JavaScript – addshore

Dispatching custom event in Fitbit SDK

December 4, 2021 by addshore

I just upgraded my Fitbit charge 2 from 2016, to a Fitbit sense from 2020. After getting everything set up I took a quick look at the developer documentation and found myself in a web based IDE called Fitbit studio and before I knew it I had sideloaded a development demo app onto my new device.

And before I knew it, I had another side project in my repertoire. Make a cool little app that does stuff, just for me!

While developing the ability to switch between various “pages” I encountered the need to dispatch events with custom data. Though seemingly the Fitbit SDK doesn’t use the Javascript norms here and needs a slightly different approach. So here is what I learnt.

Quickly clearing out your Facebook advert ‘interests’

May 27, 2020October 4, 2018 by addshore

2020 EDIT: This solution is now packaged up as a nice browser extension. Click here to read the new post for details and links to the browser extension.

Over the past years, Facebook have had a few privacy related issues. First came the ‘scandal’ with Cambridge Analytica and more recently a bug (or series of bugs) that apparently affected 50 million accounts allowing peoples access tokens to be stolen. Oh, and there was also the story about Facebook using your 2 factor authentication phone number for targeting advertising.

With all of the goings on recently, as well as the new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in the EU, Facebook have attempted to make the data that they have about an individual easier to see, understand and edit or remove. One such section of this data covers your “ad preferences“.

gitgraph.js and codepen.io for git visualization

August 10, 2019March 22, 2018 by addshore

I was looking for a new tool for easily visualizing git branches and workflows to try and visually show how Gerrit works (in terms of git basics) to clear up some confusions. I spent a short while reading stackoverflow, although most of the suggestions weren’t really any good as I didn’t want to visualize a real repository, but a fake set of hypothetical branches and commits.

I was suggested Graphviz by a friend, and quickly found webgraphviz.com which was going in the right direction, but this would require me to learn how to write DOT graph files.

Eventually I found gitgraph.js, which is a small JavaScript library for visualizing branching ‘things’, such as git, well, mainly git, hence the name and produce graphics such as the one below.

Browser extension showing blocked sites in searches

May 17, 2020April 13, 2015 by addshore

So last night I took another look at the ever-increasing list of domains that are blocked, due to various court orders, by various ISPs in the UK.

A first look

My first port of call was Wikipedia which has an article titled ‘List of websites blocked in the United Kingdom‘. Now this list, although referenced, doesn’t really contain all domains that are blocked. Luckily the article does include various other links.

From the Wikipedia article I then found the wiki of 451unavailable.org.uk which lists all current UK blocking orders. There is a wiki page for each blocking order, for example UK/temp plixid which lists 17 sites. Again each of these pages contains lots of links, and the main set of links here are to check which ISPs are currently blocking the given domain.

This brings us to blocked.org.uk.

Github release download count – Chrome Extension

May 28, 2020April 2, 2015 by addshore

GitHub tracks the number of downloads for all assets (files) that are attached to a release, but GitHub currently makes it very hard for users to get at this information. The number of downloads is currently only accessible through the API.

I noticed this many months ago when wondering how many people were downloading the new C++ version of Huggle. At the time I started coming up with some odd little script that I could set running somewhere checking the download counts and updating a static list, I even thought about just uploading the build files to some other site that tracked this information.

A few days ago I took my first look at developing chrome extensions for a referencing tool for Wikidata, and thus today I thought, why not just make an extension for chrome that adds the download counts to the GitHub releases page!