An Alexa skill for New York City transport service changes
Playing around with the idea of Alexa Skills based on live data feeds, I created an Alexa Skill which announces unplanned service changes of the New York City subway and bus lines, based on information provided by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). This skill, available in English and German, was now certified and has gone live.
Why not to abbreviate the year 2020
The year 2020 poses a special problem that can make it easy for scammers to forge handwritten documents. This happens once in a century, the last time in the year 1919. It’s common practice to shorten the year when writing down a date. This year, however, could cause some legal issues and can leave you at risk of fraud.
A VSCode extension to paste different clipboard formats
Today a short blog post about a Visual Studio Code extension I created a week ago. VSCode, as you might know, is a very popular code editor created and maintained by Microsoft and available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. This extension implements a Paste Special function to paste clipboard content in different available formats.
A 3D visualization of real-time earthquake data
This is a 3D visualization of real-time earthquake data gathered from the U.S. Geological Survey website. The data used in this example covers all earthquakes with a magnitude of at least 1 within the last 30 days. They are drawn into a template texture image file of the Earth’s surface according to the geographical position and the magnitude of the quake.
Windows 10 now supports raw image previews
The Windows 10 May 2019 Update now supports raw image previews and showing metadata in the Photos app or Windows File Explorer by installing the "Raw Image Extension" app from the Microsoft Store.
Windows 10: Changing Hyper-V support at boot time
If you want to use Docker under Windows and the new Windows Sandbox feature, you have to enable Hyper-V support. The problem is: You cannot run VMware Workstation or VirtualBox and Hyper-V at the same time. This can easily be fixed by creating two boot configurations, where one has Hyper-V enabled and one has not.
Changing labels in WordPress with the gettext filter
An easy way to change labels and strings in WordPress is to use a gettext filter. This post shows the different filter functions, their purpose, and how to implement a filter callback in the file functions.php to change labels and strings in themes, plugins, and widgets using a table of string replacements, even for different languages.
Running Linux GUI applications on Windows 10
Since the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update from 2017, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a fully supported Windows feature. In case you don't already know about that feature: WSL is a compatibility layer which allows running 64 bit Linux binary executables (in ELF format) natively on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019 in a console window. It uses much fewer resources than a fully virtualized machine.
GKV-VEG entlastet Selbständige
Heute wurde im Bundestag das sogenannte "Gesetz zur Beitragsentlastung der Versicherten in der gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung" (kurz "GKV-Versichertenentlastungsgesetz") beschlossen. Insbesondere für Selbständige mit geringem Einkommen ergibt sich dadurch eine spürbare Entlastung.
