Few days ago, I was chatting with our design team, and we were wondering how hard would be to create a fake audio spectrum (that mimics human speech) and visualize it. I immediately said it should be easy, and that I will play with it over the weekend. Of course, I didn’t wait for the weekend, but wrote it the same evening. It was fairly straightforward, but it had few gotchas.

Result

Before you start playing with the checkboxes I advise you to read the rest of this post.

Use random value Use static sample Use perlin noise value

I want to brag a little - my npm packages have been downloaded more than 1 million times Stats are coming from npm-stat.com. this year!

And I finally got a real domain:

https://muffinman.io/

I’ve been quiet for the last couple of months. Mostly because I was busy with other things, both work and personal. But I do have a few small side projects I will be sharing soon.

Stay tuned!

I love my Nintendo Switch. I have a huge draft about Switch, and how it have put the fun back in gaming for me. It takes me forever to publish it. Unfortunately, tonight I noticed that one of my Joy-Cons has weird lumps on it.

(This is the image from the internet, not mine.)

On multiple forum threads, people suggested using hair dryer to fix it. But nobody did explain how. I tried it, and in couple of minutes I managed to get it, and here is how I did it.

There are tiny inserts in the cap, and they need to go in to the tiny holes on the joystick. I had three of them fall out. To fix it, just heat it with the hair dryer (I did it for about ten seconds), carefully adjust one insert and rub it a little bit until it falls in. Repeat for each insert.

It was much easier than I thought it would be (before heating it felt impossible). Hopefully they won’t fall again, but I will probably get thumb grips to be sure.

This is something I keep rediscovering, because I keep forgetting it. JSON.stringify will omit all object attributes that are undefined.

In most cases, it doesn’t really matter, because if we parse that string back, and try to access that attribute - it will be undefined by design. Check the example below:

const user = { name: 'Stanko', phone: undefined };
user.phone; // -> undefined

const stringifiedUser = JSON.stringify(user); // -> "{\"name\":\"Stanko\"}"

const parsedUser = JSON.parse(stringifiedUser) // -> { name: "Stanko" }

// At the end it behaves the same
parsedUser.phone; // -> undefined

I want to share a hack (or a trick if you prefer) my colleague Marko showed me today.

What is the problem? We want our flex items to be equally distanced between each other and from the parent’s edge. Unforunately space-evenly I wasn’t aware of this property, thanks Marc for mentioning it in the comment below! is not supported in IE and Edge. And space-around or space-between won’t work.

You can see what we are trying to achieve in the first row, and how the latter two are behaving.