rain-1

How to make a small tweak to free software

The target audience for this is people who are beginners at software engineering and using linux. A lot of the information here may be obvious or already known to you. The language involved is C but you do not need to know any C to read this tutorial. I used mg to write this blog post. I used vs code to edit the source code.

This post is also available on gopher://tilde.team:70/0/~river/tweak-free-software

If you use a piece of free software and it's 99% perfect but there's just this one thing it does that annoys the hell out of you.. you can in theory just fix it! Here's a look at what doing that is like. Hopefully it inspires you, or you pick up a could tricks on the way!

Step 0: Have a problem

coolaj86

Task

Convert mac-os-el-capitan-pkg-to-iso.sh from using hdiutil and asr to using Linux utilities.

See https://gist.github.com/solderjs/22d08c4b582779485e0df11c5d84063a#file-mac-os-el-capitan-pkg-to-iso-sh

Steps

Important: You will need about 30GB of free disk space.

CodyReichert

Configuring Emacs for react, es6, and flow

For a while, JSX and new es6 syntax had flaky support in emacs, but there's been huge work on a lot of packages. Using emacs for JavaScript with React, ES6, and Flow (or Typescript, etc) is really easy and powerful in Emacs these days.

This is how you can work on modern web development projects with full support for tooling like JSX, Flow types, live eslint errors, automatic prettier.js formatting, and more.

Set up web-mode

web-mode provides most of the underlying functionality, so a huge shout-out to the maintainer(s) there.

jennyknuth

How to transform an SVG into a data URI

by Jenny Knuth, based on the work of Chris Coyier and Taylor Hunt

A data URI is a nice way to include a web resource without needing to make an HTTP request. Chris Coyier explains the technique nicely in Probably Don't Base64 SVG.

While a PNG might use Base64 encoding, for SVG, there is a better way.

Taylor Hunt's experiments led to this solution for optimizing SVGs in data URIs:

"So the best way of encoding SVG in a data URI is data:image/svg+xml,[actual data]. We don’t need the ;charset=utf-8 parameter (or the invalid ;utf8 parameter…), because URLs are always ASCII."

steven2358

FFmpeg cheat sheet

A list of useful commands for the FFmpeg command line tool.

Download FFmpeg: https://www.ffmpeg.org/download.html

Full documentation: https://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html

Basic conversion

johannesjo

function tableToJson(table) {
    var data = [];

    // first row needs to be headers
    var headers = [];
    for (var i=0; i<table.rows[0].cells.length; i++) {
        headers[i] = table.rows[0].cells[i].innerHTML.toLowerCase().replace(/ /gi,'');
    }

    // go through cells

alibitek

for WID in `xwininfo -root -tree | sed '/"plasma-desktop": ("Plasma" "Plasma")/!d; s/^  *\([^ ]*\) .*/\1/g'`; do
   xprop -id $WID -remove _KDE_NET_WM_SHADOW
done

# or
for WID in `xwininfo -root -tree | sed '/"Plasma": ("plasmashell" "plasmashell")/!d; s/^  *\([^ ]*\) .*/\1/g'`; do
   xprop -id $WID -remove _KDE_NET_WM_SHADOW
done

killercup

/*
 * I add this to html files generated with pandoc.
 */

html {
  font-size: 100%;
  overflow-y: scroll;
  -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;
  -ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;
}

mbostock

license: gpl-3.0
redirect: https://observablehq.com/@d3/zoomable-raster-vector