Javascript (227 Posts)

Can GenAI help you win in Vegas? (2026)

2026-06-07T18:00:00+00:00

No! Thanks for reading. Still here? Cool. So way back in 2023, I built a little demo that I thought was kinda cool. Early in 2023 I had used Alpine.js and the excellent Deck API to build a simple web-based Blackjack game: Creating a Blackjack Game with Alpine.js and the Deck of Cards API. I then took that demo and connected to Google's GenAI API, which back then was named Palm: Can GenAI help you win in Vegas?. It's been a few years and I thought I'd take a stab at it again, this time making use of Chrome's Prompt API. Technically I'd have much better luck using a bleeding edge Gemini model via a serverless function, and I may still take a stab at that later, but I thought I'd see how well the Prompt API worked.

AI versus a Grue

2026-06-02T18:00:00+00:00

"It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." If you recognize that quote, congrats, you probably need to see your doctor about pain in your back. (Ok, pain everywhere.) For those of us of a certain age, or folks who like classic games, the Infocom series was a tremendous source of entertainment. Using plain text commands to navigate your environment, players had to use their minds to figure out puzzles and mazes in order to win the game. The IF (Interactive Fiction) community is still strong and of course, I've spoken before about my time playing and coding on MUDs, so with that in mind, I thought I'd try tackling something that I assumed probably wouldn't work well - seeing if Chrome's built-in AI could handle playing Zork 1, the most famous of Infocom's library. The short answer is... not so well. But honestly, it was kind of fun to try so I figured I'd share the results.

Creating a Heavy Rain Alert with RainDrop and Val Town

2026-06-01T18:00:00+00:00

One of the "joys" of living in Louisiana is the rainy season, which is heavier in spring but honestly, feels like it lasts all year long. I can still remember being on a business trip in 2016, about to fly home, and hearing about some sort of 'rain event' back in Louisiana. This surprised me as there wasn't a hurricane involved, just an incredible amount of rain (up to 2-3 inches per hour). You can read more about it on the Wikipedia page about the event, but it goes without saying - rain is a big deal down here.

Dang good Office parsing on the web with officeParser

2026-05-20T18:00:00+00:00

A few weeks ago I wrote about using Chrome's built-in AI support to summarize documents - "Summarizing Docs with Built-in AI". This was a followup on an earlier post that was PDF only and made use of an excellent library, officeParser, to work with Microsoft Office files. This library worked well, but had one issue that made it a bit harder to use.

Is it hotter or colder this year?

2026-05-15T18:00:00+00:00

Where I live could generously be called "warm", but is usually closer to the surface of the sun, especially in late summer. That's why when the weather is not oppressively hot, I try my best to enjoy it. We're mid-May now and honestly, this spring has been... pleasant. Suspiciously pleasant but I'll take what I can get.

Send me a message in a panel...

2026-05-14T18:00:00+00:00

On my birthday a few weeks ago, one of things I got was something I've wanted to play with for a while, the Divoom Pixoo64 pixel frame. This is pixel art frame you can hang on your wall and with an app, select art, clock faces, and more. It's fun, although the app itself isn't my favorite. But - what excites me is that it has an API you can use to change what's shown on the frame. I actually built a demo of this with Webflow you can see below:

What was that song, the one with the words?

2026-05-13T18:00:00+00:00

My wife and I are both big music lovers, and I'm happy to have influenced her listening habits a bit and have loved what she's introduced me to. Given we both love music, we've also been known to sing along at times. (You can take a guess as to how well that goes.) She normally gets the lyrics right. I'm normally a bit more... loose in terms of how well I remember the lyrics. I was thinking about this and was curious how well AI could be used to identity lyrics and match them to a song, especially when the lyrics may not be exactly right. I spent some time hacking on it and here's what I built.

Animated video backgrounds via a Web Component and ColorThief

2026-04-30T18:00:00+00:00

Earlier this year, the epic ColorThief library had a pretty significant update. I blogged about a simple demo I built with it but I was fascinated by one particular demo on their site.

Another Game: My Little Mortal Combat

2026-04-25T18:00:00+00:00

Hello awesome readers! I'm happy to announce my latest web game, My Little Mortal Combat, a mashup of two epic franchises, My Little Pony and Mortal Kombat. This began as an idea, just the name, that I recorded in Microsoft To Do in September of 2019. Yes, almost seven years ago. It sat there, at the bottom of my 'idea' list, until about a month ago when in the shower (not joking), it popped up in my head along with the basic mechanics of how the game would play.

Building a Simple Markdown PWA App

2026-04-20T18:00:00+00:00

While I didn't share it on the blog, last week I tasked Claude with using Electron to build a Markdown viewer app. It was part test (how well can Claude work with Electron) and part real need - I work with Markdown files all the time but didn't have a simple "view focused" application for it. I was sure there open source or paid app options out there, but I wanted my own. Claude did a pretty good job (you can see the source here) but one thing stood out to me - the size of the bundled app.