Blog Posts in 2016
A small hack to control a 2-port KVM switch via HTTP over WLAN
Recently I bought a small and inexpensive 2-port KVM (DVI/USB) switch that I installed with the intention to switch between my Linux and Windows workstations. Marketing promises that I could switch by pressing Scroll-Lock or Ctrl on my keyboard two times. The sad reality is: this only works if the currently active workstation is the Windows one (WTF!?).
This article briefly describes how you can add an ESP8266 module to a KVM switch, which allows toggling between the two computers by sending...
Yet another continuous integration status indicator for agile software development teams
Signal towers, or stack lights, are usually used in industrial manufacturing and display the state of a machine to the operators. When a malfunction occurs, the operator can immediately recognize this and react accordingly.
Software development teams can also use these signal towers to display the success or failure of the last builds of their code base. A simple red/green indicator gives the developers immediate feedback if the current code contains some errors which they may have introduced...
New Website Design and the use of Middleman
Once in a while you need to update the design of your website. This new design is based on the Volcano Foundation Template from pixelhint.
After using the content management system Refinery for the last couple of years, I now switched to the static website generator Middleman.
For me as a software developer it is much easier to write my page content inside IntelliJ and it is also much simpler to modify and extend a static website generator instead of a full featured CMS.
Caretaker Software upgraded to Polymer 1.2
The downside of being an early adopter of Polymer 0.5 was the large amount of work that was necessary to upgrade my Caretaker software to Polymer version 1.0 (there were some big changes in Polymers architecture). There are still some minor quirks remaining, but the Caretaker system is now usable again.