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Showing posts from March, 2022

GPL-ed my text compare software!

Another piece of software I’m opening up by licensing it with GPLv3. This application allows you to compare text files with a focus on speed and handling larger files through temporary file buffering. Visit the GitHub page here . I also have the first release compiled with Visual Studio’s publish tool if you don’t want to deal with that but want to try the application out. Help me out through donating (Paypal). See an overview of the project here: This application relies on open source libraries: DiffPlex by Matthew Manela License: Apache-2.0 License Released with version 1.7.1 diffplex Fast Colored TextBox by Pavel Torgashov License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPLv3) Released with version 2.16.24 FastColoredTextBox
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GPL-ed My 2D Tile Based Map Editor

As I’ve started to consider getting back into computer work, I’m trying to refresh my memory and grow further. Today I released, with the GPLv3 license, a 2D tile based map editor I wrote in C# WinForms. If you are into software and game development this might be of interest to you! The video doesn’t go into programming, but I describe what it is currently capable of. Maybe in the future I’ll do a video series explaining the code. I’ll also be looking through my software library to see if there is anything else I can release to the world under a GPLv3 license. Github: https://github.com/TheWayOfCoding/TWOC2DTileMapEditor Help me out through donating (Paypal) https://youtu.be/ZvZbnRorOm8 I wrote most of this around 2014 or 2015 with the intent to use it for a game a friend and I were going to make, but that didn’t happen. A few years later I ended up improving it a bit and using it in the development of an Android game (that is in an unfinished state)...
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Made an app to quickly get short ebay affiliate links.

This article will be more about concepts than code. I’m not sure how ebay, and indirectly Impact the affiliate network, feel about programmatic website interaction. I’m also writing this well after I had created a working version of the program, so I’m working off of what information I gather after the fact. At one point, ebay was converting their affiliate linking system to a new format. The issue I had was hundreds of old links I had to re-create. Some aspects aren’t easily automatable like going through YouTube’s video descriptions. I don’t trust 3rd party tools linking to my YouTube account and I haven’t tried to roll my own. Though, I had wanted to make the process as fast as possible. Maybe ebay had a webservice to generate new links? Not that I could find. I even tried contacting support… nope. I set out with the goal of automating as much of the link generation process as possible through their affiliate website. My tool of choice was Visual Studio, C#, and WinForms. As I start...
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ChatGPT is a new, and faster, way to do programming!

Currently ChatGPT is in a free “initial research preview” . One of its well known use cases at this point is generating software code. I’ve also just used it to write most of this article… Well, actually a future article about cleaning up SRT subtitle files of their metadata faster than I have been by hand with Notepad++ and its replace functionality. Update: I recorded a screencast of writing the SRT subtitle cleaner application loading and processing portion. I relied heavily on ChatGPT for code. It was a fun process! https://youtu.be/TkEW39OloUA ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a powerful language model that can assist developers in a variety of tasks, including natural language processing and text generation. One such task that ChatGPT can help with is creating an SRT cleaner program. SRT, or SubRip Subtitle, files are commonly used to add subtitles to video files. However, these files can become cluttered with unnecessary information, such as timing lines or blank spaces. To clean...
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Blogger Notable theme pop-up header issue fix (thanks to Gemini Pro)

I've made a few half hearted attempts over the years to to fix Blogger's Notable theme's rendering of the pop-up header that shows up when you scroll down the page a decent amount and then pull back to reveal that secondary header. On Chrome mobile I noticed a gray box that forms next to the magnifying glass icon. I never looked in detail on  Chrome desktop, but it had an issue as well which I'll detail below.  If you are looking for a solution and don't want all of the extra talk about how I was able to find it, here it is:  .centered-top-container .sticky .main_header_elements { overflow : hidden !important ; } I decided to try using Gemini Pro 2.5 to see if it was capable of finding the issue and giving me a fix. Turns out that it was able, but it took a bit of collaboration back and forth to find the actual problem.  Here is a modified article I asked it to give me based on our debugging chat (it was very colorful in the article which I scaled back a lot, ...
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Theme error in 2010s Android App after AppCompat Migration

I plan on releasing a lot of my old work as GPL open source, but most of it has aged to the point that it no longer functions, or if it does work it’s running in compatibility mode. Basically it’s no longer best practices. Not a good way to start off any new public GPL projects, in my opinion. The current project I’m working on is an Android app that calculates star trails meant to help photographers get or avoid that in their night time photos. For now I’m going to skip some of the import process because I didn’t document it exactly. It’s been mostly trial and error as I poke around Android Studio post import. The Android Studio import process… Removing Admob Google Play code before the project would run at all. After removing dependencies, it kind of worked, but when running it in the emulator it shows a pop-up message saying that the app was developed for an old version of Android. Going through the process of updating code to match current best practices… I had the IDE convert the ...
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