I spent some time earlier assembling my Nixie’s with the driver boards, soldering one in. I had planned on finishing a single tube today and then spending some time experimenting with it and the Arduino, but then I discovered I needed another breadboard to finish attaching all the pins that connect the breadboard to the Exixe board. Since I’m now waiting until Thursday to be able to finish any of the hardware I decided I’d insteap spend some time today learning a little bit about the real time clock.

So what the heck is a Nixie tube clock? Or backing up a little, what the heck is a Nixie tube? Today a Nixie tube is basically a retro-cool display device, but prior to the advent of the seven-segment LCD display, they were how you could go about displaying digital information on your device. For example, a clock. They look sorta like a mini neon light when lit up and I think are pretty cool. I’d never seen nor heard of them before until a saw one at a friends house. I’d been thinking that I wanted a small project to work on using an Arduino, and so the idea was born: I’m going to build a Nixie tube clock.

In this post I will help you learn how to use VS Code to develop for the Arduino. The Arduino IDE is a thing that exists, but it’s far from a full featured development environment and VS Code includes many niceties to make the development process smoother and more developer-friendly.

So you got yourself your first Yubikey and you want to use it to sign you git commits so that they are verifiably yours. Where do you even begin? This guide will help you setup your environment on Windows.

(I wrote this a few months ago, but for some reason never finished/posted it. Here it is now in all its incomplete glory.)

For a while now I’ve been feeling like I needed to be writing more. Firstly, it’s just satisfying to stretch some new muscles (or the ones that haven’t been used since college). Second, writing things down is a good way to “remember” things you’ve learned, and lastly, I think I’ve been delinquent in learning Git and taking advantage of GitHub - I joined GitHub in 2012, but my first commit was when I started playing around with using it as a blogging host.