GitHub markdown style on Visual Studio Code

These days I found out the very useful feature on Visual Studio Code for markdown editing, which renders the MD file on VSCode itself, opening a new tab at right.

However, the rendered markdown styles matches VSCode itself. Since I mainly use markdown on GitHub, I’d like to preview the markdown using GitHub style. So I inspected GitHub and made a quick CSS file to VSCode:

Save the file and add this entry to VSCode user settings, which on Linux looks like this:

"markdown.styles": ["/home/your_name/.config/Code/User/eu-markdown.css"]

The markdown preview should be pretty close to GitHub styling now.

React Material-UI: a FAB with an optional tooltip

I’m using Material UI library to have Material Design components on a rather complex React project. Despite being good, this library unfortunately doesn’t provide a tooltip option to the Float Action Button, something I need at the moment.

I found some useful information on this project issue, and after digging into the code of IconButton – which has a tooltip option – and Tooltip itself, I wrote a component that provides a Float Action Button with an optional tooltip:

The icon is ready to be used with Font Awesome project, which is what I’m using. Other minor adjustments I made, like font size, can just be removed too. And my project requirements are web only, so that’s all I tested.

Extending native objects in create-react-app

Despite being considered a bad practice by some, I like to extend native objects to add some syntatic sugar. However, when working in a React project with create-react-app, I receive the following ESLint error:

Array prototype is read only, properties should not be added  no-extend-native

Fortunately this warning can be disabled by adding a comment in the file where you extend the native object. Putting it all together, this is what I’ve got:

/*eslint no-extend-native: ["error", { "exceptions": ["Array"] }]*/
Object.defineProperty(Array.prototype, 'last', {
  get: function() {
    return this[this.length - 1];
  }
});
Object.defineProperty(Array.prototype, 'empty', {
  get: function() {
    return this.length === 0;
  }
});

Syntatic sugar added, clear console.

Absolute imports with create-react-app

When developing React using create-react-app with custom-react-scripts, I wanted to use absolute paths for import, and I found this: just adding NODE_PATH=src/ to “.env” file. It worked on Windows, but not on Linux.

After a while, I sorted it out: echo $NODE_PATH told me that my Linux had NODE_PATH being set somewhere. Then, being conservative, I just added unset NODE_PATH to “~/.bashrc” file, and it finally worked.

JavaScript development is a nightmare these days.

Google Chrome 61 slow, how to fix

After updating to Chrome 61, I instantly noticed that YouTube became slow, and Google Maps – particularly Street View – became so slow it’s unusable. I went back to Firefox Developer 57, but then I missed Chrome’s search capabilities.

I found out that the problem is the HTML5 canvas, and the fix is rather easy: just disable this flag in Chrome flag page:

chrome://flags/#enable-color-correct-rendering

Instantly all the sites became responsive again.

Grep and find aliases

Two quick bash functions to speed up name and content search on files. These are to be appended at ~/.bashrc file:

function gr { clear ; grep -rn $1 . ; }
function ff { clear ; find . -name "$1" ; }

Holy Grail CSS layout with overflow

This morning – yep, a Sunday morning – I needed to implement an HTML page with the Holy Grail layout. A quick search gave me dozens of implementations, but all of them broke apart when you trew a lot of content into the sections. Being fond of the Flexbox model, I quickly came with an implementation that had all the needed overflow control:

This implementation is also modular: if you don’t need any of the panels, just remove them – the layout will stay working. Also, the satellite panels can have fixed dimensions, see the commented values for width and height.

The funny part is that min-height: 0. It’s there for Firefox; without it, the overflow goes wild. Other interesting thing is the absence of the height: 100% to html and body elements, it’s not needed.

Disabling the useless npm package-lock.json

Recently I’ve updated npm to version 5 while working in one of my projects. Much to my dismay, a “package-lock.json” file started to appear, and I finally understood why I’ve seen this file commited in some projects lately.

But since this feature is basically a horrible idea, I started searching a way to permanently disable it. It looks like I’m not the only one who dislikes this, because I found this excellent post, which points to the solution:

npm set package-lock false

And any more “package-lock.json” files that appear in front of me will be summarily deleted.

Visual Studio Code settings

This morning I was setting up Visual Studio Code at a Lubuntu virtual machine, and after saving the keyboard shortcuts, I opened my current editor to get the settings. Since some of them I consider essential, I decided to publish them here, for further reference.

Simple minimalist JavaScript metronome

These days, when practicing guitar, I needed a metronome. Whey you type “metronome” on Google Search, it actually brings out a functional metronome – however it has no keyboard shortcut keys. So I decided to write a simple metronome, with keyboard keys, from scratch, to suit my needs.

Knowing the imprecision of JavaScript’s setTimeout function, I implemented a timer that adjusts itself each call, thus having a fairly reliable precision.

The code is so simple I decided not to create a GitHub repository, so I’m just sharing the whole source code here:

Git amend updating date and time

When commiting code on Git, very often I realize I forgot some little detail right after I end the commit operation. This is very annoying. Fortunately, we have the amend command. Recently I found a very cool trick to use with amend command: updating the date and time of the commit together with amend.

So, with those in hand, I’m now using a nice alias on my ~/.bashrc file:

alias gitamend='git commit --amend --date="$(date -R)"'

And my own memory faults are now easily addressed.

Trying out Git Subtree

Currently I have 5 projects on my computer which use WinLamb library. So far I’ve been keeping copies of the library directory on each project; these directories are kept in sync with FreeFileSync Portable. Although this approach works, it’s very cumbersome.

Since each project is versioned as a Git repository, and WinLamb itself is a Git repository on GitHub, I started searching for an alternative, and I choose Subtree over Submodule. Following is a summary of the commands I needed to do on my Windows 7 x64, using Git portable v2.13.1:

1. Remote

Add a remote with the path to the repository of the shared project:

git remote add otherproj --no-tags git@github.com:username/otherproj.git

Or if a local project:

git remote add otherproj --no-tags d:/stuff/otherproj

You can view the remotes with:

git remote -v

2. Subtree

Run the Subtree command:

git subtree add --prefix otherproj otherproj master --squash

This will copy the library into the subdirectory and create a commit, with the hash in the message. It’s unnecessary, but you can provide a custom message for the subtree commit:

git subtree add --prefix otherproj otherproj master --squash -m "Subtreeing otherproj."

3. Updating

To update your project with new library code:

git subtree pull --prefix otherproj otherproj master --squash

This leads us to a nice bash function to our ~/.bashrc file:

function gitsubtreepull { git subtree pull --prefix $1 $1 master --squash; }

Which eases our life when updating our Subtree library:

gitsubtreepull otherproj

So far this approach seems to the better than the old-fashioned directory sync, although it still feels a bit “loose”. I’m still avoiding pushing code from the local repository to the shared library; if I change something, I just copy the code to there, then I update the library repository itself.

Note: beware amending a commit on the remote library. The next time you try to update the dependency, it’s likely to get lost, and you’ll have to remove the subtree and add it again.

After 4 years, SRTEd 1.3.0

So finally I released a new version of SRTEd, my own subtitles editor. Honestly, in these four years I didn’t see a better subtitle editor, I still think it’s the most user-friendly editor out there.

The interface didn’t improve much, but there are many bugfixes and minor UI adjusts. It took so long because I entirely rewrote it using my new Win32 library, which I expect to release as open source soon, together with an article explaining what it is and how to take the best out of it.

It can be downloaded from CNET or Softpedia.

Remembering Randy Rhoads

Randy Rhoads last day was March 19, 1982, 35 years ago today. After influencing so many guitarists, I just want to leave this humble tribute here. I’ve played “Crazy Train” in bands in the past, and it was always a lot of fun.



After publishing the video, I realized the guitar track was a bit too loud in the mix. Well, too late, but not too bad.

I used my Suhr Modern Satin, with Suhr SSV/SSH+ (neck/bridge) pickups, and the POD HD500X connected via USB. After using Billy Gibbons’ .007 signature gauge set exclusively for about one year and a half, I tried the D’Addario EXL130 set again, however with a .012 for the G, as I found on my graphic string tension calculator. It feels very balanced now. I don’t know if I’ll use this custom .008 set on all guitars, but I’m keeping it on the Suhr, at least.

A graphic string tension calculator for guitar

I was assembling a custom string set for my guitar, and for that I needed to calculate the tensions of the string gauges, according to the scale length. Although I found a couple string tension calculators online, pretty much all of them had terrible usability. So I decided to write my own string tension calculator, with the best usability I could think of as an user.

It’s hosted on GitHub Pages: https://rodrigocfd.github.io/string-tension-calc/

I also made it open source on my GitHub account, and I hope to make further improvements.

Fixing bad font rendering on Chrome 54

I’ve been using Google Chrome browser on Windows 7 x64 these days, and it annoyed me how bad the fonts were being rendered. Too light and somewhat pixelated. After a quick search I found some tips, with most fixes revolving around the LCD antialiasing setting, which didn’t work for me. What did the magic was actually installing and configuring an extension named Font Rendering Enhancer.

This extension has only one setting: “font width”. After adjusting it to “50”, voilà, the fonts started looking good. And, of course, allowing it to work in incognito mode.

Clean tones of Ibanez JPM100 P2

I recorded an improvisation of my 1997 Ibanez JPM100 P2, which has DiMarzio Crunch Lab + LiquiFire instead of the stock DiMarzio Steve’s Special + Air Norton. The previous owner did the replacement, and I kept it because it sounds crazy good. In fact, these new pickups sound very similar to the original ones, but with more gain.

I used my POD HD500X straight into the computer and a set of .007 Dunlop Rev. Willy's Lottery strings.

Visual Studio Code slow startup on Linux

Recently I’ve been having a problem with Visual Studio Code, current version 1.5.2, on Linux. The program startup was too slow. I mean, the absurd of waiting over 40 minutes from the doubleclick until I see the window!

I discovered that there are two executables within the VSCode package: one at the root directory, and other inside “bin” subdir. The outer seems to be a wrapper to the inner, since I made a test and ran the inner executable alone... and bang, VSCode started in about 3 seconds – not an example of quick startup, but acceptable.

So I redirected my shortcut to point directly to the executable inside “bin” subdirectory. Whatever the outer executable does, it’s clearly buggy.

Visual Studio Code keyboard shortcuts

These days I’ve been using Visual Studio Code at work. It’s a nifty editor written in NodeJS. Being a Visual C++ user, however, I missed some keyboard shortcuts I like to use. To remedy this, I customized the “keybindings.json” file to make it more familiar. To use it, go File → Preferences → Keyboard Shortcuts.


As a meta side node, this is the first time I use GitHub’s Gist to share code of mine.