Hello. I am Paul Kinlan.

I love Editor.js. It's a nice simple block editor that I use to write these posts. It has a host of good plugins that enable you to extend the capabilities of the editor, such as the SimpleImage tool that allows you to add images to the editor without having to upload them.

It's the SimpleImage that I briefly want to talk about. It's a good tool, but it has two problems, 1) I can only drag images on to the editor, I can't "add" an image; 2) It uses base64 data URL's to host the image, this is a waste of memory and it should be using blob URLs.

I wrote a simple fork that addresses these two pain points. The first is that it uses less memory because it uses blob URLs. The second is that now you can add images in when adding in a new Block to the editor.

In fact, the following images are added using this new way.

This new year Andre Bandarra left me a little surprise on my desk: A physical airhorner built with Web USB!

Check it out, well actually it will be hard, Andre created a small sketch for an Arduino Uno that connects over USB that is not yet available, however the code on the site is rather neat and not too complex if you are experienced with any form of USB programming.

Andre's code connects to the device and waits for the user to approve, configures the connection, and then continuously reads from the device looking for the string 'ON' (which is a flag that is set when the button is pressed).

const HardwareButton = function(airhorn) {
  this.airhorn = airhorn;
  this.decoder = new TextDecoder();
  this.connected = false;
  const self = this;
  this._loopRead = async function() {
    if (!this.device) {
      console.log('no device');
      return;
    }

    try {
      const result = await this.device.transferIn(2, 64);
      const command = this.decoder.decode(result.data);
      if (command.trim() === 'ON') {
        airhorn.start({loop: true});
      } else {
        airhorn.stop();
      }
      self._loopRead();
    } catch (e) {
      console.log('Error reading data', e);
    }
  };

  this.connect = async function() {
    try {
      const device = await navigator.usb.requestDevice({
        filters: [{'vendorId': 0x2341, 'productId': 0x8057}]
      });
      this.device = device;
      await device.open();
      await device.selectConfiguration(1);
      await device.claimInterface(0);
      await device.selectAlternateInterface(0, 0);
      await device.controlTransferOut({
        'requestType': 'class',
        'recipient': 'interface',
        'request': 0x22,
        'value': 0x01,
        'index': 0x00,
      });
      self._loopRead();
    } catch (e) {
      console.log('Failed to Connect: ', e);
    }
  };

  this.disconnect = async function() {
    if (!this.device) {
      return;
    }

    await this.device.controlTransferOut({
      'requestType': 'class',
      'recipient': 'interface',
      'request': 0x22,
      'value': 0x00,
      'index': 0x00,
    });
    await this.device.close();
    this.device = null;
  };

  this.init = function() {
    const buttonDiv = document.querySelector('#connect');
    const button = buttonDiv.querySelector('button');
    button.addEventListener('click', this.connect.bind(this));
    button.addEventListener('touchend', this.connect.bind(this));
    if (navigator.usb) {
      buttonDiv.classList.add('available');
    }
  };

  this.init();
};

If you are interested in what the Arduino side of things looks like, Andre will release the code soon, but it's directly inspired by the WebUSB examples for Arduino.

I love Puppeteer - it lets me play around with the ideas of The Headless Web - that is running the web in a browser without a visible browser and even build tools like DOM-curl (Curl that runs JavaScript). Specifically I love scripting the browser to scrape, manipulate and interact with pages.

One demo I wanted to make was inspired by Ire's Capturing 422 live images post where she ran a puppeteer script that would navigate to many pages and take a screenshot. Instead of going to many pages, I wanted to take many screenshots of elements on the page.

The problem that I have with Puppeteer is the opening stanza that you need to do anything. Launch, Open tab, navigate - it's not complex, it's just more boilerplate than I want to create for simple scripts. That's why I created Puppeteer Go. It's just a small script that helps me build CLI utilities easily that opens the browser, navigates to a page, performs your action and then cleans up after itself.

Check it out.

const { go } = require('puppeteer-go');

go('https://paul.kinlan.me', async (page) => {
    const elements = await page.$$("h1");
    let count = 0;
    for(let element of elements) {
      try {
        await element.screenshot({ path: `${count++}.png`});
      } catch (err) {
        console.log(count, err);
      }
    }
});

The above code will find the h1 element in my blog and take a screenshot. This is nowhere near as good as Ire's work, but I thought it was neat to see if we can quickly pull screenshots from canisuse.com directly from the page.

const { go } = require('puppeteer-go');

go('https://caniuse.com/#search=css', async (page) => {
    const elements = await page.$$("article.feature-block.feature-block--feature");
    let count = 0;
    for(let element of elements) {
      try {
        await element.screenshot({ path: `${count++}.png`});
      } catch (err) {
        console.log(count, err);
      }
    }
});

Enjoy!

I really like EditorJS. It's let me create a very simple web-hosted interface for my static Hugo blog.

EditorJS has most of what I need in a simple block-based editor. It has a plugin for headers, code, and even a simple way to add images to the editor without requiring hosting infrastructure. It doesn't have a simple way to add video's to the editor, until now.

I took the simple-image plugin repository and changed it up (just a tad) to create a simple-video plugin (npm module). Now I can include videos easily in this blog.

If you are familar with EditorJS, it's rather simple to include in your projects. Just install it as follows

npm i simple-video-editorjs

And then just include it in your project as you see fit.

const SimpleVideo = require('simple-video-editorjs');

var editor = EditorJS({
  ...
  
  tools: {
    ...
    video: SimpleVideo,
  }
  
  ...
});

The editor has some simple options that let you configure how the video should be hosted in the page:

1. Autoplay - will the video play automatically when the page loads
2. muted - will the video not have sound on by default (needed for autoplay)
3. controls - will the video have the default HTML controls.

Below is a quick example of a video that is embedded (and showing some of the options).

Anyway, I had fun creating this little plugin - it was not too hard to create and about the only thing that I did was defer the conversion to base64 which simple-images uses and instead just use the Blob URLs.