This past weekend was IndieWebCamp Baltimore and it was awesome! I’ve been hanging out online with those in the IndieWeb for the past year but until now I was unable to make a trip out to the IndieWebCamps that took place in 2017. Thanks to Marty and Jonathan, Baltimore hosted it’s first ever IndieWebCamp.

For the last year, since I’ve been involved in the IndieWeb, I’ve used IndieAuth.com for my IndieAuth authentication. It’s a hosted service for authorization and token endpoints that helps bridge the technological hurdle of allowing new people to the IndieWeb to start being able to login using the IndieAuth protocol.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

LA To Vegas is an odd comedy. It follows the passengers and crew of a routine flight route betwee. LA and Las Vegas. It isn’t realistic in any fashion and some of the jokes are a bit outrageous.

Well that was disappointing. I watched the premiere of Grown-ish and it lost all of the charm that it’s parent show Blackish had going for it. My wife Ashley and I have enjoyed watching Black-ish since it’s premiere a couple years ago. Going into it, my biggest hope for Grown-ish was that it would spread it’s wings and not feel bound to stay stuck within the confines of the established flow of Black-ish. Well, they accomplished that. But not in the way that I hoped. It lost everything that made Black-ish funny. The only thing that remains is the character Charlie. It was an awkward first episode and the second episode just made it worse. I’ll give it a couple more episodes but it has plummeted to the bottom of my watch list. Good luck picking yourself back out of the hole, Grown-ish.

I made a goal of adding weather to my site by January 1st, 2018. Today, I’m happy to announce that I completed that goal. Here’s what it looks like:

As I’ve been doing my 100 Day of Reading Chapters challenge I’ve been thinking about my use of Goodreads and the various functions I use it for:

One of my goals in 2018 is to own my reading data rather than using Goodreads for all of that information. This will allow me to track information the way I want rather than have to do it like Goodreads wants me to.

Following the IndieWeb mantra of “manual until it hurts”, all of my RSVP posts have been manually posted by hand to my website because it’s not something I did often and I hadn’t had the time to sit down and fix that.

I have found myself installing a lot of open source projects lately that are based on the PHP-Mysql stack. For each project, I generally want to create a new mysql database and user. Every time I install a new project I end up googling around the internet looking for the instructions again, so this is more for me than you, but you are welcome to use these notes as well.

Employee monitoring in the workplace is a challenging issue. There are arguments on both sides for and against it. Most employees assume they can just use the internet as they would at home. However, whereas the employee owns everything at their home, everything at their office is the property of the company (Dale & Lewis, 2016, p. 279).

Wow! I watched the four-part DC crossover event: Crisis on Earth-X today and it was amazing!

Wow! @ash and I just finished watching the latest episode of This Is Us it was … incredible.

I’ve been thinking through my technology skill set recently. I originally learned how to program using PHP back when I was 16. 14 years later, I have a day job working on a tech security platform on Angular. I’ve worked primarily on the front-end in my career, focusing on JavaScript and more recently Typescript. Professionally I’ve had some experience in PHP, Node.js, Python and Swift. As a programmer you always need to be ready for a shift in your career because technology moves quickly.

Playing video games can have both positive and negative influences on the people that play video games. Some benefits of playing video games include increased hand-eye coordination as the player has to link finger and hand movements with what they are seeing on the screen, and increased mental dexterity.

Article Reviewed: Kauflin, J. (2017, May 12). The Five Most In-Demand Coding Languages. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2017/05/12/the-five-most-in-demand-coding-languages/

Article Reviewed:

I’ve officially launched the Indigenous for iOS app beta.

At my current job, we have two different build processes in grunt. The first is my development build which allows for easier debugging and the second is the production build that strips out code that isn’t desired for the production servers. Unfortunately sometimes the development build runs just fine but the production build breaks. This leads to the potential mistake where I build something new using the development build but forget to check the production build before pushing my code into the shared git repo.

Before we can understand what software piracy is, it helps to think about what software is and what piracy is. According to Dale & Lewis (2016) computer software is a program “that provide the instructions that a computer executes” (pg. 3). Piracy, according to Merriam-Webster (n.d.) is “the unauthorized use of another’s production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright”. This means that software piracy is the unauthorized use of a set of computer instructions. This can apply to anything along the layers of a computing system, whether the programming layer, the operating system or individual applications. Of course, the piracy of individual applications that users don’t want to pay for is the most common use case.

Frederick’s October 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Urbana Regional Library on October 4th. Below are notes from the “broadcast” portion of the meetup.

What more can you expect from a show with David Boreanaz as the headliner? SEAL Team is a blow away show. As one can expect from the previews the show is basically designed to tear at your heart, and it does.

The Mayor is a new half-hour comedy on ABC. I have to say, ABC is king of the comedies. Although there are some ABC comedies I don’t like, it is rare that they don’t get good comedies. I would give The Mayor a B. It’s not their best game but it’s a decent comedy.

What can you say about a show like This Is Us! This Is Us just had it’s season 2 premiere on NBC and it was amazing, as was the entire first season.

One of the saddest moments in television is when a long-running show comes to an end. There is something about following the story of a set of characters as they grow over the course of many years and then after 5, 6 or 7 years it comes to a close.

The Brave is a drama on NBC based around the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and a team of Special Ops working in the field across the world. This is one of the shows I’ve been looking forward to since the premieres were announced this past may.

Me, Myself and I is a new 30 minute comedy on CBS. I’ll be honest, I went into this watching it almost for the sole purpose of writing about it. I watched the previews and thought it seemed like one of dumbest shows in I’d seen in awhile. Turns out I was wrong.

Young Sheldon is a spin-off show based on a main character from The Big-Bang Theory. It’s a cute, quirky show about a little boy that is too smart for his own good. I’m coming in to the show having never watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory and really just having a general cultural knowledge about the story and the characters.

I grew up watching Star Wars but have never been a fan of Star Trek. I have some vague memories of a couple of Star Trek movies when I was young, but I didn’t pay a lot of attention to them. The first Star Trek film or show that I watched and enjoyed was the remake by J.J. Abrams’, but I haven’t followed it’s recent sequels.

Santa Clarita Diet is a 10-episode comedy series on Netflix that details the story of when a normal housewife becomes a zombie.

Gotham is in it’s 4th season on FOX. As you know, I really enjoy my superhero shows and Gotham is definitely one of them. However, this is the only superhero show that my wife, Ashley, watches with me. Which is a good sign for you, because that means this isn’t your typical nerdy niche superhero show. It’s got a great cast and has a very real, gritty vibe. It is in it’s 4th season, but it’s a great time to jump in because after several years of having Bruce Wayne be a young boy whose parents had just died, he has finally started to become a teenager and a vigilante. In fact, each season has a subtitle and this season’s is “A Dark Knight”, which is Batman’s nickname!

I am such a huge fan of superhero shows, the only thing better than a great superhero show is a superhero team-up show!

My review on Marvel’s Inhumans might not be fair, I watched the premiere sitting in an IMAX theater so when Gorgon stomped his foot on the ground the entire room shook. That was the best possible way to watch this 1 1/2 hour premiere, that said, this show is beautiful, exciting and has interesting characters. Marvel’s Inhumans is a new show on ABC that is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

I got a new laptop and as with any new laptop it is a mixture of joy and frustration. The joy is that you get to start from scratch and get rid of all the cruft that has built up on your machine. The downfall is all the little things that you forget about how you set up your machine before.

While I hope that CBS cancels Zoo, I’m terrified that they might cancel Salvation. What a show! It was a great premise with really interesting characters.

The Orville is a new dramedy (an hour long show with a mix of drama and comedy elements) on FOX. There seems to be a focus on parodies of other stories over at FOX right now. While Ghosted reminded me of a parody of Ghostbusters, The Orville is most certainly a parody of Star Trek. From the music, to the outfits and even the cinematic elements.

Zoo, oh Zoo. What have you come to?

Ghosted is a new half-hour comedy on FOX. I don’t know if it’s just me or if comedies nowadays just aren’t that funny. With the music and special effects this show reminds me of a parody of Ghostbusters. While the story line makes almost no sense I think the worst part of the show is that the two main characters are literally obnoxious. I can handle a lot of things in the shows I watch but one of the primary requirements is I need to care about the characters. They can have all sorts of flaws but stupid obnoxious main characters does not draw me to watch it.

Frederick’s August 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Urbana Regional Library on August 23rd. This is the first official meetup for Frederick!

npm is the node package manager. For JavaScript server programmers (node.js), npm is a vital piece of their programming life cycle. They use npm to declare outside code modules that are required for their application and are able to download and update those modules whenever needed based on the npm system. Every early node.js programmer learns to use npm.

The idea of the “union with Christ” is used all throughout the New Testament when talking about salvation. In fact, without the ideas behind our union with Christ as believer, we would literally not have salvation. It is both the foundation in which the Christian view of salvation is built on and the key differentiator between Christianity and other world religions.

This is the first part of a series of tutorials on developing plugins for the Adapt Framework. In this part, we are going to take a look at a general overview of the Adapt Framework, how to set it up and how it all comes together.

Everyone is talking about the tenth anniversary of the iPhone being released. I had an iBook and an iPod before I ever had an iPhone, but my first iPhone is truly one of the things that cemented Apple as my brand of technology.

Last night I went to the June meet up for the Baltimore Homebrew Website Club. There, we work on our personal websites, talk about what we’ve been working on recently and talk about the latest IndieWeb technologies available.

What is the purpose of the Bible? This is the question that must be asked before we can deal with the issue if the Bible is truly inspired by God or just thought of by humans. Ultimately, the Bible’s purpose is to reveal who God is and how we can be made right with Him.

Well this takes wearable tech to a new level… uSit by Quilted Northern is designed to “Log every sit” (on the toilet), earn daily badges, setting personalized goals and allows you to compete with friends in “Battle Sits”.

For about a week, I’ve been able to receive webmentions but they haven’t been visible on my site. That is a bad experience for several reasons: The first is that it seems strange for someone to send a webmention and if they visit my site later to see that there’s no reference to the feedback they sent me. Second, it’s not very enjoyable for me to look at my site and then to have to do some behind the scenes stuff to see if anyone has responded to my posts.

I’m building reactions, or in IndieWeb terms, reacji. This is the idea that you can respond with a single emoji and instead of that displaying as a comment, it will display as the bottom of the post, with a count of how many people have chosen to respond with the different emoji.

For a couple weeks now, I’ve been trying to record what TV shows I watch on my site, by creating what in the IndieWeb we call a watch post. I didn’t have much tooling set up for this, so it consisted of me doing a lot of manual work. I would create a blank post in Jekyll, my blog engine, which is really just a list of attributes and values, in what is called YAML. I would visit IMDB, search for the show (if it was the first time I checked into this show) and grab the ID from the URL. Then I would visit The Movie DB and grab the URL for the show, the cover image for the show and sometimes the episode image for the show. I would add all of this into my blank file and add other information like the season, episode, date, time that I watched it. It…wasn’t very fun.

Today I added webmention.io to my website’s header. This will allow me to now receiving webmentions from other sites that support it. I haven’t gone through the task of actually collecting and displaying them, but the first step is making sure that someone can send me a webmention (A comment, like, rsvp or reaction).

I’ve added the ability to see posts from past years on my website. Now, on a day that has posts from previous years, you’ll see a new blue “flashback card” at the top of my homepage. This post will highlight the post from the past.

Faith in America is currently at a point of high tension. Whether it’s discussions on if Muslims are being banned or if Christians are trying to reverse political policies that are seen as civil liberties, it currently seems as if faith and politics just can’t mix.

I love new Mac OS X updates as much as the next person. However, for those of us who are the first to update we will often find bugs that haven’t been fixed either with the new operating system or with applications that don’t update to meet the new operating system’s rules.

I just recently installed Mac OS X 10.9, and I figured I would take this time to document my development environment. I’ll continue to update this as my development environment changes over time or different tools become more important.