Hung Truong: The Blog!

Updating My Blog and Killing Wordpress!

A week or two ago I got an email from Google telling me that my blog had once again been hacked. I’ve written before about getting hacked and I basically knew how to unhack myself, but I put it off for a bit until I checked my website again and noticed that Chrome was warning me to avoid it! This was pretty much the last straw. I decided to move off of self-hosted Wordpress and switch to something a bit more secure.

Introducing DeadRinger: An iPhone X Lockscreen Replica

I got an idea the other day when I was looking at my co-worker’s iPhone X sitting on a desk. I thought that I could have mistaken it for my own phone, since iPhone X comes in two colors and you have a 50% chance of having the same phone color as any other person. I was thinking that if I did mistake it as my phone and entered my passcode, I’d basically be transmitting the key to all of my personal data.

2016: A Hung Truong Year in Review

It’s been a while since I wrote a year-in-review on this blog, let alone any blog post. 2016 was a big year though, so here’s some stuff I did.

In January Emily and I moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan where we had been living for a few years (Emily since grad school and me since the last time I moved back from Chicago in like 2012) to Seattle, Washington. I’ve loved Seattle ever since I moved here in 2009 to go work for Microsoft, and it’s great to be back! I’m working for a coffee company in Seattle called Starbucks (yes, I get free coffee). I get to work on their iOS app and make latte art in my spare time. Here are some highlights:

On Writing Successful Fart Apps

Last Thursday, Apple held an event where they announced a few things, including a refresh of the Macbook Pro line that killed all of the good ports and added a touch bar to replace the function key row. I was actually in a meeting during the announcement but I had heard of the touch bar through a story about a leak. Someone on Twitter put a bounty of $5 on the first fart app for the touch bar and a friend retweeted it to me.

Building a DIY Off-Grid Solar Bank on my Roof

I’ve been fascinated with solar energy ever since I was a kid and my brother had a toy with a motor attached to a mini solar panel that you could run under a strong light. In recent years, solar panels have come down in price and now seemed like a good a time as any for me to experiment with it a bit. I took a week long staycation from work a few weeks ago, and in preparation, I did a bunch of research and bought a ton of components to set up an off grid solar thing.