In yet another ‘probably-useless-but-interesting’ hobby project, I wrote a Forth compiler and interpreter targeting WebAssembly. It’s written entirely in WebAssembly, and comes with a compiler that dynamically emits WebAssembly code on the fly. The entire system (including 80% of all core words) fits into a 10k (5k gzipped) WebAssembly module. You can try it out here, or grab the code from GitHub. What follows are some notes on the design, and some initial crude speed benchmarks.

React’s standard flow is to start with an empty HTML template from the server, and populate the DOM entirely on the client. Letting React pre-render the initial HTML for your app on the server before the client takes over has some advantages, though: it lets slower (mobile) clients load your app much faster, and it’s good for SEO for search engines that don’t support JavaScript. Since you have to run React on the server to do this, you need a JavaScript-able backend, which is why such Universal (a.

One of the first things that impressed me about Mac OS X when I first saw it was its screensaver. Instead of just showing a simple slideshow of your pictures, it actually used a ‘Ken Burns’ panning and zooming effect with a fancy fading transition to make the otherwise static pictures really come to life. It always sounded like a fun project to create a standalone tool to create slideshow movies that used this effect, with full control over where and how much pictures should be zoomed.

React’s standard flow is to start with an empty HTML template from the server, and populate the DOM entirely on the client. Letting React pre-render the initial HTML for your app on the server before the client takes over has some advantages, though: it lets slower (mobile) clients load your app much faster, and it’s good for SEO for search engines that don’t support JavaScript. Since you have to run React on the server to do this, you need a JavaScript-able backend, which is why such Universal (a.

TL;DR: You can find Dutch Diceware word lists here. TL;DR 🇳🇱: Je kan hier Diceware woordenlijsten vinden, of er hier wachtwoorden mee aanmaken. Ever since I read XKCD 936, I’ve been a big fan of the Diceware approach for picking strong passwords, where you randomly pick words from a list to create a memorable passphrase. Sometimes, I need to generate Diceware passwords in Dutch for friends and relatives. Unfortunately, the Dutch word list from the Diceware page contains many uncommon words, non-existent words, duplicate words (yikes!

I want to be notified immediately when one of the backend servers behind my HAProxy instance goes down. HAProxy offers alerting functionality, but only via SMTP: when a backend goes down it sends an email to a list of recipients via an SMTP server you provide. Unfortunately, email isn’t an ideal mechanism for real-time notification, and I don’t have an SMTP server accessible from my HAProxy instance. In this post, I’ll show my setup of HAProxy posting its alerts to a Slack channel and the Pushover push notification service, using smtp-http-proxy and AWS Lambda.

I own a couple of multi-channel Surround Sound music albums on DVD, Blu-Ray, and SACD discs. I wanted to extract them all to a hard drive to avoid the nuisance of putting discs in slow (and often stammering) CD/DVD/Blu-Ray players with unfriendly navigation menus, and wanted to have a backup of the audio in case the discs go bad. Each of the different formats requires different tools to convert them to a playable format, so it took me some time to figure out how to convert each one of them.

Although art may not be an obvious area to use BookWidgets in, you can create some fun and interesting explorations of paintings with widgets. Describing Paintings Interactively Most paintings have a lot going on in them. Describing and understanding where each little feature of a painting can be found can be challenging. This is where a Hotspot Image can come in handy. Take, for example, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs: this painting illustrates over 100 different proverbs in a single scene.

Last October, I gave a keynote talk on creating interactive iBooks with BookWidgets at the iBooks Author Conference 2015 in Nashville. Here’s the full recording: