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Welcome to The Pragmatic Addict!

Many thanks to Curious Marc for the inspiration to publish and share all the little projects that I have selfishly hoarded.

About Me

My real name is Eric Nichols. I am the Vice President and software developer for Directory Wizards Inc. I’ve been a software developer for a few decades. I am also a husband, father, Eagle Scout, private pilot, dungeon master & general repair guy for all objects in the house.

Pragmatic definitely describes my approach to just about everything, one might say I’m an addict at it… The goal of this site is to document all the side projects I take on. These can be pretty random but usually involve an overlap of my growing list of hobbies.

Projects (More to come!)

Adventures with a Dymo LabelWriter 400 Turbo
A long unused DYMO LabelWriter 400 Turbo gets a new life!
May the 4th Movie Marathon
A tribute to the Star Wars galaxy turning a Raspberry Pi into a TV station that continually plays all the movies!
Virtualize Windows 10 using QEMU
Virtualize Windows 10 with step by step instructions including setting up pass-thru USB to connect any Garmin GPS.
Create your own TV Station!
Here is how I was able to broadcast Kodi media center running on a Raspberry Pi to all the TVs in my house.
Turn a Raspberry Pi into a serial console server
This is a very brief overview on how to configure a Raspberry Pi as a serial console server using conman and a USB to serial port adapter.

Web Hosting Details

I wanted this site to be as stripped down and as simple as possible. Here are a few interesting facts about this site:

Hardware
Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Rev 1.1
WINGONEER X230 RS232 Serial Port & RTC for Raspberry Pi
Software
Raspbian, Lighttpd
Web Site
All handwritten from scratch & static, articles are written using a combination of:
Encryption
HTTPS certificates generated with Let’s Encrypt
JavaScript Libs
NONE. Zip, zero. This site will not have any javascript unless it’s absolutely needed to demo some code.
Site Tracking
NONE. Zip, zero. No extra connections to trackers.
Last Updated: 2020-02-01