I'm excited to share that I am one of the speakers for this year's All Day Hey! I first attended All Day Hey in 2018, and it has since been one of my favourite conferences. Well, technically, this is a comeback to the stage since I did give a lightning talk at All Day Hey back in 2019.

So, five years later (I can't believe it has been five years), I will be back, but this time to talk in a longer format about my new experiments with the Web Speech API and thinking a bit more about voice interfaces.

I've been working on new experiments and will be sharing new things I've learnt since I gave this talk at the State of the Browser and FFConf.

Tickets are still available but I bet not for long!

See you there?

I am excited to attend IndieWebCamp Brighton in less than a month! I already booked my non-refundable hotel, which felt very nerve-wracking!

The last time I tried to attend an IndieWebCamp, I ended up cancelling my trip last minute because childcare plans fell through.

But Brighton is near where I live, so hopefully, all will go well this time. I'm super looking forward to meeting people from the community and having some dedicated time to work on my little blog! I know that technically, this could have been an RSVP type of post, so it's one more thing for my backlog of things to improve around here.

I'm really thankful to Paul Robert Lloyd for taking the initiative to organise this. If you need any more convincing, Paul has written a more compelling introduction to the event on his blog.

Learn more about the event and RSVP on the event page.

See you there?

Let's get these out of the way!

Bookmarks related to tech and web development

• Shawna, a Set Maker by olia.
• Letting Eleventy Schedule Its Own Builds by Luke Morrigan.
• Using Trello as a Super Simple CMS by Phil Hawksworth.
• Sometimes the job is an assembly line by Dave Rupert.
• Hands‐on guides to assitive technology and accessibility testing by Adam Liptrot.
• Style your RSS feed by Darek Kay.
• WIP: Block links / Cards by Manuel Matuzović.
• Hacker News Blogroll.
• Re-creating a Japanese Fireworks Catalog from 1883 in CSS by Mads Stoumann.
• So, you don't like a web platform proposal by Yoav Weiss.
• Tucked corners by Ana Tudor.
• Take this aria-label quiz by A11y is Everything.
• The ideal viewport doesn’t exist by Andy Bell.
• Scrolljacking 101 by Sara Ramaswamy.
• Sunday Sites.
• Creating custom easing effects in CSS animations using the linear() function by Michelle Barker.
• I Used a Game Boy Camera for FaceTime Video Calls in iPadOS 17 and It Was Glorious By Federico Viticci.
• Fixing Search by Robin Berjon.
• Windows 95 by Gabrielle Wee.
• AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born by James Vincent.
• Why thousands of young Chinese people use a pink dinosaur as their alias by Caiwei Chen.
• Being an imperfect gardener of my digital garden by Elizabeth Tai.
• LearnWithJason: CSS-Only Scroll-Driven Animations by Bramus Van Damme.
• Eleventy Notes by Sandro Roth.
• Design Ethically by Katherine M. Zhou.
• Coworking With a Friend to Write More by Jacob Kaplan-Moss.
• Scribe.
• Scroll-Driven State Transfer by Roman Komarov.
• On Social Media, Lurkers, Introverts, and Blogging by Roy Tang.
• Blinded By the Light DOM by Eric A. Meyer.
• Plucky: a standing wave underline by Noah Liebman.
• Why side projects are essential for creatives—and employers should embrace them by Jonas Downey.
• First-Gen Social Media Users Have Nowhere to Go by Jason Parham.
• What happened to blogging for the hell of it? by Whiona.
• Never Use “Scroll” Value for Overflow by Roma Komarov.
• Lost in Translation: Tips for Multilingual Web Accessibility by Ben Myers.
• Don't Use Fixed CSS height or width on Buttons, Links, or Any Other Text Containers by Ashlee M Boyer.
• Pixel Art Studio by Michelle Barker.
• Using 11ty to bring back tag clouds by Ginger.
• Weekly Bookmarks 5: CSS and Web Components by Roma Komarov.
• share-button Web Component by David Darnes.
• Of Time And The Web by Jeremy Keith.
• DIMPACT – measuring emissions from media and digital entertainment by Ellen Davies.
• Engineering progression for humans by Sophie Koonin.
• Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It by Tim Neusesser.
• HTML with Superpowers by Dave Rupert.
• Adding a git based changelog in 11ty by James Doc.
• Tales from a solo dev by Tommy Palmer.
• Highlight Text When a User Scrolls Down to That Piece of Text by Chris Coyier.
• by .

Other bookmarks

• We are COVID’s collateral damage. And we are legion. by Amy Bailey, PhD.
• Energy makes time by Mandy Brown.
• Some tactics for writing in public by Julia Evans.
• The Nine Men Of Madeley.
• Humpty Dumpty Print.
• Purrli.
• British police testing women for abortion drugs by Phoebe Davis.
• I Bet I Can Speak Spanish

I had not realised it had been 805 days since my last bookmarks roundup. 805 days. This section is still one of the most visited parts of my little web corner.

It's been so long that I have accumulated an intimidating number of bookmarks. On the other hand, I did go on maternity leave and stayed away from the tech world for a while. I started the draft for this post in May 2023, and here I am, on January 2024, finally sharing it. It's a good thing that for the past few weeks, people have been talking a bit more about their bookmarks, and because I want to move to a system of individual link sharing rather than bulk, I needed to get this batch out of the way.

This post will mostly include links from 2022 - things I bookmarked while on maternity leave. It's great to revisit these because I have no memories of that time.

I hope to get another batch of bookmarks from May 2023 out soon, and then I will move on to add them individually. I mentioned before somewhere in these posts, but adding them as a batch isn't working for me right now. I used to do it monthly, but if it is a month that I bookmark a lot, it will be a long post to curate. Right now, this format takes me at least one hour to create. I could switch to a weekly post but must integrate it into my routine. Maybe forcing a time slot every Friday morning or something. I also like the idea of individual link posts so that I can add tags and get back to them quickly.

Bookmarks related to tech and web development

• Using Position Sticky With CSS Grid by Ahmad Shadeed.
• Doing the work by Monica Dinculescu.
• Stream on by Simon Collison.
• a11y.css by Gaël Poupard.
• 12 Days of Web by Stephanie Eckles.
• Pixel patterns by Chuan.
• Subterranean Blogging by Tom Critchlow.
• Fix Contrast.
• Esoteric.Codes by Daniel Temkin.
• Generate a Pull Request of Static Content With a Simple HTML Form by Hilman Ramadhan.
• How To Use Contentful With Eleventy by Henry Desroches.
• WHCM and System Colors by Adrian Roselli.
• Getting Started With Accessibility: Dynamic Type by Bas Thomas Broek.
• SVG Generators by Iris Lješnjanin.
• All the Eleventy things by David Darnes.
• Web accessibility simplified.
• How I Make CSS Art by Yosra Emad.
• How to keep up with web development without falling into despair by Baldur Bjarnason.
• “Evergreen” Does Not Mean Immediately Available by Eric Bailey.
• Reducing The Web’s Carbon Footprint: Optimizing Social Media Embeds by Michelle Barker.
• Aspect Ratio is Great by Michelle Barker.
• Websites as an Act of Creativity by Yesterweb Zine.
• Digital Cleanup Day.
• Estimate how many people using your website might be disabled.
• From Tumblr girl to engineer: How the platform inspired a generation of women to code by Elizabeth de Luna.
• Using the language attribute to make your website accessible by Craig Abbott.
• Don’t Alienate Your User: A Primer for Internationalisation & Localisation by Sophie Clifton-Tucker.
• What is the Web? by Jim Nielsen.
• Understanding Layout Algorithms by Josh W Comeau.
• Privacy and the :visited selector.
• Notes on a Blogging Accelerator by Tom Critchlow.
• Home Sweet Homepage by Amy Wibowo.
• Mourning loss as a remote team.

Other bookmarks

• 11 years, 10 arrests, at least 62 women: how did Britain’s worst cyberstalker evade justice for so long? by Sirin Kale.

For my daughter, I've been buying second-hand as much as possible. If it can be washed and disinfected, it will be second-hand. She loves noisy books right now, so I've been getting some cheap books from Vinted and charity shops. The other day I found a noisy book in a charity shop for £1, but I couldn't test it. I assumed the batteries had died, so I still bought it. I was right regarding the batteries - they were dead - but after replacing them, I still couldn't get the book to work. I've wanted to learn how to fix small home appliances, so I thought this would be an excellent first project.

I've made quite some mistakes along the way, so I will share them here, hoping that someone does not make them! The book is now fixed and working, but I did waste some time fixing the wrong things. The first thing I did was search YouTube for videos showing how to fix noisy books. I found two of them, and they were interesting but threw me in the wrong direction. The first video showed how to replace the speaker in a noisy book. Like me, they replaced the batteries, but pressing the buttons still didn't produce any sound, so they showed how to solder a new mini speaker into the book.

So, of course, that's what I did! I got an intro kit into soldering, bought a mini speaker and began the task of soldering this new speaker. I spent time learning how to do it on YouTube and then tried it. It was not easy, but fascinating. Once that was done, I tested it out, and it was still not working. Bummer.

The second YouTube video showed me someone testing things out and replacing the chip that holds the sounds because the chip was dead. In my head, this made sense. There are only three items here: batteries, chip and speaker. If a new speaker and batteries are in, the problem must be the chip.

Things would get more complicated if it were the chip, but I was keen to learn! But it was time to ask for help. I tooted on Mastodon asking for help and was reminded that FFConf's discord server has a hardware help channel.

Remy asked if I had a multimeter. (which I didn't). He followed:

"You should have continuity through the speaker if it's working - also useful to test if the voltage is coming in. Since the chip is under a resin blob, it's hard to think the chip is gone/bad, but if that's the case, I'm sure I've seen boards like this on Alix (and I'll take a look for you)."

I bought a multimeter. A tip shared by Sarah was to get one that makes beep-beep sounds so that you don't have to look at the screen. At this point, I had exceeded the cost of buying this type of book brand new, but the thought of saving this one from landfill was very exciting.

It was tough to find a YouTube video that showed how to use a multimeter in this scenario, and of course, I wasn't using it right. Remy very kindly annotated the photo I provided, which helped me understand how to use the multimeter to check for continuity. All the beep-beep was there, so continuity wasn't an issue. It was time to test the voltage.

There are three batteries, but I was only getting a little over 2V. Remy said that it was too low and should be around 4.5v. Okay, we're getting somewhere. Using the multimeter, I checked if the batteries were full (they were), and I also took a close-up photo of the battery holder just in case. Remy spotted the culprit quickly. There was some corrosion in the metal. He then dropped pieces of wisdom:

"This would add resistance and reduce the voltage being delivered. (...) put a very small amount of white vinegar in a pot/glass pot and put in the microwave for about 15 seconds - doesn't need much more. then drop those two metal tabs in there. it should fizz for a bit, it'll remove the corrosion - then dry them off (really well), replace and test. (battery corrosion is alkaline, and vinegar is acid, so mix the two => water)."

So I did that. Then, the voltage was over 4v. Then I assembled it all, and it worked!! It worked!! I was over the moon! I was disappointed that I misidentified the cause of the issues but glad I learned something. But most importantly, it is saved from landfill!

After assembled, I fixed the paper with green self adhesive paper I had left over from other crafts.

Thanks Remy and everyone who replied to my toot! I'm super happy I was able to fix this. Also, I was wondering if I could make a custom noisy panel for my girl. Something like a family member's face, and if she presses, something we say plays. That would be cool!

Lessons learned:

• You can do this!
• Don't be afraid to ask for help!
• Don't assume the first solution YouTube tells you is the right one if you don't know the basics.
• Basics matter!