I recently received a bug report on a library I built - three-good-godrays - which implements screen-space raymarched godrays for Three.JS as a pass for the pmndrs postprocessing library. One of the problems pointed out was that colors seemed washed out/desaturated when my pass was used, even when the pass wasn’t rendering any godrays.

Here’s how things look by default without the effect (and are supposed to look with it on):

For a long time - at least a couple of years - I’ve been cursed with an issue on my KDE Plasma Linux desktop where my PgUp key doesn’t work. Instead of scrolling up in my terminal or editor, it pops open a menu with the title “Select to paste” and a listing of my most recent clipboard entries:

I was recently working on speeding up a MIDI editor UI written in PIXI.JS which is part of my web synth project. The UI is fairly simple itself, but it needs to be efficient in order to render potentially thousands+ notes on the screen at once.

Here’s what the MIDI editor UI looks like:

The Problem

After upgrading svelte-seo to the latest version (1.5.4 at the time of writing this), I encountered this error when trying to run my SvelteKit dev server:

Error while preprocessing /home/casey/dream/node_modules/svelte-seo/index.svelte - Cannot find module './transformers/"application/ld+json">${'
Require stack:
- /home/casey/dream/node_modules/svelte-preprocess/dist/autoProcess.js
- /home/casey/dream/node_modules/svelte-preprocess/dist/index.js
Error while preprocessing /home/casey/dream/node_modules/svelte-seo/index.svelte - Cannot find module './transformers/"application/ld+json">${'
Require stack:
- /home/casey/dream/node_modules/svelte-preprocess/dist/autoProcess.js
- /home/casey/dream/node_modules/svelte-preprocess/dist/index.js

The Fix

The issue turned out to be that my svelte version was too old.

Recently, I’ve been working on a rainy scene in Three.JS. One of the most important parts of this scene is a greenhouse with big glass windows.

I decided to take a stab at making some realistic raindrop-covered window panes for them using Three.JS’s built-in transmission shader. The result turned out pretty well if I do say so myself, so I thought I’d write up my process for building it from start to finish.

I have an Anker USB hub that I use with my work laptop - an M1 Mac Pro. I use it to plug in two USB-A peripherals (mouse and keyboard) as well as to plug in a HDMI monitor. The hub itself connects to my laptop via USB-C. In addition to the hub, I also have a second HDMI monitor, a USB-C internet adapter, wired headphones, and my charging cable connected to the laptop.

While watching some logs for my webserver recently, I’ve noticed a significant amount of requests coming from a bot I didn’t recognize with the user agent of fidget-spinner-bot. It seems to be pretty aggressively crawling my personal network of sites that I maintain, following links and downloading page contents. Some requests are also coming from user agents including my-tiny-bot, thesis-research-bot, test-bot which seems to be the same or related. I usually recognize most of the user agents of bots making significant amounts of requests to my server, so these stood out to me.

Recently, I’ve been working on some interactive sketches/games in Three.JS. For one of the levels I was building, I had the idea of importing something I built from one of my old MineCraft survival worlds in to use as part of it.

I figured that there was a pretty good chance of some software existing to export MineCraft levels to some 3D model format for 3D rendering or other purposes, and that indeed is the case. There are multiple options out there, but the one I chose to go with was jmc2obj.

I was reading a Hacker News thread for an article comparing GCP to some alternatives like AWS. I’ve been a GCP user for a good while now, and it’s definitely my go-to public cloud. We also use it at my dayjob at Osmos.

Reading the article and comments got me thinking about some of my favorite GCP features. GCP has a few excellent gems which are better than pretty much any competing cloud offering:

I’ve been building some interactive sketches/games in Three.JS, and I wanted to deploy it on my server. I export the models used by the level from Blender in glTF format, which is a modern, well-supported, and commonly used format for this. Specifically, I exported the models as a .glb file.

The Problem

When I loaded my levels in the browser, I noticed that the .glb file wasn’t getting compressed with gzip. This was a problem because the file is quite large - over 4MB - and glb is a format that should benefit greatly from compression.