not only this, but PHP is not the most performant language by any means. You can see this for yourself in TechEmpower's famous framework benchmarks. These results clearly show that PHP is at or near the bottom of the pile, being beat outright by languages such as Java and Go.

So, how do you make one of the most popular languages in the world for web applications usable again? Many say that PHP simply needs to be killed off entirely, but Facebook disagrees.

The space, a small, old looking building, is commonly used for events such as weddings, holiday parties, and other corporate gatherings. From the outside, it wasn't apparent anything was occurring at all-- only a few lone parking signs across the street gave any hint of the company's presence. But as you walked to the front door, flanked by a couple employees in nondescript black T-Shirts, it was apparent that this was more than just a "corporate event."

One major issue still remains with RethinkDB, however-- it's relatively difficult to secure properly unless you have security group or virtual network functionality from your hosting provider (a la Amazon Web Services Virtual Private Cloud, security groups, etc.). For example, RethinkDB's web administration interface is completely unsecured when exposed to the public Internet, and the clustering port does not have any authentication mechanisms. Essentially, this means that if you have an exposed installation of RethinkDB, anyone can join your database cluster and run arbitrary queries.

While I've previously written about how to create a Jekyll website from scratch, a lot of developers or bloggers don't necessarily want to spend the time designing or creating a website from a blank canvas. Thankfully, there are a lot of great themes out there, but many of theme are spread throughout individual GitHub pages and projects. Hopefully, with Jekyll Themes, the themes scattered across the internet can be consolidated into a single listing where they are tagged by their color scheme, responsive-ness, or other attributes.

But, how does it compare to the desktop equivalent?

My decision was justified when one of my posts, Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous, hit the top spot of Hacker News. Over the course of two days, over 22,000 visitors visited my post. It's common to see the servers of front page Hacker News posts struggle or even go down entirely due to the surge of traffic, but thanks to Tumblr, my website stayed online the entire time.

But while Tumblr was resilient to sudden surges in traffic, the service has had its struggles and periodically went offline. There's several huge, day long gaps in my Analytics-- a sign I need to move to another platform.

The original FuelBand received mixed reviews, with many users complaining about reliability over time. Despite the hardware issues, Nike's FuelBand was a solid entry into the "Quantified Self" movement that seems to be increasing in popularity.

Fast forward a year and a half, and the second generation Nike+ FuelBand SE device is nearly available for public consumption. But, with only small improvements in tracking and an update to the Bluetooth 4.0 standard, Nike has missed a valuable opportunity to differentiate themselves in the expanding field of wearable electronics, and instead spent over a year creating a minor iteration of its existing device.

With Windows (Phone), Xbox, Google, and various other companies taking a "flatter" approach to UI design, it only makes sense that Apple would want to follow the trend of simplicity-- especially now that Scott Forstall, the guy known for the skeuomorphic design elements present in previous versions of iOS. After all, that is what Apple strives for (especially in their hardware).

iOS 7 directly reflects the transition from Forstall to Ive's rule over iOS, but are the changes truly an improvement?

Over the last couple of months, I've been exploring several content distribution networks for my new web course Extreme Website Performance, such as CloudFlare and Amazon's CloudFront, as well as forgoing a CDN altogether and focusing on reducing the number of network requests used (and therefore taking the bottleneck away from the distribution servers).

In fact, it's quite easy to do so using multiple background images in CSS. The following solution requires no images, though it does require a browser to support multiple background images and radial CSS gradients.

A couple of weeks ago, Google released an update for the Google Search app on the iPhone, with Google Now as the headline feature. A while back, it was rumored that Google would be releasing this update with Now baked in, though this rumor was shot down by Apple, and Google later admitted that Eric Schmidt's comments were not necessarily accurate (or, rather, not interpreted correctly).

Recently, Google Now was also featured at Google's I/O conference. In addition to new cards, such as location aware reminders and public transit information, Google revealed several new services designed with a similar goal to Now-- to make your life easier, and to delve deeper into your personal information.

This worked fine for many years, but recently I've discovered the magic of Vagrant and Puppet.

Ten million dollars later, the Pebble smart watch shattered Kickstarter's record for the most money funded for a project and had the task of coordinating the design and manufacturing of over 80,000 watches to some 65,000 Kickstarter backers around the world. Despite selling out of the watch on the crowd funding website, Pebble's success was reinforced when they continued to sell pre-orders on their website.

But, there's a fundamental issue with placing user generated content on your home screen.

1&1's experience has always been similar to that of a larger company, with over complicated systems and procedures to do simple things. Contacting their support means waiting through a phone queue, domains sometimes can take forever to switch name servers (though the process in itself takes a while on any provider, 1&1 seems particularly slow), and the various FTP and database account management systems are nightmares.

• Zappos: 24 million accounts' passwords and email addresses exposed
• Global Payments: 1.5 million credit card numbers exposed
• LinkedIn: 6.5 million hashed passwords stolen-- many of which weren't salted
• eHarmony: 1.5 million hashed passwords exposed
• Last.fm: Passwords compromised
• Yahoo: 450,000 passwords leaked-- in plain text

By now, I'm sure you get the point-- your information is never safe. When you input your credit card number or password into to a website, you're trusting they've taken the necessary precautions to safeguard this data. The reality is, there's a lot of business that do not implement decent security practices.

In fact, the worst offenders not only store your password insecurely, but they prevent you from protecting yourself properly. In the event of a leak in which password hashes are made public, having an extremely secure password is the only way to keep yourself protected. A secure password can be composed of random letters, numbers, symbols, or even a long sentence that you remember. The issue is, not all sites let you use these kinds of secure passwords.

I could always buy a lamp, but why do that when I can have a little fun tinkering with technology? I also had a Raspberry Pi sitting on my desk, so I decided I would put it to use. The completed project, which I call PiFX, can be recreated with the steps below.

Jekyll is a static website generator that takes Markdown, Textile, HTML, or other formats and transforms them into a complete static website. The platform is extremely customizable and extensible.

While building a Jekyll website isn't for everyone, it is a powerful platform that allows your website to perform great and be extremely secure. In fact, I run my own blog off of Jekyll, Amazon S3, and CloudFront. "Learning Jekyll By Example" walks you through this entire process, so if you'd like to learn how to setup your blog in the same fashion, this tutorial is for you.

But my obsession with the Timex was an indicator of a budding obsession for the latest technology. At this point, I didn't have a cell phone or laptop, and I barely had my own desktop computer for the little homework I had. Yet I was still fascinated with the ability to receive a message on my wrist, and always be connected-- even it was just to my parents.

In summary, ThreeBar is a welcome bar service that allows you to promote content to your visitors. Whether you're looking to draw visitors to your book's home page, get people to follow you on Twitter, or simply say hello, ThreeBar is designed for you.

But if you're looking to use your Raspberry Pi as a general computer, you may want to consider the Raspbian distribution. Raspbian is a version of Debian Linux specifically configured to run on the Raspberry Pi and is recommended by the Raspberry Pi Foundation as the operating system to install.

The rising popularity of Kickstarter and sheer volume of money being invested is fantastic-- it allows for a small startup or individual to have an idea, and make it reality.

The basic level Computer Science tests are outdated, and in my opinion, not necessarily indicative of a student's true programming skill.

The new iPod/iPad pricing lineup consists of the following:

1. iPod Shuffle at $49
2. iPod Nano at $149
3. iPod Touch (4th Gen) at $199
4. iPod Touch (5th Gen) at $299
5. iPad 16 GB at $499

So, where exactly does the iPad Mini fit in? At $399? That’s not exactly competitive compared to Amazon’s new Kindle Fire HD, which starts at $199. It’d be pretty easy for someone to say, “the iPad Mini is double the price of the Fire and is the same size.” And the larger Kindle Fire HD 8.9", which is closer to the original iPad’s size, is only $300.

But Apple wouldn’t price the iPad Mini at $299– the same price as the iPod Touch–which leaves one price point left: $350. This is still cheap enough in the consumer’s mind (it isn’t “$400”), and yet it doesn’t occupy the price point of the iPod Touch. It also distances it from the regular sized iPad.

In any event, you certainly won’t be seeing an iPad Mini for $299 or less.

Hacker News is a new favorite of mine. It’s a great resource for some good articles to read. Engadget, despite having a poor reputation for the quality of its comments, is still a great tech blog. The Verge is relatively new, but like Engadget, it’s a great place for news on computers and electronics.

And there’s Lifehacker, which has some interesting tips and tricks, while Macrumors has all of the Mac news I could possibly need.

There’s also my Twitter feed. I follow a couple of Node.JS news bots, as well as some designers, developers, and products such as the Pebble. It makes for a great source of quick news snippets.

And then there’s Gizmodo.

I've been working pretty hard on one of my projects and decided to take a small break and do a little experiment. A while ago (years?), I saw a website that allowed anyone to type anywhere on the screen. I decided to take a couple of hours tonight and recreate it using Node.JS.

My version of the Wall of Text app is available here.

It's built with Node.JS, Socket.IO, and Express (which really was unnecessary, but I was lazy and didn't want to work with the vanilla Node.JS HTTP server). Nodejitsu is providing the hosting.

I'm looking into making it into an infinite canvas, but for now, it extends as far as your screen goes. I suppose if you had a really big screen it would go infinitely... Those with 1080p+ monitors will be able to see beyond those with smaller resolutions. It's sort of an exclusive club if you can see the text on the outskirts of the wall ;)

The wall resets every six hours and shows the number of users connected in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.

tl;dr

See it here.

I chose, “is technology making us stupider?”

Don’t get me wrong– I think Derby.js is a fantastic (start) of a framework, and I would love to be able to use it, but I can’t for one simple, but big, reason. It’s no where near production ready.

I still remember the two paned, frame based website I built. It was terrible, with solid yellow backgrounds, and existed solely to show off photos of my new dog. This was back in the day when Microsoft FrontPage still ruled. During the winter, I made snowflakes drift down the page slowly using Javascript snippets from various websites, and during a power outage one year I built a Flash version of the site that mirrored my dark house with only virtual candle to light up the content. Really, everything I made or did was seen by a handful of people that landed on my site from a Google query. And I still have no clue exactly what they searched to get there.

Recently, on a website called Forrst, someone posted a question: “how did you all get in the position that you all are in?”

That’s great, but after further investigation, it seems like Derby.js isn’t quite as mature as I’d like– it’s not 1.0 yet. To be fair, neither is Node.js (the platform behind Derby) or Meteor, but there seems to be quite a bit missing from Derby. For example, as far as I can tell, there’s no easy way to handle sessions. This may be a result of a lack of documentation, but it appears that the developers behind Derby are working on authentication at this moment. If anyone has writeup on how to handle sessions in Derby, I’d live to hear about it.

The one framework I always see compared to Derby.js is called Meteor. Similar to Derby, it handles things such as updating views live across multiple clients, though Meteor does it somewhat differently. While Derby is designed to be easier to use with different types of database systems, Meteor works closely with MongoDB. In fact, the client API for accessing the database is almost exactly like what you’d expect on the server-side with something like Mongoose.

While there are some drawbacks and controversies surrounding the framework (see Fibers vs Callbacks), Meteor looks like a pretty interesting option when creating an app that requires realtime feedback. Personally, I’m more attracted to the traditional callback style of programming of Derby, but the lack of robust documentation and a large developer community behind it is a huge blow to Derby’s usefulness. This will change over time, but at a much slower rate than Meteor, which recently received $11M+ in funding. This financial backing ensures that Meteor will remain around and supported, and for developers who need a financially and developmentally stable framework, the funding will only make Meteor more appealing.

Today, I want to go over how to create a really simple Meteor app. Essentially, this is a writeup for Tom's Vimeo screencast. One major difference between my writeup and Tom's video tutorial is the way we handle events in Meteor. Rather than copying and pasting code from one of Meteor's examples, I take you step by step through a custom implementation of handling the enter key press to submit a message. Let's begin!

Fast forward to 2012, and I am trying to log into my Envato Marketplace account on Graphic River. I haven’t been there in a few months, and recently I’ve been working on changing my passwords to be unique-per-site. Understandably, I forgot my password.

But I didn’t entirely forget my password— I knew there are three possible passwords, across two possible usernames. Rather than going through the entire reset password process, which is a hastle and a last resort, I decided to try and guess. After a couple of attempts and failures, I was presented with a reCAPTCHA.

A long time ago (in the iPad 1 days), I used Appcelerator to build an app called LOL. The problem was, there was a huge memory leak caused by a bug in the framework. Images were not properly released, resulting in a pile up of memory. This was a huge issue because of the 256mb of RAM the iPad 1 had. I published the app after fixing some of the bugs in the framework myself, but there were still issues. I ended up rewriting the entire app natively in Objective-C.

Some two years later, I am back to iOS development. While I did work on a Mac OS X app between “LOL” and now, my Objective-C is rusty, and a lot has changed in the newest versions of iOS. Automatic reference counting (ARC) now solves my worst nightmare for me. Rather than relearn Objective-C, I opted to once again use Appcelerator.

With the Raspberry Pi, I have a low cost ($35) and low power device that I can always leave on, without worrying about heat building up in a case or a large power bill— after all, the entire thing runs on a Micro USB port.

I had a Transcend 4GB SD card lying around, and wanted to transfer the entire contents of the older SD card to the larger one.

After receiving my Raspberry Pi, I began to look for a place to plug it into. I've always assumed that at least one of my two monitors sitting on my desk had an HDMI port, but I've always used DVI. I happened to be wrong-- neither of them had HDMI, meaning I had to commandeer a television somewhere else in my house.

I plugged the device into a 55" TV in my living room and booted it up with a 2GB SD card I had prepared earlier and began installing some things that would allow me to run the device headless. This is important, because I do not want to be forced to sit on the floor in front of the TV every time I want to use the Raspberry.

The Windows Phone Developer Blog has a complete list of the new controls:

 LongListSelector has been rebuilt and redesigned to take advantage of the new smooth scrolling and off-thread touch input support in ‘Mango’. This is a buttery-smooth control for showing lists, including grouping and jump list support.

MultiselectList control enables multiple selection for easily working with lists of data, similar to the Mail app’s capability.

LockablePivot adds a special mode to the Pivot control where only the current item is shown (often used with multiple selection).

ExpanderView is a primitive items control that can be used for expanding and collapsing items (like the threaded views in the Mail app).

HubTile lets you add beautiful, informative, animated tiles to your application, similar to the new People groups in ‘Mango’.

ContextMenu control has been reworked: performance improvements and visual consistency fixes.

ListPicker now supports multiple selection.

RecurringDaysPicker lets your users select a day of the week.

Date & Time Converters localized to 22 languages. The converters let developers easily display date and time in the user interface in one of the many styles found throughout the phone’s UI, from a short date like ‘7/19’ to relative times like ‘about a month ago’.

Page Transitions have improved performance for a more responsive feel.

PhoneTextBox is an early look at an enhanced text box with action icon support, watermarking, etc.

All error messages and interface elements have been localized to all of the supported languages, making for a great experience for users around the world.

PhoneTextBox

Among these new controls and features is the PhoneTextBox, an addition developed by me during my internship at Microsoft this summer. This simple control adds a lot of new functionality to the Silverlight TextBox and is really easy to use.

To use it in your app, make sure that the toolkit is referenced in your application and that you have added the XML Namespace in your XAML. If you are already using the Toolkit in your app you won’t have to do this again.

After that’s done, you can simply replace any existing references of the Silverlight TextBox with the PhoneTextBox. For example:

<toolkit:PhoneTextBox Text="Hello World!" />

Hint Text

One of the three new features in the PhoneTextBox is "Hint Text." It's kind of like the Placeholder in HTML5. While the WP7 Developer Documentation states that there is a Watermark attribute to the TextBox, it was never implemented and is a dead end. The PhoneTextBox implements this feature by adding a couple of new properties:

Hint- A string that will be displayed in the text box when there is no Text and the control is not in focus.

HintStyle- This allows you to customize the style of the Hint.

Action Icon

The second feature of the PhoneTextBox is called the "Action Icon," a small, 26 by 26 pixel icon that sits in the (bottom) right hand corner. Developers can attach events to the icon that will be called when the icon is tapped.

ActionIcon- An ImageSource that will be displayed on the right side of the control. If the text box is multiline or supports wrapping, it will be shown in the bottom right.

ActionIconTapped- An event that is called when the action icon is tapped. The control will not get focus or open the keyboard when the icon is tapped.

Length Indicator

Lastly, there is a length indicator built into the PhoneTextBox that can prevent users from entering more than a certain number of characters, but provide feedback as to how many characters they have already input.

This feature is more complex and flexible because it has a few different "modes" of operation. First, a developer can simply set a MaxLength and set the LengthIndicatorVisibility to true. The length indicator will always be visible and will display the number of characters entered into the text box out of the MaxLength. (ie. 125/140)

Secondly, a developer can set a LengthIndicatorThreshold. This property determines after how many characters the length indicator should pop down. For example, if the threshold is 20, the length indicator will be hidden if there are 18 characters in the text box. However, once 20 characters have been entered into the text box the length indicator will slide down.

Third, a "soft limit" can be imposed on the text box. In this case, a developer does not set a MaxLength, but rather sets a DisplayedMaxLength. In this scenario, the user can enter more than DisplayedMaxLength characters, much like how the Messaging app behaves in "Mango" for text messages.

LengthIndicatorVisibility- A boolean that determines whether the length indicator is visible or not.

LengthIndicatorThreshold- An integer that determines when the length indicator hides or slides down. Note that LengthIndicatorVisibility must be set to true if you ever want the length indicator to be shown.

DisplayedMaxLength- An integer that overrides the default behavior of showing the format N/MaxLength, where N is the number of characters entered. If DisplayedMaxLength is set, the format will be N/DisplayedMaxLength.

You can also check out the sample app included with the Toolkit to see how you can mix and match these different components.

This is a great new update to the Silverlight Toolkit and I am excited to be a part of this release. If you have any feedback, feel free to use the Issue Tracker on CodePlex.

P.S. If you are using the PhoneTextBox in your app, I'd love to hear from you!