Over the past few months, I’ve been working on my latest cloud-connected smart home project: an automated controller for my blinds. I’m naming this project Helen, after Helen Keller, an inspirational American author.

So I finally finished a weekend project that I’ve been working on (off and on) for months. It’s a replacement for that old fashioned electronic ding-dong doorbell chime in my home with one that’s more Internet of Things friendly. It uses my most favorite electronic toy, the…

I love Particle. It’s the perfect combination of a little bit of hardware and a little bit of software. It removes all the annoying bits of creating a thing: the firmware flashing, the command-line debugging. It lets me just make things.

A pet curiosity of mine is of the Domain Name System. Its intended purpose is to map domain names (medium.com) to their IP addresses (52.21.239.123). Entire businesses (GoDaddy, for instance, and my former employer) are built upon the fact that DNS is a thing.

A few years have passed since the smash hit AndieGraph hit the Android Market and a lot has happened:

• Several new versions of Android OS released: Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, Kit Kat, Lollipop
• Android Market renamed to Google Play…