The problem#

I wanted to stream video of myself and my screen at the same time. My plan was to put the video of myself on my screen and stream the entire screen, but I do not have a camera on my desktop. On the other hand, I do have a smartphone with a camera, so I needed a way to show the video from my phone's camera on my desktop's screen.

There are a few Android apps that promise to do so, but none of the ones I tried worked very well. But I know that video chat works just fine on my phone, including in a web browser using WebRTC which supports peer-to-peer video chat between two web browsers, so it should be easy to show the video from my phone's camera in a browser window on my desktop. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any straightforward solution for setting up just a peer-to-peer video link.

The solution#

Open minimal-webrtc on the computer you want the video streamed to. A QR code will appear; use your smartphone to read it and after approving access to the camera, the video should appear in the first browser window. This is intended to be used for local connections, so it may not work if the two devices are not on the same network. Only the signaling to set up the connection goes to the minimal-webrtc server, the actual video will be sent peer-to-peer over the local network.

To get just the video as a bare window with no decorations, use chromium --app=uri to get rid of the address bar, etc., and this script to remove the rest.

To host it yourself, download the source code¹ and use the included run_daphne.sh script (which assumes daphne is installed) and nginx configuration. As WebRTC requires HTTPS, to run it on your local network, you may need to set up a self-signed certificate.

The details#

The problem#

In the computer game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, the "bomb expert" players are looking at a fictional "bomb manual", often frantically searching for the right page. While the intention is for this document to be printed out—and physical paper makes it relatively easy to keep the headings at the top of each page visible—there is also a web version if you prefer to view it on a screen (or don't have access to a printer). Scrolling through the web version feels a lot more awkward than flipping through the paper version; one workaround I found was to open different pages in different browser tabs or windows, but then identifying which page is in which window is still awkward.

The solution#

I created a userscript, "BombManual.com Tab Title and TOC" that automatically updates the tab title to match the title of the currently visible page. It additionally adds a table of contents to make it easy to quickly open all of the pages in separate tabs or windows.

If you do not already have one, you will need to install a userscript manager extension for your browser to use it. Alternatively, you could bookmark this bookmarklet, but as you would have to click that bookmark on every instance of the page you opened, that's less convenient.

The details#

The problem#

In a web app where the display should be constantly up-to-date, the client needs some way to get up-to-date information from the server. One of the simplest ways to do so is to regularly (every few seconds) query the server asking if there is new information. This involves making a lot of requests and is wasteful of bandwidth and processor time on both the client and server (the latter can be improved with caching).

If updates are rare, it makes much more sense for the server to notify the client when they occur, but HTTP is designed around the client making requests to the server, not the other way around. And, furthermore, the Django web framework (like many web frameworks) is built around that model.

The solution#

Of course, this is a well-understood problem and there are a wide variety of APIs and libraries to solve it discussed on the Wikipedia page for Comet. The main workarounds are WebSockets which is a very flexible technology for two-way communication in a web browser and long polling which is a simpler technique which involves merely having the server not answer a request immediately and instead wait until it actually has an update to reply with.

In the rest of this blog post, I discuss the changes I made to convert a Django-based web app that I originally wrote to use a basic polling pattern and hosted using uWSGI to instead use long polling and be hosted using Gunicorn/Uvicorn. I also cover nginx configuration including hosting the app in a subdirectory.

The details#

The problem#

Google Forms is a tool that allows for easily setting up simple structured data entry. But it's designed to make it easy to analyze a lot of data that has been entered, not to view a single entry. There is a view to show individual entries, but it's very cluttered due to including all of the options that were not selected as well as those that were selected. A display that showed only the entries that were selected could be used as a quick and dirty way to make a form letter-like website.

To make this problem harder, the solution has to run on iPad, a platform not exactly known for its user programmability.

The solution#

Bookmark this link: hide unselected items in Google Form. Then select that bookmark when on the appropriate Google Forms page. Note that in addition to hiding unselected entries, if the entry that is not select has a value of "Yes", then its entire section will be hidden. If you don't want that behavior, bookmark this variant of the script instead.

The details#

There were two non-trivial aspects of the design of Anagram Bagels: puzzle generation, which I discussed in my last post, and how to handle saving and sharing puzzles, which I will discuss in this post. I wanted an intuitive design that satisfied the following constraints:

1. It should be possible to easily share a puzzle with another person in the form of a link.

2. The difference between a link to the game and a link to a specific puzzle should be clear. (So the user doesn't accidentally bookmark a link to a specific puzzle when meaning to bookmark the game.)

3. The game should gracefully handle the common mobile browser behavior of reloading the page if it hasn't been viewed in a while.

4. Opening multiple instances of the game in separate tabs shouldn't break anything. (This is the default for web sites, so it's true unless doing something to actively break this assumption.)

Introduction#

I have a friend who plays a lot of simple puzzle games on their phone. One of them is this word puzzle, which is variant of Bagels (also known as Bulls and Cows or by the trademarked name Mastermind) where the secret is an English word and the guesses must be valid words. Additionally, the alphabet of the guesses is limited to a set selected for the puzzle, and the feedback is given for specific letters as opposed to giving just a count of the correct letters.

While playing the game, my friend would often find that it would be useful to type letters out of order. For example, once determing that the word ends in "ing", it would be easier to simply write that in at the end and then fill out the beginning. As the feedback means the player often knows exactly what they want to write in the middle of the word, typing each word in order from the start to end can be awkward.

As the game seems quite simple, I decided to reimplement it and improve upon the UI. My implementation is in HTML5/JavaScript and should work in any modern browser. Play Anagram Bagels or view the source.

The goal#

Generate a file and offer it for download using only client-side JavaScript that is valid TypeScript.

The solution#

var fileContents = "Hello world!";
var filename = "hello.txt";
var filetype = "text/plain";

var a = document.createElement("a");
dataURI = "data:" + filetype +
    ";base64," + btoa(fileContents);
a.href = dataURI;
a['download'] = filename;
var e = document.createEvent("MouseEvents");
// Use of deprecated function to satisfy TypeScript.
e.initMouseEvent("click", true, false,
    document.defaultView, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0,
    false, false, false, false, 0, null);
a.dispatchEvent(e);
a.removeNode();

This code offers a download of a file named hello.txt with the Internet media type text/plain containing the string Hello world!.

Warning: This uses the deprecated initMouseEvent() as a workaround to this TypeScript bug. While presently functional in Chrome and Firefox, this code may stop working in future versions of those browsers.