Couple days ago I found out about a tool called pdfcpu, a PDF processor. Among its features I saw “optimize” so I had to take it ot for a spin and see how much of an optimization we’re talking about. Here’s a quick study of optimizing a random-ish sample of PDF files. Source data I […]

Let’s see how to setup and run cjxl (and its sibling djxl) on a simple shared hosting provider so you can encode and decode JPEG-XL (aka JXL) images. How There are better ways to install libjxl and its command-line tools but they require you to have sufficient privileges on your computer or server. With inexpensive […]

“When I was younger, so much younger than today” and upset and full of vinegar about the state of the world, I’d say things like “CSS is the worst” (not really). Now, half a year later, older and wiser and more accepting, I’d agree to mellow down to “CSS is render-blocking”. Un-render-blocking CSS What this […]

Prettier is a code formatter, great for following consistent coding conventions with 0 effort. Here’s how to add it to TextMate, my text editor of choice. Install Prettier Globally, so you take advantage of it in any old directory. npm install –global prettier If that doesn’t work, you probably need to install Node first. So […]

Finally managed to cobble together an index page for the bunch of tools I’ve been hacking on in the past year as I progress through my music education. Is it better UX than the Apache default file listing? Hmm… Say hello to onlinemusictools.com! Not the best domain name, I know. But everything is bloody taken […]

Update: Now in French too Update 2: and in German Update 3: now with Web Speech API (scroll to the bottom) Here’s a little app that gives you flashcards of Italian words used in music: https://www.onlinemusictools.com/italiano/ It also pronounces the words in four different voices. The code for the tool: https://github.com/stoyan/italiano A few implementation notes […]

How to kill an hour on a Mac on a rainy afternoon? open Terminal.app say -v ? (to list all the voices installed) or say -v ? | grep en_ (for English-only) say -v Fred Fitter. Happier. More productive. Replace Fred with Yuri. Repeat. And if you want more voices, or better ones (some do […]

Here’s how to mix three audio files into one: ffmpeg -i alex.aiff -i fred.aiff -i whisper.aiff -filter_complex “[0:0][1:0] amix=inputs=3:duration=longest” out.mp3 Note the inputs=3 part as we’re mixing three files. And this mixes only two files putting one on the left and one on the right: ffmpeg -i alex.aiff -i fred.aiff -filter_complex amerge out.mp3

Naturally, you want your lint tools integrated with your text editor. Here’s what I did to integrate Stylelint (hello!) with TextMate. New Bundle In TextMate… menu Bundles / Edit Bundles…. I didn’t see a way to add a new Command, so I right-clicked an existing one (one with a C icon for Command), selected Find […]

Yesterday I had to plug in my keyboard to the computer and wasn’t sure if it was working. How do I test? Well, I had to look up an older post, copy and paste some code to the console… what a drag. I though it would be cool to have a page where you can […]

mogrify (like convert) is one of the utilities that come with imagemagick. Here’s an example of how you convert a batch of pic files to jpeg. Same for png to jpeg, vice-versa, etc. $ mogrify -format jpg *.pic Boom! Next! Also see: batch convert audio/video files with ffmpeg

Here’s my new tool called intervals Play with it here. Learn about the theory behind it here. The code for the tool. What does it do? Generates a random music interval, shows it on the musical staff. You try to guess it. Clicking on the staff reveals the answer. You can also play the interval. […]

There’s a new tool in town. It lets you drag photos and gives you a map of where the photo was taken. Creepy, isn’t it? It figures this out using the meta (exif) information that’s part of a photo. The tool also lets you download a version of the photo without any exif information. The […]

Every once in a while I feel inspired to create a little tool to “do one thing” ™. But often I get distracted and a little too lazy to get off the ground and forget all about it. So I thought maybe a little helper can, well, help move things along. Enter FAIL, short for […]

Here’s a video I made to raise awareness about Anaconda Limousine’s first album (where I play guitar and co-wrote 1 song): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LavyKbSuvI. This is a post that explains how it was made so if anyone wants to made a similar one, they can have something to step on. Turns out videos like this are called […]

Update: Easier way to get top X URLs: http://httparchive.org/urls.php, thanks @souders Update: found and commented an offensive try{}catch(e){throw e;} in zombie.js (q.js, line 126), now the script doesn’t fatal that often Say you want to experiment or do some research with what’s out there on the web. You need data, real data from the web’s […]

Jest is a new javascript testing tool announced today. I thought I’d take it out for a spin testing the UI of a simple vanilla JS app – no CommonJS modules, no fancy stuff. Just old school JavaScript. Granted, it’s probably not what the tool was optimized to do, but it totally worked. The app […]

So there’s this recent open-source project from Facebook called jstransform. It’s also used by ReactJS. It lets you explore ES6 features and not only explore, but use them in production code. All you need to do is add the transformation to your static resource pipeline. (Of course you have one, right, for minification and so […]

I’m part of a band that has an album out now. I know, right? (links: excuse-for-a-site, amazon, itunes). I wanted to put up all the songs on the site, but seems like there’s a little dissonance in the band whether this is a good idea. Plan B: 30s samples. Like the bigwigs do on Amazon […]

Background HTTPWatch (automation) …with PHP (and again and again, and response) JavaScript shell scripting I gave this short presentation at the recent Yahoo FE summit’s open mic, here are the slides and some notes. Slides and screencast vid JavaScript shell scripting View more presentations from Stoyan Stefanov Screencast to see the thing in motion: Notes […]

If you haven’t seen it yet, YSlow for Chrome hit the streets couple of weeks ago. (And Google’s own PageSpeed did too yesterday. (And there’s now DynaTrace for Firefox. (And WebPageTest for Chrome. (What a month for x-browsering (word?) the performance tools! (And the month’s not even over yet))))) BTW, I closed all the parentheses […]

Very rough notes from the event that just ended a few minutes ago ======== 1 ======== Tony Gentilcore (google) and Anderson Quach (MSFT) talked about the W3C working group and the specs for measuring performance: Navigation timing spec – HTML document: DNS, handshakes, load events Resource timing – how long JS, CSS, audio, video… take […]

Last year I compared some CSS minifiers, namely YUICompressor, CSSTidy (with “small” vs. “safe” settings), PHP PEAR’s CSS lib and Minify (detailed results). Now that I’ve done some work on the YUICompressor and since there’s a new kid on the block from Microsoft I thought I should give it another go. I only compared CSSTidy […]

There’s a new version and now hosted on AMO (addons.mozilla.org). Get the new version there and it will take care of auto-updates in the future. WFT Web Testing Framework (WTF) is an extension to YSlow that tests for the following shady web dev practices: Use of <blink> Use of <marquee> Use of <font> Missing doctype […]

The previous parts are here (building and testing) and here (what gets minified). Now let’s see how YUI CSS min handles CSS hacks. As you know CSS hacks often use errors in CSS parsers in browsers to target specific browser versions and supply additional rules to work around other issues in said browsers. That makes […]