For my fifth and sixth hackday's in 2020 the pandemic had already been in full swing for a while and my mom had expressed how she didn't have time to read the labels of things when she was at the store because she was trying to get in and out quickly.  It got me thinking, there has to be off the shelf OCR/etc that I could put a mobile app together to accomplish this.

For my fourth hackday in 2020 my kids had been playing a lot of Minecraft and I started getting the idea that maybe I could rig up a bike to physically pedal and ride through Minecraft.

For my third hackday in 2020 I wanted to dabble with user input control something like is seen in the movie "Minority Report".   I had a few ideas how that might be accomplished and technology has come a ways since the movie first came out.

For my second hackday in 2020 I thought, maybe I could create a motorized chicken coop door that was controlled by Alexa... 

First of a series of posts... my employer generously gave us 6 sets of personal hackdays last year to use as "mini hackathons" to go out and learn something new to us.   Could be anything we wanted personal or not just as long as it involved technology and we learned something.   This is my first one from that series.   I hope to write more detail about it but for now, here is more or less my slide deck from my presentation part of it.   

Using Tensorflow.js with BlazeFace to control a game

Copy and paste files between hosts.  You know you want to.  

Extra handy if you find yourself in a situation where you are copying from one jump host to another but they all happen to have Internet access.

What's wrong with this picture? 

var a = "hello there this is a string";

a[3] = 'X';

Many blog posts say... for now we'll set it to "*" or.. don't do this but for now we'll just leave the security wide open... I would rather you put in specific permissions from the start and you will thank yourself for it later.  But ARN's are too hard you say?  Maybe I can change your mind.

I know there are a pile of articles on static site hosting with an AWS S3 bucket, however it seemed like a nice way to start out my blog.

So how would you like to be able to host a website without running a server, with a global content distribution network for high performance around the world and with a free SSL cert? 

Read on...