Game Dev Diary – Cat Herder – Part 1 / / No Comments Over a year ago, I released my first "idle clicker" game, IdleFleet. IdleFleet is a simple "space merchant" game built with Alpine.js. I’ve worked on it off and on since the initial release (which was in Vue.js by the way) and still have updates I want to add, but a few weeks ago I started work on a new game I’d like to share with you, Cat Herder. The Game # Cat Herder is very much in its early stages so while I’ll (eventually) link to it, you can’t do much with it now. The basic idea is that you have one cat… to start with that is – and have to keep it happy. Cats have three basic moods: Wanting to be left alone Wanting to be fed Wanting... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Diary, Game, Herder, part
Tracking Gemini Models with Pipedream / / No Comments APIs, tools, consumer features, and heck, pretty much every aspect, of generative AI is changing at an incredibly rapid pace. I mostly focus on just Google Gemini and even that is pretty difficult to keep up with. Recently, Linda Lawton shared that she actually uses an automation script to keep track of the models currently available in Gemini. I thought that was a great idea and decided to see if I could build something similar using Pipedream. Here’s what I came up with. Getting Available Models via API # Normally, if I wanted to know what models I had available, I’d go to AI Studio and just look, or check the docs. While that’s fine usually, there’s actually an API... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Gemini, Models, Pipedream, Tracking
Update to My Table Sorting Web Component / / No Comments Just a quick note. Last year, I blogged a demo of a web component that lets you wrap an existing HTML table and progressively add table sorting. I’m rather proud of that demo and was actually planning on doing a quick video about it, but while testing I encountered two small bugs that somehow missed my earlier rigorous testing. (And by rigorous testing I mean a few minutes of clicking around.) Specifically, the issue is in the "when clicking to sort, notice if we sorted this column before and if so, reverse the sort" area: sortCol(e,i) { let sortToggle = 1; if(this.lastSort === i) { this.sortAsc = !this.sortAsc; if(!this.sortDir) sortToggle = -1; } this.lastSort = i; this.data.sort((a,b)... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Component, Sorting, table, update
Adding Recommendations to my Blog with Algolia / / No Comments I’ve been using Algolia for my site’s search functionality for a few years now and it works great, especially once the free tier expanded to cover the size of my content somewhat better. In that time, I’ve mainly just stuck to basic search functionality and haven’t really touched any of the more advanced features. This weekend I took a look at one I’ve been meaning to play with for some time, Recommendations. My thinking was, of course, a way to recommend/suggest content related to the current blog post you may be reading. This distinction is important because as I looked at the Recommendations marketing and documentation, the content is heavily focused on product... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adding, Algolia, blog, Recommendations
Using the Gemini File API for Prompts with Media / / No Comments Using media in your prompts (what’s called ‘multimodal’) with the Gemini API is fairly simple in small cases. You can encode your input with base64 and pass it along with your prompt. While this works well, it’s got limitations that may be quickly hit – most specifically a file size limit of 20 megs. A few months ago, I shared a demo of using your device’s camera to detect cat breeds. With today’s cameras taking incredibly detailed pictures, I hit that limit right away and had to write some code to resize the image to a smaller size. Luckily, the Gemini API has a better way of handling that, the File API. The File API # This API provides a separate method... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: file, Gemini, Media, Prompts, using
Creating Visualizations in Postman / / No Comments Earlier this week, I blogged about a cool Postman feature where you could use scripting to take the result of one API call and use it as a variable that is then used by a second call. For APIs that first require you to exchange credentials for an access token, this is a super useful way to make that process easier. Today I’m following up on that with another useful application of scripting – visualizations. Once again, I’ve got my coworker Ben to thank for showing me this. Let me show you an example. When working with Firefly Services and the text to image API, you get a nice JSON response back containing information about the results as well as links to your images. Here’s... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: creating, Postman, Visualizations
Dynamically Creating Variables in Postman / / No Comments This may come as a shock to you, but sometimes, I don’t read the documentation for the tools I use. Sometimes, I don’t even look at all the various menu items and UI stuff for the tools I use. I know I’m probably the only one who does that and I apologize for letting down my faithful readers. I’ve used Postman for probably over ten years now. I don’t use it terribly often as I can normally whip up a quick API demo in Node in minutes, but I’ll use Postman from time to time. As you can probably guess by how I started this post, my use of Postman was very rudimentary. Heck, I’ve only recently realized the benefit of organizing requests via various collections... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: creating, Dynamically, Postman, variables
Testing Google’s New Gemini Flash Model / / No Comments I’m currently at Google I/O waiting for the next session to start and decided to take a quick look at the latest Gemini model to be released, Flash 1.5. As the name implies, this is a ‘speedier’ model built to return responses quicker than other models, with the tradeoff that the results may not be as good. Like most things in life, there’s going to be tradeoffs. Gemini’s Pro 1.5 model will definitely be slower but will return better results. When and how you choose is… well that’s a good question, right? I decided to build a tool so I could play with this myself. The idea is to let me enter a prompt and have it run both Flash and Pro models and see both... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Flash, Gemini, Google's, Model, Testing