CSS is Awesome
Ok. CSS is in an awesome place now. We have functionality, including CSS variables and functions like color-mix() that make writing CSS so compact. Here's what I mean.
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Boolean Attributes in Custom Angular Components
I like clean code so being able to have boolean attributes like required in my custom Angular components makes me happy. To do it however you need an extra bit of javascript.
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Before I loose it again, one of the best references for creating accessible web sites is the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide (APG). It has good examples of how to create some complex components like navigation with submenus and treegrids, as well as best practices.
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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 web accessibility 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 came up with.
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Day-to-day with Librem 5
After quite a few years of waiting, I finally got my Librem 5 phone. I am now using it as my primary phone… using my work phone as a back-up. Here are the issues and whether I think using it as a primary phone is a good idea so far.
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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,altortitle);aria-label;alt. Notearia descriptiondoes 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-heighttransitionanimations — 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
displayCSS 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 -
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.
The Background
Being in the UK for the last few years, I have become ever more aware of the impact of humans on the world. It seems nearly impossible in the UK to go somewhere there isn't a piece of litter. Centres like Cardiff and London are horrendous, even with the council cleaners that I have an admiration for.
While in Cardiff, I bought a litter picker and a bag holder so that I could hopefully make people think twice about the litter. I have also done litter cleanups and surveys for both Thames21 and the Marine Conservation Society.
One thing I have noticed, in the realm of litter and other conservation organisations is there is a lot of data of all types being collected and no great ways of exploring the data or finding it in first place. This, along with looking into decentralised alternatives to social platforms, has led me down the path of looking at technologies such as linked data, ActivityStreams, ActivityPub, JSON-LD, JSON Schema, remoteStorage and IndieAuth and wondering if there is a better way.
The Idea
My pie-in-the-sky idea was to have the tools for a Mastodon of the organisation science world including:
- formalised schemas for observations
- libraries for letting organisations and citizen scientists publish and subscribe to new observations
- customisable apps for collecting and exploring data.
Organisations and people would be able to subscribe to subjects such as species or survey types. They would be able to create and share their own observations, storing them on their own storage and/or submitting them to other central data repositories. Those subscribed would receive notifications about the new data.
Verification of the data or the organisation or person would be needed to make the data useable for research. This could be done numerous ways depending on the type of observation.
The Initial Litter App
The app itself is written using Preact (a lightweight WebApp library) and Leaflet (a mapping library) and uses modern browser APIs for the camera, geolocation, storage and caching.
My aim is make the app as generic and flexible as possible, so that organisations can style and customise what is available to their own needs and it can be used by all in all environments.
The app allows you to record individual bits of litter or collections of litter collected during a litter survey. Each piece of litter is currently categorised using the categories from the Marine Conservation Society beach clean survey form, which is very similar to the European Environment Agency Marine Litterwatch category list. It is able to take photos of litter and record the position of the litter as well as a track during a litter survey. You are able to look through previously picked litter and surveys.
My ideas for future functionality:
- live trash counts from other people on the same survey as you
- different survey types
- specifying the brands of pieces of litter
- automatic recognition of litter through the use of image object recognition
- offline use
The app is currently up at https://litter.gfon.org (note that it doesn't yet submit your data or allow you to store your data remotely - that's still on the TODO). The code, as always, is available on gitlab.
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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.
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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
tmuxfor 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