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How to Download a YouTube Video or Channel
4.9.2024
The ability to download media on the internet almost feels like a lost art. When I was in my teens, piracy of mp3s, movies, and just about everything else via torrents and apps like Kazaa, LimeWire, Napster, etc. was in full swing. These days sites use blob URLs and other means to prevent...
How to Add a Header to a curl Request
3.8.2024
curl is one of those great utilities that’s been around seemingly forever and has endless use cases. These days I find myself using curl to batch download files and test APIs. Sometimes my testing leads me to using different HTTP headers in my requests. To add a header to a curl request,...
Case Insensitive CSS Attribute Selector
19.6.2024
CSS selectors never cease to amaze me in how powerful they can be in matching complex patterns. Most of that flexibility is in parent/child/sibling relationships, very seldomly in value matching. Consider my surprise when I learned that CSS allows matching attribute values regardless off case!...
How to Set Date Time from Mac Command Line
17.6.2024
Working on a web extension that ships to an app store and isn’t immediately modifiable, like a website, can be difficult. Since you cannot immediately deploy updates, you sometimes need to bake in hardcoded date-based logic. Testing future dates can be difficult if you don’t know how...
How to Fix: Windows WASD Keys Reversed with Arrow Keys
2.5.2024
This past weekend I had the opportunity to be what every father wants, if only for a moment: the “cool dad”. My wife was out of town and my youngest son wanted to play PUBG. I caved in, taught him the basic FPS key binds, and he was having a great time. While he was […]
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Date.now()
17.1.2024
Ask any software engineer and they’ll tell you that coding date logic can be a nightmare. Developers need to consider timezones, weird date defaults, and platform-specific date formats. The easiest way to work with dates is to reduce the date to the most simple format possible — usually...
Extract a Number from a String with JavaScript
16.1.2024
User input from HTML form fields is generally provided to JavaScript as a string. We’ve lived with that fact for decades but sometimes developers need to extract numbers from that string. There are multiple ways to get those numbers but let’s rely on regular expressions to extract those...
How to Get the Current Branch Name with git
28.10.2023
Most developers spoil themselves with fun command line utilities to make their work easier and more efficient. One such command line helper allows developers to always show the git branch in the command line. How can you get the current branch? With this handy snippet: git branch --show-current...
AutoSave with VSCode
23.10.2023
Visual Studio Code has taken the crown of most used text editor, at least in JavaScript spheres. VSCode is fast, feature-filled, and supports thousands of plugins to boost productivity. Developers can also tweak hundreds of settings to enrich functionality. One such feature is the autoSave feature....
Sum an Array of Numbers with JavaScript
7.9.2023
It’s rare that I’m disappointed by the JavaScript language not having a function that I need. One such case was summing an array of numbers — I was expecting Math.sum or a likewise, baked in API. Fear not — summing an array of numbers is easy using Array.prototype.reduce!...
JavaScript closest
5.7.2023
When it comes to finding relationships between elements, we traditionally think of a top-down approach. We can thank CSS and querySelector/querySelectorAll for that relationship in selectors. What if we want to find an element’s parent based on selector? To look up the element tree and find...
JavaScript: Reverse Arrays
26.6.2023
Manipulating data is core to any programming language. JavaScript is no exception, especially as JSON has token over as a prime data delivery format. One such data manipulation is reversing arrays. You may want to reverse an array to show most recent transactions, or simple alphabetic sorting....
Restart Mac From Command Line
9.5.2023
Restarting and shutting down a computer remotely is a frequent task for remote system administrators. As someone that writes many shell scripts, I also find myself automating system restarts. Let’s look at a few ways to restart Mac systems from command line! Restart a Local Mac To restart...
How to Get a Computer’s Hardware ID
18.4.2023
Cheating in online games is a huge issue these days — just ask anyone playing PUBG. Cheaters aren’t difficult for players to spot but vendors oftentimes don’t do enough to punish these villains. Krafton recently announced they would start banning cheaters by hardware ID, which...
How to Get Mac Battery Level from Command Line
10.4.2023
I’m a big fan of having as much information as I can get within the command line. I couldn’t go without knowing which git branch I’m on, for example. Another important piece of information I like having is my current battery percentage. To get the current battery level from...
How to Block a Range of IP Addresses
27.3.2023
As much as content creators want traffic to their website, there is such thing as the wrong type of traffic. Sometimes it’s content scrapers, sometimes it’s malicious bots; either way, it’s important to know how to block problematic IPs from your site. To block a range of...
CSS ::file-selector-button
20.2.2023
We all love beautifully styled form controls but, due to the differences between operating system displays, styling them can be painful. Due to that pain, we’ve created scores of libraries to mock these controls. Unfortunately that sometimes comes at the cost of accessibility, performance...
How to Open a Tor Brave Window from Command Line
6.2.2023
I love the Brave web browser for many reasons: ad blocking, Brave rewards, crypto integration, and even a Tor tab feature. I’ll often use the Tor feature but wanted to know how I could automated opening Tor windows from command line. To open a Brave Tor tab, you can use the following command:...
How to Open an App from Anywhere on Mac Command Line
31.1.2023
Many engineers like myself live in the command line, and perform actions from command line that most others would click an icon for. I’ve always found opening apps from command line on Macs painful. You need to references the Applications directory, add .app to the name, etc. I just want...
Document.elementFromPoint
30.12.2022
Reacting to events with JavaScript is the foundation of a dynamic experiences on the web. Whether it’s a click event or another typical action, responding to that action is important. We started with assigning events to specific elements, then moved to event delegation for efficiency, but...