I've Migrated my Blog to Medium

I believe that Medium offers a better writing and reading experience, so I finally took the effort and migrated all my posts to the new location of my blog: mylifeasa.tinkerer.us. Click the orange "Redirect page" button on any page to view that post on Medium. It'll also store a cookie in your browser to automatically redirect you to the corresponding Medium article anytime you land on one of my Blogger posts.

If you're interested in migrating your own Blogger site to Medium, I wrote a tutorial at my new blog location: How to migrate your blog from Blogger to Medium.

Thanks and see you on Medium!

How to Automatically Unzip Files Downloaded from Chrome on Windows

macOS has a nice feature where it can automatically unzip “safe” files after downloading. I was looking for a way to do the same thing on Windows and couldn’t find a nice tutorial using free or open source software, so I decided to create my own. I should say that this process could be a security concern if you manage to download a file that unzips into a virus, but I decided that the convenience is worth the possible risk.

Particle-Losant Integration using Webhooks

As I’ve posted on my blog before, I use a Spark Core to control the lights in my bedroom. In my first blog post, I described the original hardware and firmware. In the second blog post, I described the hardware and software updates, and also how I integrated it with IFTTT. Recently, I wrote a post about integrating Liquor Lights into the project. I had thought that these changes had fixed the remaining issues, but I was still experiencing problems where the lights would turn on and off without input. I had to think of a way to log what what happening so that I could dive in and see what is actually going wrong.

My Spark Lamp project’s hardware

IoT Liquor Lights using Spark Core

My whiskey collection was starting to outgrow the space that was allocated for it in the kitchen so I was brainstorming a new place to put them. I love how unique the bottles and colors are for each drink, so I wanted a way to display them. With the help of my girlfriend, we decided to move them into a small bookcase in the corner of our apartment that was mainly used for displaying knickknacks. We decided it would look nice if we could light up the bottles, and I of course needed to connect that light to the internet!