Blog of Frank Delporte, Java Champion, Software Developer, Technical Writer, Nerd/Geek

Create Music Bingo cards with iText

It has been a while since I last had to create documents in a program, and iText has been “on my radar” to try out for a while now. This weekend we had a party and wanted to organize a music bingo. For this, we needed a set of randomly selected songs to be printed out per person. A small Java project seemed to be the best solution, otherwise, this would have been a boring, manual, and repetitive task. Isn’t that the goal of most of our developments? “Automate the boring stuff!”

Blink a LED and read a button state with Vaadin, Spring and Pi4J on a Raspberry Pi

As I’m becoming a senior developer in terms of age, I’ve transitioned from one language to another. One of my main interests has always been clean, easy-to-understand UIs (User Interface). That journey started for me with Director (to create multimedia CD-ROMs), Flash website animation, and Flex Rich Internet Applications (= “Flash on steroids”). When I started developing with Java over 10 years ago, we had some projects with the early versions of Vaadin and JavaFX. As I went on with serverside applications, I only continued with JavaFX for some personal and side projects, and loved the way you can create a UI both with XML (FXML actually) and code, exactly the same approach I loved with Flex. Since then, my love for Java and JavaFX only grew and it’s still my major programming environment.

Er zit slechts een paar 1000km tussen geluk en miserie

English version below

Ik heb een vrouw, kind, hond en kat. Mijn Java-collega waar ik al meer dan jaar dagelijks mee samen werk, heeft ook een vrouw, kinderen, hond en kat. We willen gewoon ons gang gaan, werken om te leven, ons kleine steentje bijdragen om van deze wereld een leuke plaats te maken. Het enige verschil tussen ons twee, is de plaats waar we wonen. Ik woon in een dorp dat 100 jaar geleden tijdens de “grote oorlog” plat gebombardeerd werd. Hij woont in Ukraïne, het land dat momenteel aan stukken wordt geschoten, waar de losgeslagen Russen om-weet-ik-veel-welke-reden aanspraak willen op maken en daarvoor alle mogelijke oorlogsmisdaden inzetten.

3D printed Pinecel soldering iron holder

The Pinecil is a very handy and affordable USB-C powered soldering iron (running on open firmware!) with an OLED monochrome display. This soldering iron is made by PINE64, and is delivered in nice carton boxes. But once you start using it, you quickly need another way to keep the different tips at hand.

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