Bennett Notes

Listening to the Jordan Harbinger podcast, I learned a tip about making effective small talk; the F.E.W. approach. Facts, Emotions and Why. Facts: Start with asking a fact. “Where do you work?” Emotion: Follow up with an emotion. “How do you like working there?” Why: Dig a little deeper “What made you choose the career path?” It’s important to mix this up with statements of your own in-between the questions so you don’t sound like a robot.

Everyone tells me, “Dave, you shouldn’t be living just for the weekend!” But I wonder, how do people who work in a typical 9-5 corporate environment avoid lusting over the liberty and excitement that the weekend brings. Two whole days to do what you want to do; spending time with family or friends, traveling, working on side projects, gaming, etc. For me, it means two whole days where I don’t have to be in a windowless room coding in front of a computer screen for eight hours.

Have you ever needed to cast music from your PC to your Android device? Let’s walk though a quick tutorial that will show you have to use your Android as a bluetooth speaker. Download Android Wireless Speaker App Begin by downloading the app wireless speaker for android. All you need to do is download it, and launch it. No further configuration is needed. Take note of that IP address that is listed for your phone in the app.

If you are developing a Chrome extension with message passing, then you might have received the following error: Unchecked runtime.lastError: Could not establish connection. Receiving end does not exist.. There was some type of behavior change that happened post Chrome 72 that affected the way channels are opened. Essentially, if you try to call runetime.connect() before you have a a channel open, then you will get this error (Stackoverflow).

Let’s take a look at how you can run android apps in Chrome browser. Keep in mind, this is more of a proof of concept than something you should heavily rely on. While simple apps and games will work, you will most likely run into issues when trying android apps with advanced graphics. To run android apps in Chrome browser we are going to use a modified version of the android-chrome runtime found inside of chrome.

Last Saturday, I spent several hours working on my website’s code. I added some new meta tags to lazy load images, tried to remove JQuery dependencies from my scripts, added enhancements for accessibility and structured data, and even created a pull request for the theme that I am using (Beautiful Hugo). Basically, five hours of my day were eaten up by completing those tasks. Although this was another example of getting too absorbed in your side projects, I was actually proud of myself.

When I was a kid, it was easy to merrily invest myself in any activity that I found interesting. Building robots, learning to play guitar, and making short films were things that I would work on after school everyday. I did all those things simply because I enjoyed doing them. Now, as a young adult, I feel like I completely lost that spontaneity and simple mindset. Every project which I take up has become an attempt to make money.

Let’s take a look at a Kafka Nodejs example with Producers and Consumers. We will be creating a kafka producer and consumer in Nodejs. If you haven’t already, check out my previous tutorial on how to setup Kafka in docker. I already created a topic called cat that I will be using. Kafka Producer We are going to use the npm module called kafka-node to interface with our kafka and zookeeper.

Setting up Apache Kafka and Zookeeper in docker is easy thanks to popular DockerFiles like wurstmeister/kafka-docker. Let’s go through a quick setup of Kafka and Zookeeper in docker on a single node system. Prerequisites Linux System Git Docker Docker-compose Kafka and Zookeeper Start by cloning the repo: git clone https://github.com/wurstmeister/kafka-docker Then change to the kafka-docker directory: cd kafka-docker Now let’s edit the docker-compose.yml file. Change the Kafka Advertised Hostname to localhost:

Flying a drone with javascript probably sounds crazy and hard. Do I use a framework? Will the 10 GB of node_modules weigh it down? NOPE! It’s all pretty simple to do. The other day I came across a neat drone called the DJI Tello. It is a relatively inexpensive quadcopter that offers a simple SDK which can be accessed over WiFI. Using the NodeJS dgram library, I can send commands via UDP to the drone to perform actions such as takeoff, left 20, and land.