Tangible Bytes

How did I balance all the other requirements of a website with the need to minimise energy use?

To make this site cleaner than 98% of web pages tested

Part of what makes the web so brilliant is in it’s flexibility - the information is conveyed mostly in digital text and unlike paper we don’t all have to experience that in the same way.

Some people can’t see the images in a website so we can add “alt” text which replaces the image for these people.

The problem comes when the image doesn’t actually have a meaning - then what should the Alternative text be?

I was recently updating a very old laptop for use in some network testing - all it needs to do is connect to wifi.

I couldn’t understand why I was getting a blank screen after grub loaded

I tried various install media, tried editing grub conf.

The best I could get was a screen saying

Booting a command list

What’s the difference between providing a rejection handler for a promise and catching errors ?

And why Does the React AJAX FAQ say

// Note: it's important to handle errors here
// instead of a catch() block so that we don't swallow
// exceptions from actual bugs in components.

I’ve been using Google’s Firebase recently and find it a great development platform.

One of the best things about it is the emulators available for local development.

Just a few weeks ago they made it even better by adding an authentication emulator

So now you can easily start up a clean environment to test your new code on.

But the auth emulator starts with no users every time.

This is one way to add users.

Hugo Page Bundles seem like a great idea, providing a way to organise images and other pages assets.

Here’s why I decided not to use them.

Setting up Sonarcloud integration with Gitlab was so easy as to be not worth documenting - just setup an account at each, import your projects on Sonarcloud and follow the step by step guide to start analysis.

But getting test coverage reports was harder.

I’ve been taking a bit of time lately to do some of those low priority housekeeping tasks that can easily get overlooked.

By using quiet times to setup good processes life should be easier next time things get busy.

One of those tasks was to setup outgoing email on various systems - some of which are laptops and I’d still like automated mails to go out even if the device isn’t on the home network and can’t reach my ISP mailserver.

Back in the day you’d just send mail directly - but with spam protection everywhere this just doesn’t work and it’s far better to authenticate to some trusted mailserver.

I’m using gmail so I’ll use their servers.

I repurposed an old workstation and needed to install Windows with only Linux systems to work from.

This turned out to be painful because the system has an old BIOS and while you can in theory install windows from a USB stick - doing so requires a newer system using UEFI

Linux installs fine from a USB stick so this caught me out.

It turns out the Windows installer works fine from an external DVD drive - but first you may have to buy some double layer DVDs because the image doesn’t quite fit on a normal one.

My name is sean

This website is tangiblebytes.co.uk

put an @ between them and email me

Or use linkedin.com/in/seanburlington

My Apologies for not putting a mailto link or a contact form here - unfortunately these get abused by spammers to the point where I would likely not see any genuine message.