Thomas Mertz

Essentially eternally 12 years old

Thomas

  • A big part of the 10Four project is detecting a button press. This, I had been told, would be trivial using an Arduino Leonardo. That was true. It took me all of 20 minutes and a bit of light googling to parse together what I needed. Here’s the code I use. Next up is hijacking…

  • We’ve seen it in the trucker movies. I’m thinking stuff like Convoy. It looks hella cool whenever the guy reaches up in his cab, grabs the mic and talks into it. I’ve been playing a bit of Space Trucker, Elite Dangerous, etc and I want to replicate that feeling. So this idea originally came from…

  • I did my little prototyping, and it worked like a charm. The Sony AVX AV3250 has a parking break sensor, that enables the display to show the videosignal if, and only if, the parking break is enabled. Or, if you do like I did, and just ground it to the chassis of the car. The…

  • As I mentioned in my previous post I bought a car last year. I have been very happy with it, but the headunit in (which was cheap Chinese thing) annoyed me. It would crash often, and just generally be unreliable. Also, in the 2006 Honda Civic when you remove the stock head unit you lose…

  • About a year ago I bought a car that I have been eyeing ever since I first saw it. The 2006 Honda Civic hatchback with the space shuttle facelift that relaunched the Civic in Europe. It’s an astonishingly cool car, and I was very lucky. The one I found was in mint condition, and loaded…

  • I still write a ton of code. Code needs to be maintained. That means keeping an eye on how your code performs. While talking through that process with a friend and a client, I thought it might be interesting to write a bit about my process. Git is the common thread I use Gitlab for…

  • Growing pains

    Preface; this is just some scattered thoughts and reaction to events that unfolded in the larping community today. There’s probably a ton of stuff that I need to elaborate on at some point.  I started larping when I was 13 years old, some 20+ years ago. Back then we were the weird kids running around…

  • You: Lovely infectious laughter, brunette, travelling with your friend. Me: tall chubby red bearded supergeek. We started laughing about the Chinese gentleman who thought we were waving at him when we were yelling at him to take a step backward, so a young mother could get into her seat next to her child. We never…

  • I was looking into setting up my own incoming webhook server, because webhooks are super cool and useful for a variety of things. And also because I am a giant nerd and wanted to play around with some stuff.  Now, there are very few ready made components for this out there, so I had to do…

  • Work & Play

    On and off (more on than off) I’ve been running my own business since 2006. I’ve never been much for formalized things, and so I’ve never really maintained an actual office for my business. It was never my idea that it was something that should grow into a massive corp, and so being just me…