Author: Tim

Wireless Temperature Humidity Sensor

Tim Leave a comment

If you have a need to wirelessly monitor the temperature or humidity of a room, attic or even a crawl space, the Govee Thermometer Hygrometer is a great device! I currently have 3 of them monitoring my attic, crawl space, and kid’s room. They have a nice screen but also sync over Bluetooth with your smartphone. They take 2 AAA batteries after a couple of months still are showing full for the battery status.

They are great for real-time temperature and humidity readings but also store 20-day historical data that can be viewed and exported from the app. You can also set high/low alarms for both temperature and humidity but since they are Bluetooth, you do have to be within 100 ft of the device to get an alert.

For $15, the Govee is a great deal and I highly recommend them!

Compress and Upload Images using NativeScript

Tim Leave a comment

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been working on a new iOS and Android app using NativeScript. One of the requirements is to compress and upload images. I figured this would be pretty straightforward but couldn’t find any examples of how to accomplish image compression. After some trial and error, I came up with a simple solution that has worked well. Hopefully, this example will save you some time!

The key piece of code is imageSource.saveToFile which takes a third argument that is compressionValue. This allows you to compress the image to a value from 1-100. Check out the playground example below and feel free to ask any questions in the comments below.

var saved = imageSource.saveToFile(path, "jpg", compressionValue);

Demo

Playground Example

GitHub Repo

 

Fix Cabinet Doors that Overlap

Tim 10 Comments

Recently we had our kitchen cabinets painted and new hinges installed. Everything looked great but the cabinet doors overlapped slightly on the edge due to the new hinges and additional paint. We knew this would cause a lot of frustration and we had to find a way to fix it.

Most suggestions online were to sand or cut the edge of the cabinet door. I felt like this may work but could ruin the cabinet doors. Other solutions were for concealed hinges that had the ability to adjust the position of the doors. After some searching, I finally came across a video that had a simple solution to the problem. The magic tool was a dish towel wedged in between the doors to slightly bend the hinges into the correct position. It took about 5 minutes to fix all my cabinet doors. I love finding a simple solution to a problem!