I’m in the process of reworking my (now very old) website. It’s a great quarantine project, especially now @asiancwgrl is working in the evenings again.

As I work through it I’m discovering some awesome tools and services, so I thought I’d share a few links in no particular order.

• OctoberCMS is a PHP-based CMS based on the Laravel framework. I’ve tried it out before, but this time around I’ve been writing a few plugins of my own to really make it do what I want. I’d also shout out the Magic Forms third-party plugin.
• Bootstrap is the front-end framework I’m using. I’ve been aware of it for a while but I’ve never used it until now, and I don’t know I ever lived without it. The only downside is now that I know what a bootstrap-based site looks like I see them everywhere.
• Font Awesome is a service I only learned about today and is a really simple way to use icons on a website.
• ColorSpace for creating colour schemes

As much as I enjoy building my own hardware, especially stuff that makes my various dumb appliances smart, it’s sometimes the most frustrating experience. I find myself constantly troubleshooting something.

This, for example, is the microcontroller that connects up all the stuff in my garage – door sensors, ultrasonic distance sensors, temperature sensors, etc.

It stopped working a month or so ago, and I’ve been trying to figure it out. The problem is that it’s attached to the rafters in the garage, so I disconnected everything and took it down to work on it. As soon as I plugged it in at my desk it booted up, connected itself to the WiFi and started complaining that the garage door was gone – as expected when the sensors are disconnected.

This afternoon I put it back in its housing in the garage, plugged it in… and nothing.

It took me an hour of trial and error before it occurred to me to put a multi-meter on it to see if the sensors were getting the voltage they should be, and I discovered the problem. The USB power adapter that should have been supplying it with 5V was only putting out about a quarter of that.

Infuriating.