Adventures with 3D Printing

3D Printers have come a long way over the last few years. I decided jump in and try out an entry level printer. It was a bit of a learning curve and not quite what I expected. I've documented my experience and some advice that might be useful for anyone thinking about jumping into 3D printing.

Cheating at photo retouching

As I've discovered, photo retouching software has come a long way in the last few years, with AI playing a huge role. You don't need expert Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom skills any more to take good photos and make them great. I started using applications from Skylum and was blown away by the results!

Installing Windows 11

Doing a clean install of Windows 11 on a custom built PC running Windows 10 can be a minefield of problems. Despite these problems, I managed to get Windows 11 up and running with TPM and all the new security features enabled. I've documented the steps I took in the hope that they might be useful for others. Especially those with AMD Ryzen (AM4 / X570 AORUS) machines.

Async .NET Core Console Applications

Microsoft's new Async/Await support makes writing multi-threaded applications a lot easier. Sadly, on older versions of Visual Studio / .NET, it doesn't work out of the box for console Apps but it's a simple config change to enable it. I've put together a brief description and a couple of screen shots to demonstrate how.

Visual Studio for Mac: NUnit and .NET Core

You may encounter some issues trying to get the built in test runner UI in Visual Studio for Mac v7.2 working with NUnit and .NET Core projects. It's actually really easy to fix so I thought I'd share the work around here.

Fun with .NET Core, Docker and AWS

Docker's been on my list of things to look at for a while - I though it was about time to see what all the fuss was about. Building something is a great way to learn a new technology so I decided to put together a little learning project. To build a very simple .NET Core web service and host it in a Docker container running in the cloud. I mean, how hard could it be?

Travel Research and Planning

I've created a series of pages about some of the things I learned about planning trips abroad. I took a road trip across Europe and I though it would be nice to write about some of the preparation I did to get ready for the trip.

Please bear in mind that these articles pre-date the UK's exit from the EU and Covid-19.

Help Me Learn A1 German, an iOS and Android App

The Help Me Learn A1 German App is a simple iPhone and Android App designed to help German language students studying A1 level German. The App contains a database of 800 German nouns and provides flash cards and tests to help memorise them. The App is available on both the Apple App and Google Play stores. I built the App as a way to learn Xamarin.Forms. Written in C#, around 99% of the code is shared between the iOS and Android versions.