Sorry for the lack of posting this month. I'm on the way back home from speaking at CodeStock so I've been on the road a bit, and work has been incredibly busy (which is good!) so my usual blog cadence has slipped a bit. Luckily I had a great question in my session on Chrome's Built-in AI which led to a bit of investigating last night. The question involved how well Chrome's AI could do OCR on an image. I had a demo in my presentation showing using AI to describe an image and another to generate a list of tags, but not one specifically for OCR. Here's what I found.
Happy "Three Days Before My Birthday Day"! Oh - yeah, and happy Easter too, but I'm personally a bit more excited about turning 53 as I've decided that's when I'm going to grow up and act like a mature adult. Probably. Maybe. We'll see. Now, if you, my lovely and incredibly intelligent reader, are feeling generous and you've gotten some good knowledge (or entertainment) from this blog, I'll use today's Links For You post to remind you of my Amazon Wishlist. Or even cheaper, leave me a comment below saying HBD - that's just as good. ;)
For the past month or so I've been obsessed with a book series that's apparently been popular and I just didn't realize - Dungeon Crawler Carl. Without giving too much away, it's basically about a person, and his glorious cat, who get caught up in a real world RPG. I'm currently on book 3 (of 8) and am enjoying every page of it. It's incredibly funny and cool at the same time. If you haven't checked it out yet, I highly recommend picking up the first book and giving it a shot. I don't think you'll regret it.
Tell me if you done this before - you're sitting in a movie theater after it's ended and want to know if you should stay for a mid, or post-credit scene (also called a stinger). You open your phone, google, and end up a web page that has five gigs of ads or so and then thirty to forty paragraphs of text talking about the movie before they finally get around to actually answering the question. Yeah, I hate that too. I always tell myself, next time I'll google ahead of time so I'll know before going in, but I never do. If this bugs you, I built a web app that literally only tells you if the movie has these stingers - and nothing more. No context, no description of the movie you literally just saw, just a simple yes or no. If you don't care how it was built, just go here: https://canhaspostcredit.raymondcamden.com/
My regular readers know I like to have fun with my demos. I'll illustrate some API, framework, technique, with perhaps a somewhat silly example as a way of introducing you to something I've learned recently that I thought was cool. My hope is that you see me demonstrating something useful in (perhaps) an less than useful demo that helps you apply it to a real world need. Today's post is not that. Rather, this is a completely silly, useless example and if you have any common sense, you'll stop reading now.
As I continue to dig into Astro, one of the areas I wanted to explore was security and authentication. The Astro docs have an entire section on authentication in which they mention multiple different third party projects you can use with Astro, but I wanted to take a stab at building something myself. Once again I figured this would be a useful way to get some experience with parts of Astro I had not used yet, specifically sessions and middleware.
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