from brodan import Blog

flipper-zero Featured

A Visual Guide to Flipper Zero GUI Modules

I've recently been diving into the Flipper Zero multi-tool and learning how to develop a custom Flipper Application Package (FAP). It's been a very overwhelming process as there is very little documentation when it comes to the Flipper Zero firmware and what it has to offer. Thanks to Derek Jamison

tattooing

Brodan's Tattoo Bucket List

This post is a collection of all of the tattoo artists I hope to meet and get tattooed by before I run out of space on my body. I've only planned to tattoo my legs and as a result I don't have much time left. This means that, unfortunately, not

NFT

Learning NFT Provenance by Example: Investigation Follow-Up

It's been nearly a year since I decided to verify the Bored Ape Yacht Club's provenance hash out of boredom and made an interesting discovery. I wrote a blog post [https://brodan.biz/blog/learning-nft-provenance-by-example/] about it which you should read first before reading this. I also tweeted [https://twitter.

ffmpeg

Dynamic Aspect Ratio Detection With FFmpeg

This week I've been working on a challenging new feature for one of GIPHY's GIF creation tools. The goal is to detect every aspect ratio change of a long-form video, which is useful for videos such as smart-phone videos that contain a combination of vertical and horizontal video. Here's an

ethereum

How to Run a Private (Local) Ethereum Network with Go Ethereum

I've been learning more and more about Ethereum lately and I wanted to solidify some of my understandings by running an Ethereum node locally. I ran into several issues along the way due to a combination of less-than-helpful documentation and super outdated Stack Exchange and Medium posts. In this post

NFT

Learning NFT Generation By Example: An Open-Source Success Story

Lately I've been heads down on a generative NFT PFP project and working heavily with a Node.js tool called sharp [https://sharp.pixelplumbing.com/]. sharp is a high-speed image processing library that's useful for image converting, resizing, extraction, etc. GitHub - lovell/sharp: High performance Node.js image processing,

NFT Featured

Learning NFT Provenance by Example: A Bored Ape Investigation

I was recently approached by an artist friend of mine to help them build and launch an NFT collection using their artwork. I've never worked with smart contracts or any of the NFT-related technologies, so I've been learning all of it myself. One concept that I found particularly interesting was

ghost

How to Hide the Ghost Blog Subscribe Button

Ghost [https://ghost.org/] is the platform I use to host this blog, and I love it. It has everything I need. However, I recently came across my first gripe/bug with Ghost. The Bug The issue is that the 'Subscribe' buttons can not be hidden from the page despite

python

Logging S3 Download Progress with Python and Boto3

This post demonstrates how to log the download progress of an S3 object at self-defined intervals using Python's built-in logger and without any additional third-party libraries (besides boto3). At the time of this writing I'm using boto3 version 1.18.2 and Python version 3.9.1. The full source

tattooing

8 AAPI Tattoo Artists You Should Support and Follow This Month (And Every Month After).

A personally curated list of eight exceptional AAPI tattoo artists.

react

Rendering a Custom Font Dynamically with React + TypeScript

This past week at GIPHY [https://brodan.biz/blog/p/187bfcf6-86a0-4cea-8349-0a4d3de23a71/giphy.com/] I was working on an interesting feature for one our creation tools. The tool needed to allow the user to upload a font file and then render a preview of that font. Various Google and StackOverflow searches

illustrator

On Learning Adobe Illustrator

In an effort to start doing some of my own design work for my pin company, Pingrove Press [http://pingrovepress.storenvy.com/], I finally took another crack at learning Adobe Illustrator and how to work with the dreaded pen tool. The pen tool has perplexed me ever since I first

web monetization

How To Monetize a Ghost Blog with Web Monetization

This post is going to be quick and easy. Web Monetization (WM) helps you get paid for your content. You can learn all about it on https://webmonetization.org/. If you use Ghost [https://ghost.org/] for your CMS/blog like I do, there's an easy way to integrate WM

command line

betty: A Slightly Better cp

betty is a simple command line tool which combines the functionality of cp and mkdir into one command.

tattooing

Brodan's Tattoo Compendium

Brodan's tattoo collection from 2014-present.

toreba

On Winning Toreba

I've won ten prizes on Toreba to date, and I have the receipts to prove it.

python Featured

Configuring a .pypirc File for Easier Python Packaging

Today I published a new blog post on my Truveris's engineering blog on how to configure a .pypirc file to simplify Python packaging. You can read the post here: Configuring a .pypirc File for Easier Python Packaging [https://truveris.github.io/articles/configuring-pypirc/] If you have any questions or feedback

tattooing

7 Color Tattoo Artists You Should Have Already Emailed

In a previous iteration of this post (which you can read here [https://brodan.biz/blog/9-blackwork-tattoo-artists-you-should-have-already-emailed/]) I presented 9 kickass blackwork tattoo artists, all of whom should be capable of meeting anyone's blackwork tattooing needs. In this iteration, I'll discuss a bunch of the best color tattoo artists I've

nodejs Featured

Verify Travis CI Webhook Notifications with Node.js

Travis CI allows users to configure webhook notifications [https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/notifications/#Configuring-webhook-notifications] which can be sent during certain build events. I recently played with this feature in order to send SMS messages via Twilio [https://www.twilio.com/] whenever a project failed to build/test. This post

python

Parsing CSV Files with Python's DictReader

I had an interview today (spoiler: I didn't get an offer), and one of the rounds of my interview involved refactoring some poorly written Python [https://www.python.org/] code. In this code was a function that parsed a CSV file and returned all the rows with columns matching some

twilio

Building Twilio MMS Bots

I recently wrote two short tutorials for this awesome project called hack.guides() [http://tutorials.pluralsight.com/] which is run by pluralsight [https://www.pluralsight.com/]. These posts are intended to cover identical material in two different langauges (ruby and python). You can view both of these tutorials here: * Build

osx

Symlink Directories on OSX

The OSX version of the ln command behaves differently than the GNU version. As a result, I could not figure out a way to correctly symlink an entire directory (and its contents) on OSX. Here's a quick solution to this problem: This command will install and allow you to use

music

Music For a Hranj Day 004: Local Band Spotlight

Sometimes when the weather sucks and you're feeling down, you want to find something new to cheer you up. The focus of this post is to highlight a number of local bands that I believe deserve recognition. Hopefully the bands in this list will be new to you and you'll

hackNY

A hackNY Week 1 Recap

It's absolutely crazy to believe that I'm already halfway through my hackNY [https://apply.hackny.org/] Fellowship summer. I can finally say that I've gotten to know all of this year's fellows and it's such an honor to be able to associate myself with this group of people. hackNY recently

git

Squashing Git Commits Using 'git rebase'

There's many times when collaborating on Git that you may need to combine, or "squash" multiple commits into a single commit. For example, the repository I'm currently working on at my internship with BuzzFeed has 8,500+ commits and hundreds of open pull requests at any given time. If these