Posts

After years of putting it off, I finally got myself a camera! I’ve been having lots of fun taking pictures but I didn’t really have anywhere to share them. I didn’t really like my options for photography-oriented social media, so I just did it myself, and over-engineered a photography section for my website. I thought it would be fun to talk about how it works!

Last week while I was out shopping, I found a little sort-of-egg-shaped thermal label printer. I didn’t really need (another) label printer but I got it because the box said it supported Bluetooth and I really wanted to know how the “official app” communicated with it. I spent the next three days going down a rabbit hole of learning very specific information about thermal printers, and discovered that the printer I had bought was both very similar and very different to existing thermal printers!

Recently, I was working on some C++ code, using std::maps to map setting names (as strings) to their configured values (also as strings). Initially, all the key names were either specified using string literals, or variables assigned to literals, and it worked fine. Then I tried to access mappings using strings loaded from a drive at runtime as keys, but it was accessing different values than expected. This post will explain what happened, and how to resolve it!

I’ve made a new look for this website! In this post I’m going to talk a a bit about how it was created.