Sorry about not posting, I’ve been busy over at @overcastchat. Also just got a PyPortal.

The past few days, I’ve been working on an awesome hardware project: the micro:watch. It’s a simple watch with the micro:bit, with clock, date, thermometer, compass, health, calculator, stopwatch and timer apps, and more coming soon. Here’s what you need to build it:

• A micro:bit
• Duct tape
• AA Battery holder for micro:bit (I used this one) and 2 AA batteries
• Velcro strip
• Micro-usb cable

As you may know, Scratch 3.0 came out on Wednesday! Yay! Or not. I’ve never actually met someone who really loves Scratch 3.0. I was excited for it, but it could really use some more work.

1. Fix the loading bugs now!!

I’ve seen several Scratchers whose projects don’t load the blocks! In two videos, someone reported they’ve been working on a project for months, and now they can’t work on it because there are no blocks! The project runs fine, but they can’t edit it! This is crazy.

2. The blocks are WAY TOO BIG!!

I know they want it to be more mobile friendly, but I tried Scratch out on my iPad Pro this morning, and IT WAS TERRIBLE!! Whenever I tried to move a point in the vector editor, it thought I wanted to make a new point. I got so frustrated, I threw the iPad down, and switched to the desktop. Point is, the Scratch editor will never be good on mobile. At the very least, please make there be an option to shrink the blocks.

3. Move the stage back

This isn’t a big problem for me, but I know a lot of other Scratchers who are extremely mad about this. I’m afraid Scratch will remove a lot of good users by making this change. It’s really not that hard to change back (just make a userscript and change the flex order to 2 on the block editor), but not everyone knows that.

4. Stop the Lag!

Scratch 3.0, maybe it should be called Snail 3.0. It’s really slow. In this video, the account nav takes so long to load, the user thinks their account is gone. And in several projects (I had one, but I lost the link), Scratch 3.0 slows it down enough to be unusable, even in turbo mode.

5. Switch the colors of Control and Events

This isn’t that big of a topic in the community, but this is my personal opinion. In Scratch 3.0, the events category is #ffd500, a yellow-orange color, and the control category is #ffab19 a weird orange-brown thing. In Scratch 2.0, events is #ca8135, a brown color, and control is #e4a826, a yellow. Point is, they flipped the colors! This is so confusing!

If you’ve been around my profile lately, you might have seen I created a new Github orginization, @simple-themes. I’m planning to make lots of themes for Jekyll, and soon I plan on changing this website to use one of the themes. Here are some of the currents themes:

You might have heard of the things called Node.js and NPM. Node.js is a way to run JavaScript on a server, and NPM (Node Package Manager) is a website that keeps track of node code.

Recently, I came across photos of Chrome 69. I thought, “Is that a Photoshop? That toolbar looks just like Microsoft Edge!” But nope, it’s Chrome alright.

First post in this series

When I first learned JavaScript, I was like this is great, but how do you make stuff wait? I still have code that would never finish running, because unlike Scratch, JavaScript does not re-render every frame of a while loop. I now know about setTimeout, but a new feature, Promises, make waiting much more easy.

View the demo that goes with this post

I just realized I haven’t posted since April! Today was my last day of school for the year. I was busy with some things, but now I’ll be able to post more. About poll of the month, I’m not doing that anymore. I started this in June 2017, about a year ago, and it has changed. On my old site, I had a “Contests” section where I would ask a weird question and visitors would try to answer it. I removed it because:

View the demo that goes with this post

Today, I discovered a bug in the Apple iOS keyboard. First, when you open the keyboard, it looks like this:

This is now what you see when you visit http://goo.gl . What happened? It turns out Google no longer wants people to use their URL shortener, goo.gl. Somehow, this is a way to promote Firebase Dynamic Links. How does that work? They are telling new customers to go to bit.ly or ow.ly. If you need a new shortener, I reccomend reading this post, but my personal favorite is http://is.gd .

In case you forgot, it is Easter April Fools Day;

Don't forget the tradition of using random semicolons;

Has anyone seen Waldo?;

Another tradition: On Easter April Fools Day, you are supposed to type bop(); in the console and press enter;

Don't forget to check Google's Youtube channel.

I was looking at Google Street View, and this is a screenshot of what I saw! The top of one person is not aligned with the bottom; one person only half-exists and the car is in two places at once! This is one disadvantage of taking photos while driving!

Also, don't forget to look for Easter Eggs April Fools Pranks. There are 2 in this post!

I've hidden some April Fool's pranks around this site, and it's up to you to find them!

More will be added as it gets closing to Easter April Fools Day.

It might help to check Github and this scratch project.

When you find a prank, you will hear a noise and see an easter egg.

Hints

Upside Down

*

boop

-13

I was inspecting a Scratch 3.0 page, and I wanted to translate something. I used Chrome’s context menu to translate it, and guess what! The original HTML was this:

<select aria-label="language selector" class="language-selector_language-select_8Vfnm">
 <option value="en">English</option>
 <option value="ar">الْعَرَبِيَّة</option>
 <option value="de">Deutsch</option>
 <option value="es">Español</option>
 <option value="he">עִבְרִית</option>
</select>

And the result was this:

<select aria-label="language selector" class="language-selector_language-select_8Vfnm">
 <option value="en">English</option>
 <option value="ar">
  <font style="vertical-align: inherit;">
   <font style="vertical-align: inherit;">العربية</font>
  </font>
 </option>
 <option value="de">Deutsch</option>
 <option value="es">Español</option>
 <option value="he">
  <font style="vertical-align: inherit;">
   <font style="vertical-align: inherit;">Abrit</font>
  </font>
 </option>
</select>

At first, I thought this was a bug in Scratch 3.0, but I couldn’t find anything wrong with the code. Then, for some reason, Scratch crashed. I reloaded the page, inspected, and was surprised to find the the error was gone. I translated again, and the error was back. Why is Google Translate using the unsupported <font> tag?

In the early days of the internet, domain extensions had meaning. .com for commercial, .org for organizations, .gov for goverment, .net for networks and so on. The internet now has over 1500 domain extensions (source: iana.org), and there are now hardly any rules for extensions. My website is kyleplo.com, and it is not commercial.

Today, I was trying to figure out how old a web file was, I used document.lastModified, and I was surprised to see that the date was today, a few seconds ago. That info didn’t seem right, so I reloaded the page. This time, the date was different, now even more recent! I think this was because the file was returned by a server scripting language, which “created” the file a few seconds ago, even though the file was really older. So beware of using document.lastModified; it might be wrong.

For some reason, I was searching Google for a copyright sign. The first result, was from emojipedia.org! Do you consider the copyright sign an emoji? I don’t. Share your opinion in the comments below.

Have you ever wanted to link to your latest Scratch project? Well now you can here

I consider myself an introvert, and I’ve never been big on collaboration. But recently, I’ve worked on several open source projects online, WITH PEOPLE I’VE NEVER EVEN MET IN PERSON!!!! This sounds crazy, but it’s actually fun!

Sorry I havn’t posted in a while. I’ve got a lot to write about.

Yesterday, I got an iPad Pro, and it is great. But one feature I still don’t quite understand is: Live photos. How can a photo be live? Wouldn’t a live photo be a video? Or is it more like a GIF?

If you were on my website yesterday, that is impossible. Because my site was down yesterday. Sorry. I was experimenting with some domain stuff that clearly did not go as planned. If you read this post, you know I have my 1and1 subscription back! So the next few days, I will be changing some stuff on this website.

Have you ever wanted to convert camel case to spaces? Try this code:

Hello, happy new year!!

URL Shorteners are a pretty cool tool, and there are so many of them. You probably know https://goo.gl and https://bit.ly, but here are some cool ones you’ve probably never heard of:

As you may have noticed, today, there are now comments at the bottom of almost all the pages that allow you to comment! I have added these, they are not part of Jekyll Now (which I use). Here is how I made it:

For Christmas, I was able to renew my 1and1 subscription so I can now continue using server languages!! Yay! I won’t stop using Github Pages, I like it for blogs, and project sites, but I also want to do some stuff with servers. But I’m trying to decide what language(s) to use.

The new progressive web app ideas that browser developers have are pretty cool. But I think there are a few APIs that the web would be way cooler with. This is the second post out of a series of posts

4. Widget API

Some platforms, mostly phones have widgets that you can place on your home screen. What if websites could create them? Example:

navigator.createWidget("currentTime",{
title: "Current Time",
color: "#ee8800",
content: [
{type: "updatingText",key:"getTime"},
{type: "button",label: "Open website",key:"openSite"}
]
},function (res){
if(res.type === "getTime"){return time}else if(res.type === "openSite"){window.open("http://time.is")}
}
);
if(userDoesNotWantWidget){navigator.removeWidget("currentTime");}

5. Document Print API

Somehow, Google Docs is able to print only part of the page, in this case, the document. This would make it much easier!! Example:

The new progressive web app ideas that browser developers have are pretty cool. But I think there are a few APIs that the web would be way cooler with.

1. Spellcheck API

This API would let developers modify the list of spellcheck words on that website. These change would be on that website ONLY, unless the user accepted a permission that lets the website change the whole list.

What is your favorite out of the following games?

Fill out the poll!

Hello! I made a new extension called Scratch Emoji Shortcuts. It lets you use more emojis on Scratch, including sound emojis. You can use most of the emojis Github supports, plus a few sound emojis. For more info, see https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/283788/

What are you going to be for Halloween?

Fill out poll

From an idea I found online, I made a shirt with CSS code for a ghost. This is my Halloween costume. The code on the shirt, if you can’t read it is:

.ghost {
  opacity: 0.5;
  background: white;
/* Noo! Ghost attack! */
  visibility: hidden;
  display: none;
    }

The idea

My version

Sorry about the image quality. You can make your own with a shirt, fabric paint and some CSS knowledge!

With Halloween coming up soon, I carved a pumpkin. My pumpkin has my logo in it, leaving a K-shaped piece that I can do whatever I want with. So until Halloween, my test account logo will be:

Ever wanted to lag out the browser console? Well now you can! This code makes the console glitch out. If you try scrolling, some parts of the console will disappear. You may even need your task manager to close the tab!!!

function error(s,m){return setInterval(function (){console.error(m || "ERROR");console.warn(error())},s || 1000)}

To use, paste into the console, then call the function error(speed,message) Example:

error(1000,"ERROR");

In my last post, I said that polls would resume! Well they have! Fill it out here. Results will be on this blog.

One bad thing about Github Pages is that it is hard to create forms on it. So I decided to create a Weebly site to host all of my forms, because forms are so easy there. The site is here. You can also request to have a form create for you. Because of this, I will resume poll of the month!

Recently, on the Scratch forums, many users seem to put a random Google search link in their signature. Because Google crawls the Scratch forums, all posts with this set of characters.

My custom scrollbars

As you may have noticed, I use a custom scrollbar on this website. I think they are awesome because you can customise your site more. However, mine happens to be very weird: ```css ::-webkit-scrollbar { width: 1%; }

If you are reading this, my website is working!