@bytesnz

Jack Farley, Computer Engineer

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  • 6/16/2022

    JS Binary Decoder

    software

    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. How's how they came to be.

  • 4/19/2022

    New Zealand Low Power Wide Area Networks

    electronicssoftware

    I have started experimenting with low power wide area networks (LP-WAN) in New Zealand using a u-blox SARA-R410-02B. Here is is what I have experimented with so far.

  • 2/7/2022

    Starting with ESP32

    esp32electronicssoftwaretrap-watch

    I started developing my trap-watch project on an ESP32-CAM using the ESP IDF. Here is the newbie difficulties I ran into.

  • 2/4/2022

    VIM Window Rabbit Hole

    linux

    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.

  • 1/28/2022

    Parsing Arguments in Bash

    linux

    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

  • 1/8/2022

    Where's my bait gone?

    electronicsconservationtrap-watch

    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.

  • 3/26/2021

    Bathymetric Contours

    gisgeoserveroceans

    Finally got around to creating a SLD style for GeoServer to display bathymetric contour lines using the GEBCO gridded bathymetric data. Here's how.

  • 2/25/2021

    shm That Cache

    yarndockerdevelopment

    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.

  • 2/2/2021

    Blob blob blob blob Stayin' Alive Stayin' Alive

    softwarejavascriptdebuggingmemory

    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.

  • 12/25/2020

    A new Litter Survey

    softwarelitterlitter-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.

  • 12/13/2020

    Hoe Stream Trash

    litterpi-trash-camlitter-pick

    My latest litter pick target was Hoe Stream and the White Rose Lane Local Nature Reserve. Here's how it went.

  • 11/24/2020

    Release the Beast

    softwaregitlabcirelease

    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.

  • 9/30/2020

    Gitlab CI Caching

    gitlabcontinuous integration

    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.

  • 9/21/2020

    Birthday Trash

    litterpi-trash-cam

    As a birthday treat, I took the day off work to try out my electronerised litter picker. Here's how it went.

  • 9/13/2020

    Pi Trash Cam

    raspberry pielectronicslitterpi-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.

  • 8/25/2020

    yarn add --dev webdriverio

    first-draftsoftwaretestinggitlab

    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.

  • 8/16/2020

    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.

    softwareblog
  • 8/9/2020

    Removing EXIF Data from Photos

    exifphotos

    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.

  • 8/9/2020

    tmux List and Reattach

    tmuxbashsoftware

    Using tmux for your terminal multiplexer but want an easy to reattach to a session? Here's a small bash script to do it.

  • 8/8/2020

    Selectable Shell Examples

    markdownsyntaxcss

    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.

  • 8/5/2020

    Be Dates You

    mongodbdocker

    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.

  • 7/8/2020

    Testing vue components

    softwarevuetestingjavascript

    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.

  • 2/20/2019

    No More Numbers

    javascripthtml5software

    HTML5 number inputs aren't useful, but tel inputs, have all the power

  • 12/21/2018

    A Hacker "Hacked" Me

    securityemailgrep

    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.

  • 12/7/2018

    Mouse Surgery

    pledge to not upgradeelectronics

    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.

  • 10/29/2018

    Danger Danger, Highly Reactive

    vuereactivegraphingdata
  • 9/11/2018

    Switching to SSR

    reactssrreact-loader
  • 8/10/2018

    Clean Docker Registry

    nodedockerconsolejavascript
  • 2/1/2018

    Testing on the Filesystem

    testingjavascript
  • 1/26/2018

    Tag You Are

    javascripttags
  • 1/25/2018

    NaN Got Me

    rubber duck savejavascriptnodejsjson
  • 4/28/2017

    All our app's tabs are belong to us

    angularjavascriptlocalstoragerxjssessionstorage
  • 2/20/2016

    Developing NPM modules

    nodejsnpm
  • 2/20/2016

    Nfa + Nfb or N(f+fa+fb)

    arrayfunctionjavascriptjsperf
  • 10/31/2015

    Photo Layout

    arrangercssgallery hierarchyhtmljavascriptphotostinymcewordpresssoftware
  • 10/31/2015

    Browning Pass HideAway Web Site

    cssgallery hierarchyhtmlwordpress
  • 10/17/2015

    Think Mobile

    mobileweb

    Good mobile web sites are currently few and far between. Most web sites don't have a mobile web site, so people accessing the site, be it current or potential customers, or people seeking information, have to navigate web sites built for large screens and mice. This can involve a lot of scrolling, zooming in and out and frustration with menus that require you to be able to hover over a button. Most web sites that have got a mobile version have got a mobile specific web site that has very limited information on it, sometimes very outdated leaving people forced to be sent to the "full version" web site to find the information that want (if the mobile site allows them to).

    With the technology available today, it is very easy to make a web site "responsive" for mobile devices. Long gone are the days of requiring a very minimised version of your web site for tiny screens with no bandwidth. I am strong believer that no web site needs a mobile-specific version of their page (or a mobile app for that matter) and hopefully this post will give why and how a one-for-all web site can be achieved.

    History and Today's Technology

    When the Internet first came to mobile phones, bandwidth was almost non-existent and phones were designed to be phones rather than the portable powerhouse of today.

    The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and the WAP Browser was the way to button press your way through the Internet. WAP sites were specially crafted and very minimal.

    As bandwidth increased and screens got bigger and touchable, the WAP protocol quickly vanished and access to real web sites became a thing of everyday. However, the evolution of touch and bandwidth weren't quite synced so along low bandwidth "mobile" web sites designed specifically for mobile phones. These sites normally had a fraction of the content of the normal web site and was designed a few specific uses, such as checking the weather at the local mountain.

    Today, a large amount of people with Internet access have it on mobile phones at a every increasing high speed. Most mobile browsers are fully compliant with the latest (and even draft) specifications in web technology, such as HTML, CSS and Javascript.

    In the realm of HTML (the code of the actual contents and structure of each page of a web site), HTML 5 offers better ways of creating graphic-intensive web sites without requiring add-ons, such as Adobe Flash, Shockwave and Microsoft Silverlight.

    In the realm of CSS (the code that makes each page look the way it does), CSS 3 offers the ability to customise the look of a site for different media (print, screen and speech) and for different resolutions (the number of dots or pixels making up a screen) all in a single "responsive" stylesheet.

    In the realm of Javascript (the code that makes cool things happen), where can I start... With what Javascript can do, who needs custom built apps? Notifications, offline access, background services (allowing background updates) and pushing updates to clients (browsers) are all possible with the latest browsers.

    The New Mobile Responsive Internet

    Gone are the days of not having a mobile site or having a dedicated web site - if you want to exist on the Internet, you have to have a web site that is capable of being displayed on the "old" computer and mobile devices. If you don't, you don't exist (at least in Google's eyes).

    So what does this mean? Well, not much needs to change, you just need to be a little smarter.

    • Pages need to be able to be smooshed onto a small screen. If you have a fancy layout, you need to ensure that if they screen is too small, things will be ordered neatly so they can still be read.
    • The navigation needs to work on touchscreens. Mobile phones and tablets normally don't have mice (and some laptops have touchscreens), so mouseover events are (currently) nearly non-existent (they action the same time as touches clicks), so they can't be used to open menus. Instead, the navigation must work solely on touches clicks. That's not to say you can't have mouseover menus for desktops with a mouse, but it is difficult to tell when a mouse is being used and when one isn't.
    • Your pages need to specify they are mobile friendly. This tiny bit of HTML will make all the difference to your Google page ranking
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0">
    • You need to be bandwidth conscious. Even though I have been harping on about how much bandwidth mobile devices have these days, you still need to be weary of it - don't use 1MB images if they only need to be 100kB to look good. Another thing to consider is they amount of requests your page needs to fully load. Each image, stylesheet, Javascript file and any other goodies you may have each require a request (please sir may I have...) to the server. Latency (the time it takes to talk to a server on the Internet and get a response) is still an issue on mobile devices (and always will be for the foreseeable future), so less is best.

    Examples

    skiwhitewater.com

    Whitewater Ski Resort is an O for awesome ski hill in the Kootenays, British Columbia, Canada and their web site(s) are a good example of the separate page for mobile devices. Their mobile web site (skiwhitewater.mobi) is a different site from the one you visit on a device it determines as a desktop. It is only helped by its content management system (Drupal), that is able to load the same data onto both web sites. The navigation is completely different on each site though, so if you get used to the desktop site, you will find it difficult to find the same information on the mobile web site.

    mec.ca

    Mountain Equipment Co-op is a great outdoor equipment store in Canada (one that quickly became my outdoor supplier when we were in a town that had one). Their mobile web site (bar a few occasional glitches) is perfect. It is their normal web site, but with responsive CSS to make it fit and work on a mobile device - exactly what everyone should aim for. Everything is available and easy to navigate to. What's better is MEC offers free WiFi in store so you can browser their site while browsing their store.

    swissarmy.com

    Mobile site, non existent. Desktop site on a mobile device... don't even bother trying. This is the perfect example of something that could be easily transformed, but just hasn't.

    Need Help?

    I believe that for most web sites, making it work perfectly on a mobile device is a quick and easy fix, so much so, that if you have a web site that isn't mobile ready (or have a dedicated mobile web site that you want to get rid). I am willing to have a look at for you and make it mobile friendly for $100 (some exclusions apply). Feel free to contact me if you would like me to have a look at your web site.

    Close
  • 10/13/2015

    Pledge to Refuse and Not Buy Bottled Water

    environmentpledges
  • 2/25/2015

    Run PHP run!

    maximum execution timephptrial and error
  • 11/26/2014

    Gallery Hierarchy

    galleryhierarchyphotos
  • 10/3/2014

    Vim and functions

    functionnavigationtagsvim
  • 9/26/2014

    I'm making hierarchies

    hierarchical datahierarchyphp
  • 9/4/2014

    Google Sheets fun

    googlegoogle scriptgoogle sheetsjavascriptsheets
  • 8/13/2014

    Travel Photos

    photo managementphotostravel photos
  • 8/13/2014

    Image managment scripts

    photo managementphotos
  • 7/31/2014

    MeldCE logo

    csshtml5javascriptsvg
  • 4/26/2014

    MoltenDB

    databasemoltendbmongodbnodejs
  • 10/29/2013

    The Expensive Side

    house
  • 9/22/2013

    abcde

    music
  • 7/16/2013

    Energizer Power Plus Rechargeable Batteries

    gadgets
  • 3/4/2013

    USAR FOGTeX

    fogtex
  • 2/21/2013

    Personal Gear Bag

    rescuegear
  • 2/18/2013

    Geocaching Stamp

    stampgeocaching
  • 4/2/2007

    Call Record Presenter

    parserpythonsqliteweb
  • 9/25/2004

    Kimi Ora School

    csshtml
  • 6/25/2004

    All About Catering Web Site

    csshtml
  • 7/26/2003

    Quantum Accounting Web Site

    csshtml
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