The last piece heralding the dawn of modern JavaScript (sometimes thought of as ES6, but we're past that now) arrived last month when two browsers (Chrome and Safari) shipped support for ES6 modules natively without developer flags. It's now possible to write all this stuff (modules, classes, arrow functions, const/let variables, Promises) using just your code and not relying on transpilers!
Decided to pluck at one of my open source projects on the weekend. The latest idea was to use the Google Drive API to let users load up their comic book files (cbr/cbz/cbt) into kthoom (a comic book reader).
This should help those users storing their comic books on Google Drive to be able to access them on Chromebooks. Haven't tried it on a tablet yet - I wonder if that works...
I'm always accepting patches if someone wants to write the equivalent code for Microsoft OneDrive.
My kids (9-year olds) each got a Kindle for Christmas (thanks Gramma and Grampa!). It looks like even for them to "buy" free books, this is how I had to set them up:
- Create an Amazon account for them
- Manage Account, 1-Click Settings
- Turn on 1-Click for the account
- Add an address
- Click the link to make it the 1-Click default address
- Make this address the billing address
After this, my kids were able to "purchase" free books (and gift cards can be added to their balance), all without requiring a credit card number. Thanks, Amazon for making this so simple! 🙂
I kind of forgot about the idea of writing in my blog so that I can find the answers again via Google. Well here's a quick one: How to backup the entire contents of your webcam (I own a Sony HDR-XR150) to a "Camera Archive Folder" on OSX.
- Open up iMovie
- Go to "File > Import from Camera" or the click big camera button under the Project Library pane
- Click the "Archive All" button beside "Camera: Sony HDR-XR150"
- Choose a location to save the entire contents of your camera (I use portable hard drives)
After doing this, you'll have a "Camera Archive Folder" where you can import movies into iMovie for your editing pleasure.
Screenshot of iMovie and the Archive All button
As promised, I have a tiny thing to announce here. I recently split off and refactored the code that deals binary data in kthoom into a new open source project: https://github.com/codedread/bitjs, Binary Tools for JavaScript.
The faster and faster JavaScript engines in modern browsers and the rise of new technologies like Typed Arrays, Web Workers, and the File APIs mean that browsers can actually be used to read in binary formats completely on the client-side (as long as native performance isn't a requirement).
For now the library includes two main capabilities:
- streams for reading in bits and bytes from a Typed Array
- unarchiving zip, rar or tar files (that's right, you can unzip and unrar in JavaScript now)