Please! Stop with the mobile web sites! If you are using browser agent strings to change your CSS/layout don't! Use responsive CSS instead. There are other situations when you need a small window and devices that have a small screen where your web site does not work.
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Minimal Accessible Tooltip
Doing a lot of accessibility (a11y) fixes, I wondered what would be the minimum amount of code to create a WCAG 2.1 compliant custom tooltip. Unfortunately, it had to include Javascript. Here is what I can up with.
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If you are wanting to apply accessibility labels onto an image, here are the label (
alt
,title
,aria-description
,aria-label
) priorities (highest first):aria-description
(witharia-label
,alt
ortitle
);aria-label
;alt
. Notearia description
does not get read out if there is no other label attributes. (Tested on Windows, NVDA, and Firefox and Edge). -
Email dates in Javascript
Javscript is missing functions to format dates in some common formats, such datetime-local inputs and RFC 5322 (email dates) in a non-obsolete way. While Date.toUTCString() is close, the timezone is now obsolete (though it is handy for HTTP Date and other such headers). Here's the basic functions to get the right formats
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Visibility and CSS Accordians
When changing a reworked menu to have accordian animations, I came to the realisation that I have been missing a big issue when using
max-height
transition
animations — accessibility. I detail a simple fix in this article. -
Can't touch list
Turns out screen readers really don't like you playing with the
display
CSS property on lists, for example to change it to an inline list — it will cause lists items to be read like a paragraph. Here's how to do without upsetting the screen readers. -
New Zealand Low Power Networks (LTE-M & NB-IoT)
I have started experimenting with low power wide area networks (LP-WAN) in New Zealand using a u-blox SARA-R410-02B. Here is what I have experimented with so far.
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JS Binary Decoder
I have recently been dealing with parsing binary data packets from various sources, and have published two NPM libraries from it: binary-decoder and sbd-direct-ip. Here's how they came to be.
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Starting with ESP32
I started developing my trap-watch project on an ESP32-CAM using the ESP IDF. Here is the newbie difficulties I ran into.
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VIM Window Rabbit Hole
Developing ESP-IDF components I thought it would be great if I could make a command to open all the files for a component at once. What a rabbit hole it was. Here is how I did it.
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Parsing Arguments in Bash
Making a script parse arugments in Bash took me way too long last time I did it, so here is a nice full example of how to do it using
getopt
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Where's my bait gone?
I have recently started trapping some introduced predators around my local area and have had baits and pre-feed disappear with nothing to show for it, so I decided to get sparky and see if I could catch the culprit in the act.
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Bathymetric Contours
Finally got around to creating a SLD style for GeoServer to display bathymetric contour lines using the GEBCO gridded bathymetric data. Here's how.
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shm That Cache
I am often trying to find more space on my hard drives and found today my own docker containers wasting space thanks to ! Here's how I fixed it.
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Blob blob blob blob Stayin' Alive Stayin' Alive
Upon recently trying Deezer again, I found their web app ate all my memory when running in Firefox, so I decided to see if I could find out why. I got as far as memory-file-data/string and Blobs. Here's how.
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A new Litter Survey
In a culmination of litter surveys and litter picks, linked data and data exploration, and remoteStorage and ActivityPub, I have created a web-based litter pick/survey app that I hope will allow federated citizen science.
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Hoe Stream Trash
My latest litter pick target was Hoe Stream and the White Rose Lane Local Nature Reserve. Here's how it went.
The next place I decided to target for my litter picker antics was the paths along Hoe Stream and the White Rose Lane Local Nature Reserve (OSM). Having fixed the issues with the GPS positions on the Pi and the other issues I found, I was hopeful of great success with the litter picker.
As I was walking to the park I found that the GPS module was taking a very very long time to get a good fix. I pulled out my phone and fired up the track recording in OSMAnd so I could at least track where I went, which magically made the GPS module on the Pi get a good fix.
Missing the bridge as I was paying too much attention to my phone and the muddy puddles, I started from Hoe Bridge School Sports Grounds and worked back to the nature reserve.
On previous walks, I had seen a couple of bits of trash caught by a tree that had fallen in to the Hoe Stream, so once I had gone round the nature reserve once, headed to the tree. It was a lot worse than I thought. I picked out a dozen bottles, four tennis balls, a nerf dart and a strange black floating ball, which shattered when I tried to crush it (still not sure what it is) and found I was out of space in my bag - will go back with a drysuit to get the rest.
On returning home, I found again that it hadn't recorded positions. It turned out it was due to some wires shorting the serial lines on the GPS modules that I hadn't cleaned up after soldering them (bad Jack). Since I had recorded my track on my phone, I was able to add GPS positions to the images by correlating the time the photo was taken with the position data from track using Digikam (select the images, open the "Item" menu, select "Edit Geolocation", change to the "GPS Correlator" tab, load the GPX file, choose the correct timezone, click "Correlate" and voilĂ ).
The tally for the picking was:
- 3 face masks
- 1 medical glove
- 4 tennis balls
- 3 bags of dog poop
- 2 empty dog poop bags
- 3 wet wipes
- 19 single use plastic bottles
- 1 plastic drink bottle
- 3 glass bottles
- 15 cans
- 1 pair of garden gloves
- 2 takeaway containers
- 1 juice pouch
- 1 yoghurt container
- 11 snack wrappers
- a couple of other bits of plastic bag
As before here is a video of the images from the pi-trash-cam.
A video of all the images of litter I picked up during the day Here is the commands I used to create the video
$ # Resize the images $ for f in `ls *.jpg`; do convert -auto-orient -resize '640x480^' -quality 80 "$f" "resized/$f"; done $ # Create a video from the images $ convert -delay 10 resized/* trash.mpg $ # Encode as $ ffmpeg -i trash.mpg -vcodec libx264 trash.mp4
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Release the Beast
I just created a Gitlab CI job to create a release with information from a CHANGELOG.md file for some of my projects. Here's how I did it.
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Gitlab CI Caching
I noticed something strange happening during build process during a multi-tasking bug fix. Turns out I was using Gitlab CI's caching incorrectly. I should have been using artifacts. Here's what I saw.
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Birthday Trash
As a birthday treat, I took the day off work to try out my electronerised litter picker. Here's how it went.
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Pi Trash Cam
In preparation for a day of litter picking, I finally got round to a project idea - attaching a camera to a litter picker to record it all. Here's what I did.
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yarn add --dev webdriverio
I finally started implementing UI testing on first-draft using WebdriverIO. While writing tests was easy, getting the tests running was a little more difficult. Here is how I did it.
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Hooray! My new blog is live! Based on Sapper, using MongoDB and eventually ActivityPub and ActivityStreams, it will be my federated posting hub to the world.
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Removing EXIF Data from Photos
Creating this new blog, I wanted to make sure there was no metadata data leaking personal information. Here's how I removed all the metadata tags except the ones I wanted from my photos.
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tmux List and Reattach
Using
tmux
for your terminal multiplexer but want an easy to reattach to a session? Here's a small bash script to do it. -
Selectable Shell Examples
Here's how to help your readers save time by making your post's shell commands easy to select and copy - with a simple CSS property.
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Be Dates You
Making my new blog, I didn't initially set the published dates to be native dates in the database. Here what I did to change them …and do all the upgrades I needed.
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Testing vue components
I recently needed to test that some Vue components were creating the correct HTML. To do this, I decided to create snapshots of Object representations of the rendered HTML.
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No More Numbers
HTML5 number inputs aren't useful, but tel inputs, have all the power
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A Hacker "Hacked" Me
I decided to look into the extortion emails I have been getting and wrote a small script to extract the bitcoin addresses that have been used.
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Mouse Surgery
As part of my pledge not to upgrade, I decided to repair two of my failing mice instead of replacing them with a brand new model (as tempting as it was). Here's what I did.
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Danger Danger, Highly Reactive
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Switching to SSR
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Clean Docker Registry
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Testing on the Filesystem
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NaN Got Me
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All our app's tabs are belong to us
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Developing NPM modules
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Nfa + Nfb or N(f+fa+fb)
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Photo Layout
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Browning Pass HideAway Web Site
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Think Mobile
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Pledge to Refuse and Not Buy Bottled Water
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Run PHP run!
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Gallery Hierarchy
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I'm making hierarchies
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Google Sheets fun
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Travel Photos
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Image managment scripts
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MeldCE logo
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MoltenDB
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The Expensive Side
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abcde
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Energizer Power Plus Rechargeable Batteries
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USAR FOGTeX
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Personal Gear Bag
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Geocaching Stamp
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Call Record Presenter
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Kimi Ora School
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All About Catering Web Site
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Quantum Accounting Web Site