Whoa - where the hell did all the time go?! I knew in the back of my mind that I was being a huge slacker by not updating in a while, but almost 5 years? That's crazy! My initial reaction was that the timestamp of my last post had gotten screwed up somehow, but the details of what I wrote proves that the time is right.

When I started this blog I had recently been laid off and figured it was as good a time as any to give some visibility to the code I had been creating over the years rather than hoarding it like a jealous dragon. I intended to keep up with it but then I started a new job and the writing sort of fell by the wayside. I kept working on projects when I could but never really got the chance to write about them. I'm hoping to be a bit more consistent this time around but only time will tell.

My wife and a friend run The Crafty Coop (edit: now closed) - an event planning business that also sells handmade party decorations/favors online and at craft shows. One of the ways I help out is as the designated "IT guy" by handling the web/email hosting and other technical stuff.

One of my most complete projects is Feed Center - an RSS feed reader designed to blend in with the Windows desktop.

The software side of LaundryMonitor is currently pretty straightforward. The C.H.I.P. runs a Node.js application that keeps track of a GPIO pin for each current switch - when the switch is closed the appliance is on and when the switch is open the appliance is off. The application exposes a websocket that applications like HomeStatusWindow can watch and messages are sent to a family Telegram channel.

The next project up is LaundryMonitor which uses the most hardware of anything I've done so far.

I'm going to take a break from status windows for a little bit to cover my WorkIndicator project.

Next up in the "floating status window" category is SystemTemperatureStatusWindow. This one does exactly what it says on the tin - it shows various system temperature values.

Now that I've written about my FloatingStatusWindow library I can start to talk about the projects that use it. First up is the ProcessCpuUsageStatusWindow project.

Something that shows up in a lot of my projects is my FloatingStatusWindow library. It allows the creation of something akin to a desktop widget that displays simple text and blends in with the Windows desktop. This is what several of them look like in the corner of my secondary monitor:

One of the oldest projects I'm still working on today is my weather station. I had always wanted a weather station but it seemed boring to just install something on the roof, stick an LCD display on the wall somewhere, and then forget about it - I wanted something I could build, expand on, and write my own software for.

Being a programmer at heart it seems appropriate to stick with the classic "hello world" for starting off!