Forgive the samewhat lame title, and this will be a quick little post, but I've recently been using such an incredibly helpful npm module I wanted to share it with others. open by Sindre Sorhus (you must click that link and look at their incredible GitHub profile) is a simple, but powerful utility that... opens things. Ok, that sounds rather obvious, but what it means in practice is that your Node code can open a resource on your computer with the associated app. (It can also open up an app by itself if you want.) I can't tell you how many scripts I've written that generate file-based results ..read more

Good afternoon, readers, I hope you are having as good a day as I am. Today I started playing "Midnight Suns" (PS5) and so far, it's a heck of a lot of fun. Yesterday was one of those days that was so good, I almost got a bit paranoid that something bad was going to happen. (It didn't - the day ended great.) I hope it's a sign of how good the week will be. As a quick aside, there will be no <Code><Br> this week - it will return next week. See you then! Cally - Calendar Component # First up is a cute (can you call a web component cute???) little web component that displays calendars ..read more

For the past few months or so, I've started tracking my movie watching with Letterboxd. I'm not doing a lot of reviews, mostly just logging, but I find it neat to look back and remind myself of what I've watched recently. You can see my profile if you're curious, or check out my "Now" page as well. I thought it might be interesting to see if I could use my Letterboxd data along with Google Gemini as a way to suggest the next movie I should watch. I was able to build a quick workflow using the incredible Pipedream in a few minutes. Let me share with you how I did that. What does it do? # At a h ..read more

Forgive the somewhat alliterative title there, but today's post covers something that's been on my mind since I started playing with Google Gemini, specifically, how to get the results of your API calls in JSON. To be clear, the REST API returns a result in JSON, but I'm talking about the content of the result itself. Before I continue, a quick shot out to Allen Firstenberg who has been helping me off and on with Google Gemini stuff. Anything I get wrong though is entirely my fault. ? Ok, so before I go on, let's look at a typical result. Take a prompt like so: "What is the nature of light". P ..read more

Good day my fabulous readers and I hope all is well with you. I just got back from speaking at the excellent Devnexus event and despite some travel issues (thank you storms, really), I had a great time. I got to see not one, not two, but three very old friends of mine and attended some good sessions as well. I'm home for a week and then on the road again to the Adobe ColdFusion Summit in the DC area. Don't forget, this Tuesday I've got another episode of <Code><Br> coming up. I'll be building, or attempting to, build a PWA live. Surely it will go perfectly, right? Pretty Console Ta ..read more

A few weeks back I wrote up my experience with generative AI as a dungeon master. That post ended up being really popular and got me thinking about other ways I could integrate D & D, or other games, with Generative AI. With Gemini 1.5 now available via API, I thought it would be good to find an excuse to hit the API in a demo. So with that in mind, I'd like to introduce you to the Class Suggester. The Application # The app begins by simply presenting some introductory text and invites you to click a button to roll for your stats. You can hit the Roll Stats button as many times as you wan ..read more

For some time now, I've relied on my Netlify Analytics report to keep track of how well my site is doing, what content is popular, and so forth. I was a Google Analytics user for over ten years, but when they updated the UI, I saw red every time I tried to use it. Netlify Analytics is super simple and quick. (My only real complaint is that it's limited to 30 days, but I've got free access to the feature so I'm happy to not care about that.) I complement Netlify Analytics with GoatCounter as well. Netify's analytics show much more traffic than Goat, and I figure the truth is somewhere in the mi ..read more

My regular readers (hello, yall rock!) know I've been playing with generative AI the past few months. I'm still a bit skeptical about the amount of hype involved around the space, but I'm slowly getting more excited as I see some of the interesting possibilities available with these tools. Most of my recent exploration has been on the Google Gemini side, but after hearing my buddy Todd Sharp talk about Amazon Bedrock on his stream yesterday, I figured it was time to check it out. (FYI, you should absolutely check out his weekly Twitch show on the AWS Twitch channel called "Streaming on Streami ..read more

Yesterday I introduced you to Adobe's new offering, Firefly Services, and demonstrated a simple example of how to generate images from prompt using the REST APIs. Today I thought I'd share one of the little demos I've made with the API, and one specifically built to help out with my blog - generating headers. My usual process for headers is to go to the Firefly website, enter a prompt, let it load, and then promptly change it to landscape and re-generate my prompt again. I always feel bad that the initial, square, images are essentially trashed. It occurred to me I could build a Node.js utilit ..read more

Adobe Summit is currently happening in Vegas and while there's a lot of cool stuff being announced, I'm most excited about the launch of Firefly Services. This suite of APIs encompasses the Photoshop and Lightroom APIs I've discussed before, as well as a whole new suite of APIs for Firefly itself. Best of all, the APIs are dang easy to use. I've been building demos and samples over the past few weeks, and while I'm obviously biased, they're truly a pleasure to use. Before I go further, do know that while the docs and such are all out in the open, there isn't a free trial. Yet. Basics # First ..read more