Bertwagner

Train Wreck The last time I watched a high school band nearly fall apart mid-performance was when the relatively new, certainly nervous band director started the piece off much faster than what the students could play. I felt bad for the students, the dir

I almost ordered parts for a circuit that would have destroyed itself the instant I powered it on. Instead, an LLM caught the critical flaw in my design, saving me time and money. While I regularly see value in using LLMs in my coding projects, this is th

Until recently, my family's 90,000+ photos have been hidden away in the depths of my gaming PC's hard drives. Many of the more recent photos were also scattered across our individual iCloud accounts, making them hard to find and access. A failing backup d

After setting up dozens of Internet of Things (IoT) smart home devices, I started to wonder: how hard could it be to build one from scratch? I needed a project to learn on, so I decided to create something fun: a device that alerts my neighbors when my ki

Watch this video on YouTube I like using ChatGPT. But I don't like the $20/month price tag for using OpenAI's app, especially given the API costs fractions of a cent. So what did I do? I created...

Earlier this year I presented at PyCon 2023 in Salt Lake City, UT on the topic of "Efficient Cross-Server Data Joins on Slow Networks with Python". You can watch the presentation on YouTube : a href="h...

Watch this week's video on YouTube How do you keep track of your daily work accomplishments? If you are like me, you wait until the end of the week and then dread having to think back all the wa...

Watch this week's video on YouTube I like solving the daily New York Times crossword on paper. However, logging in to download the PDF every day and printing it is a pain. In this post, I will ...

Watch this week's video on YouTube Recursive queries are fun to plan and write. They can be frustrating too depending on the complexity of the problem you are trying to solve. This post shows on...

Watch this week's video on YouTube Imagine you need to join two tables of data and filter the results. Perhaps you also need to convert some of the values for display as well (eg. 0 = "No", 1 =...