garrettmills

Monochrome Redesign

I decided that it was time for a visual refresh of this site. I liked the bright & flashy design I've had for about a year now, but decided on a return to relative simplicity.

The new design has the added benefit of being very light and semantic, and relies on no external stylesheets or frameworks, unlike the old. This has the added benefit of making the page more accesible and improving load times.

Technical Info on *.garrettmills.dev Sites

For the past few weeks, I've been reworking my analytics collection system with an eye to privacy.

I've tried to make my system collect only the data I wish to use in aggregate, and give users the ability to permanently opt-out of page-view collection.

For details and interesting nitty-gritty about this site, I've added a new technical info page that talks about how the analytics system works, the data it stores, and how you can opt-out.

Opting Websites Out of FLoC

Google announced recently that the beta version of their Chrome browser will include a new tracking system called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). This system is their replacement for 3rd-party tracking cookies. You can learn more here.

FLoC perpetuates the track-by-default system in Chrome that violates users' privacy. Worse, because it's baked into the browser itself, this tracking can occur on all sites by default.

I remain strongly opposed to these privacy-invasive moves. As a result, starting with version 0.59.0, all Flitter-powered sites (including this one) will opt-out of FLoC by default.

As a user, if this change makes you uncomfortable, consider using a browser that respects user privacy like Firefox or Brave.

Rethinking Dependency Injection in TypeScript

For the past few years, I've been experimenting with various paradigms for DI in JavaScript and TypeScript.

In the latest in my series of mad ramblings on dependency injection, I've written up my thoughts on the various paradigms I've tried.

New Features in Noded

Noded is a project I started at HackKU last year. It's a rich-data notes app designed to help people create information trees. I've been slowly improving it since.

• File Box
  • In addition to the basic file uploader, you can now add "File Boxes" to your notes, which support nested structures and managing individual files.
  • Files in File Boxes appear in the universal search, and will open to their nested location directly.
• Universal Search
  • Nodes that support full-screen mode now open directly from the search interface. This means that the open page is unchanged.
• WYSIWYG
  • In-line links and images now render properly in view-only mode.
• Databases
  • Added the "Hyperlink" column type for external links.
  • Added the "Link to Page" column type for referencing other notes.
• Users can now drag-and-drop to re-order subtrees in the sidebar.

You can try Noded out here.

An Open Letter to Senator-elect Roger Marshall

Roger Marshall, Kansas Senator-elect, has expressed his intention to vote not to certify the result of the 2020 presidential election.

I feel very strongly that this is a dangerous and irresponsible move that goes against the core tenets of American democracy.

Read the letter here.

This letter is released in the public domain. Please, adapt it, share it with others, and most importantly, send it to your representatives. Call them, e-mail them, snail mail them to tell them to support free and fair elections.

Full-text search PDFs from Linux CLI

For an open-note exam, I wanted a quick way to full-text search PDFs from the command-line.

I wrote a 2-line script to help with that, using just find, grep, and pdftotext (common to most distros).

Get it here.

MiniQ: A bare-bones, CRON-driven job queue.

I wanted a simple way to queue jobs to be run in the background without having to run a separate daemon.

MiniQ is what I came up with. With just 3 files, MiniQ provides the ability to log jobs and the CRON script will run periodically and execute the queued jobs in the background.

More info here.

Converting an Ionic/Angular Site into a Progressive Web App

For the last year or so, I've been working on converting an Ionic app to a progressive web app with offline support called Noded. I decided to write up my findings on how to do this with Angular service-worker.

Read more about it here.

My Technical Notes Site

I'm trying to write down or save all the technical tricks, notes, and fixes I find. That way, it's easier for me to find them again in the future, and maybe they can be of use to others.

You can check them out here.

How to Code From Home Like a Boss

With the current need to work from home, I've put together a list of tricks and tools I use to do my work as a software developer remotely, and discuss the challenges. Here's what I use.

Feed Page, RSS, & Atom - Minor Website Updates I recently made some tweaks to my website. I added a dedicated page as a historical archive for these updates.

I also added the ability to subscribe to this feed using RSS, Atom, and JSON thanks to a handy NPM package.

VuES6 - ES6 Vue.js Components, in Plain JavaScript

I recently released a small utility library for defining Vue components as proper ES6 classes, but in vanilla JavaScript. I like to use this in small projects where I don't want to have to set up vue-cli and compile templates. More info here.

Connect-4 Webtoy

I've built a simple Connect-4 webtoy as a project for EECS 368 at the University of Kansas. You can play with it here.

Code Freedom with Gitea & Drone - Part I

In my never-ending quest to self-host all the things, I've deployed a combination of Gitea and Drone CI for a feature-for-feature, self-hosted alternative to GitHub. Here's how.

Noded - Free-Form Notes & Databases

I recently attended the annual University of Kansas hackathon, where me and a couple friends built Noded.

Noded is a tree-based note taking app based on reusable page elements. It provides support for basic notes, uploaded files, a built-in code editor, customizable databases, static website exports, and sub-tree sharing. Check it out here.

flitter-di@0.1

Flitter-DI is the second-generation dependency-injector used by the Flitter framework. It was pulled from the libflitter project in the hope that it can remain independent from the rest of Flitter and can be used in other projects. More info here.

Dependency Injection in Less Than 100 Lines of Pure JavaScript

DI is a powerful pattern for segmenting code to keep it efficient and easy to reuse. In this article, we're going to build a basic DI in <100 lines of pure ES6. Read about it here.

A New Platform - My Relentless Pursuit of Privacy

I've finally moved the home of my blog from Medium.com over to a self-hosted Hexo blog. Why? Read more here.

flitter-auth@0.13

This release of Flitter's auth provider brings an OAuth2 server, OAuth2 client, and refinements to the login flow structure. More details here.

Computing in the Kubernetes Framework

Recently I had the pleasure of presenting at the University of Kansas' Center for Research Methods and Data Analysis Weekly Colloquium. You can find resources from my talk on using k8s for scientific computing here.

Building a Raspberry Pi Cluster - Part 3

In the third installment of my miniature-HPC series, we discuss OpenMPI, Python3, and running parallel jobs. Read more here.