Resources for Teaching Kids to Code

written by Thomas Hicks on 2017-10-26

An overview of the resources we used to teach our kids to code.

Onion Omega2 Wifi Scanner

written by Thomas Hicks on 2017-02-10

Using the Omega2 and an OLED board make a portable wifi scanner!

Raspberry Pi GPIO Hello World

written by Thomas Hicks on 2016-12-17

The first step in the world of physical computing is generally to wire up an LED and make it blink. The RPi's GPIO pins make this quite simple, even with older models.

Poor man's VPN

written by Thomas C Hicks on 2014-08-25

No VPN available? No problem, you can get around some problems with an SSH tunnel and some clever changes to Firefox's configurations"

Encrypting containers in Linux

written by Thomas C Hicks on 2014-06-26

Moving from Truecrypt containers to cryptosetup - why didn't I do this years ago?

Python Puzzle - Counting characters in a string

written by Thomas C Hicks on 2014-04-29

A common problem in programming is looking through a data set and enumerating the data. How many times does the letter `a` occur? This Python Puzzler introduces a common pattern for solving this sort of problem.

Ipython Debugging

written by Thomas C Hicks on 2014-03-30

Ipython is a great interactive development environment, since I discovered it I haven't looked back at IDLE. I have always wondered what the debugger was about though, just read some things that blew my mind!

Fixing i3status window titles

written by Thomas C Hicks on 2014-01-28

The status bar for i3 is nice, very useful and a little ugly. Did a bit more reading and found a great, easy way to fix the font and make it more attractive.

Setting up an Nginx server on RaspberryPi

written by Thomas C Hicks on 2014-01-20

Got a new raspberry pi for Christmas, need to learn webserver deployment in a safe environment. Seems like a match made in geek heaven.

Favorite Firefox plugins

written by Thomas C Hicks on 2014-01-13

Firefox is a wonderful browser with lots of native functionality. Even with all those native functions there are still somethings that could be better. Luckily, the makers of Firefox realized that one size does not necessarily fit all. In order to allow easy customization they included a way to extend the functions of the browser with plugins. This post recounts my favorites and why I use each one.