• Ember Ajax and Ember Simple Auth

    It can be tricky to properly configure ember-ajax to play nicely with ember-simple-auth. You will need to manually configure a service to mimic the authorisation functionality you get for free when using Ember Simple Auth with Ember Data. This post will show you how to get up and running properly.

  • Sending Ember actions down to components

    Data down, actions up is an often repeated mantra of the Ember community, and for good reason. Sometimes though, you need to call actions on components in a 'downward' direction. In this post I'll give you an approach for breaking this DDAU rule."

  • 'Route variable' pattern with Ember

    There are a couple of different libraries for Ember that add the ability to set the page title for each page in your application by simply creating a title property on each route. This is a great general purpose pattern for declarative information that needs to be set across routes. For example you might want to add breadcrumbs, or just a different heading on each page. This post will outline how to go about creating this pattern yourself.

  • A simple pagination component with Ember

    Ember's ethos of 'components everywhere' makes it really quick and easy to make reuseable widgets. This takes the tedium out of implementing some of the more basic features of web sites and applications. An example of this is pagination. This post shows you how to create a very basic pagination component that allows you to page through a list of items.

  • Making a draggable Ember component

    HTML5 makes it really easy to create elements that can be both dragged and dropped. This is a really powerful API to add rich functionality to your application. In this post we'll use this API to make a simple Ember component that can be repositioned on the screen by dragging it with the mouse.

  • Making USB Push Buttons

    Using a 'Teensy' microcontroller/USB HID you can easily create physical push buttons for your project that, when pressed, will appear as key strokes in your application. This is a really flexible approach to adding physical buttons to an array of different web, desktop or even mobile applications. This post will show you how to do it.

  • Twitter controlled power switches with a Raspberry Pis

    Using off-the-shelf parts with a Raspberry Pi, you can make a remote controlled power switch to turn appliances on/off. I've used this approach to create Twitter controlled snowblowers, remote controlled car headlights, a Twitter activated Christmas trees ... the possibilities are endless. This post will show you how to set up a power switch that will activate when a certain hashtag is posted to Twitter.

  • Adding labels to Ember Leaflet markers

    This post shows you how to create a custom marker component that integrates the Leaflet.label add-on to get nice pop-up labels on your ember-leaflet maps.

  • Django access mixin for active users only

    As of Django 1.9, there are a number of new permission mixins you can use with your views to make access control easier. One that isn't included by default is a mixin allowing you to only permit users who have activated their account (user.is_active = True)

  • Updating your cert_fingerprint for offlineimap with Fastmail.fm

    Fastmail recently updated their SSL certificate, breaking my offlineimap email backups. This post has the updated cert_fingerprint value you need to add to get it back running