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Web WordPress Blog Menu Web WordPress Blog Solution for Poor Sound Quality using AirPods on MacOS February 10, 2018 I tossed my AirPods in today and for some reason the sound quality while listening to music was a lot lower than normal. I’ve had this audio playback issue with other Bluetooth headphones, but never with the AirPods. The issue: If your Bluetooth headphones are set as both the output audio device AND the input audio device, the OS has to lower the quality of the output sound because of the 2-way audio communication. The solution: set your Mac’s audio input to the internal microphone, so it’s not trying to use the AirPods’ microphone. Open System Preferences and go to the Sound settings. Under the Input tab, select your Internal Microphone . The AirPods should re-sync and you’ll hear playback at full quality. Posted in Uncategorized and tagged AirPods , Bluetooth , Mac Leave a comment Upgrade Pains with 3rd Party Libraries in TypeScript January 1, 2018 Most TypeScript developers know that one of the pain points of the ecosystem has traditionally been its integration with 3rd party libraries. As we begin 2018, the DefinitelyTyped project has finally matured to the point where grabbing a d.ts definition file for most libraries is only an npm install away (provided that you’re using TypeScript 2.0 or later). The problem has been solved well. However, I recently tried to upgrade one of my Hapi.js projects from v16 to v17. Hapi v17 is a major rewrite of the entire framework, which includes a complete refactor to use async / await instead of callbacks. Upgrades like this generally have serious implications for the API (and therefore the typings) of the framework. This is both good and bad. The massive "win" is that by upgrading to the v17 typings TypeScript identifies all problem areas with my code. Much like when upgrading a DLL in a .NET project and your compilation breaks. I think this is a benefit that is often overlooked when most think about strong typing. The downside is that the typings aren’t always available immediately, or even soon, after the official release of the new versions of libraries and frameworks. Upgrading libraries that haven’t made TypeScript support a priority will always incur delays. In this case, the typings for hapi v17 have been stuck in pull requests since December 11th, 2017 , and were authored only shortly earlier by a very helpful contributor (for whom I have immense gratitude). Because this PR hasn’t been merged yet, I’ve had to manually pull these typings and track the progress of the PR. While this is a good thing (we want high-quality typings), it’s a gap in the TypeScript world that has been frustrating for me. This is not a complaint. The contributors putting together the typings for hapi have done a great job. If anything, this is a plea for framework and library developers to take a more active stance toward including TypeScript typings in-project or supporting the development of external typings in the DefinitelyTyped repository. As a TypeScript developer it’s hard not to love a library for simply making rich and accurate typings available. Bring us typings and we will adopt! Posted in Uncategorized and tagged TypeScript Leave a comment Adding Advanced Custom Fields to WordPress REST API Response July 17, 2017 There seems to be a lot of outdated information as to how to add your ACF fields into your WordPress REST API response, especially if you’re using the v2 API that’s now built into WordPress. The answer comes thanks to baptistebriel on a GitHub issue response for a plugin that seemed to work for API v1. Here’s his code, slightly reworked. $post_type = "post"; function my_rest_prepare_post($data, $post, $request) { $_data = $data-data; $fields = get_fields($post-ID); foreach ($fields as $key = $value){ $_data[$key] = get_field($key, $post-ID); } $data-data = $_data; return $data; } add_filter("rest_prepare_{$post_type}", ’my_rest_prepare_post’, 10, 3); See below, where my custom fields maturity , traits , and variety are all part of the object that’s returned from the API. Posted in Uncategorized and tagged WordPress Leave a comment Set MacBook Pro Touch Bar to Always Display Function Keys for Certain Apps November 18, 2016 I’ve been wondering if there’s a way to lock the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar into "Function Key" mode, for use in applications like virtual machine hosts (such as VMWare Fusion) that can’t take full advantage of the Touch Bar or where it makes sense to have the function keys available. To turn on function keys only for a particular app: System PreferencesKeyboardShortcutsFunction Keys Click the + button and select your application. Enjoy a Function Key-only experience in that application. Posted in Uncategorized and tagged Mac , Touch Bar Leave a comment Calling C# Extension Methods on null references August 20, 2016 Many C# developers are familiar with extension methods, but did you know that you can call extensions methods on null objects without fear of the dreaded Object reference not set to an instance of an object. error that comes along with invoking a method on a null reference. Consider the extension method public static bool IsNullOrEmpty(this string str) { return string.IsNullOrEmpty(str); } Notice, we don’t actually try and invoke anything on str , we just pass it through to the string.IsNullOrEmpty() method for checking. Provided that we’re working with a string variable (which provides us with our IsNullOrEmpty() extension method, we can invoke the method without fear: string str = null; Console.WriteLine("Is null or empty?: {0}", str.IsNullOrEmpty()); // OUTPUT: Is null or empty? True Posted in Uncategorized and tagged C# Leave a comment Generating PNGs in JavaScript February 23, 2016 A project I’m working on allows the user to construct their own exterior home design using a set of provided colors, sidings, and trims. Due to technical limitations, I needed to be able to generate a solid-color image on-the-fly in JavaScript to set as a background-image on the element we overlay on the base layer in order to color that section of the home. A Google search led me to PNGLib by Robert Eisele , which makes creating these images a lot easier. In my case, I needed to convert a hex RGB value into a valid value for background-image , url(...) and all. My code below includes a function imageUrlForColor() accepting three arguments: the hex color string (e.g. "#CE1126" ), width, and height and returns the rule value as a string. BONUS : One of the limitations of the CSS background-blend-mode is that is only works when one of the elements has a background-image , not just a background-color . The technique shown in the example below shows that you can use background-blend-mode on these elements without issue. See the Pen Generate PNG in JavaScript by Cody Sand ( @marpstar ) on CodePen . Posted in Uncategorized and tagged CodePens , Image Manipulation , JavaScript Leave a comment HTML5 File Uploads with FileAPI by Mail.ru February 20, 2016 During a recent hunt for a nice HTML file upload library, I came across FileAPI by Mail.ru. In particular, I was looking for a library that was completely framework-independent. jQuery File Upload is a very nice plugin that I’ve used in the past, but for this particular project we needed something not based on jQuery. What’s particularly cool about this library is that it includes a handful of functions for manipulating images directly. We wanted to generate an image thumbnail before we sent the file to the server for storage. FileAPI can generate a canvas thumbnail for you and you can generate a Base64 string of the image by calling .toDataURL() on the canvas element. I took the simple example from the FileAPI docs and tossed them in a CodePen for you to play with. In my example, I filter any selected files to only images, generate a thumbnail for each one, and append it to the document. Check it out: See the Pen FileAPI Preview by Cody...