The Academic – Bear Claws (Live Looper Version)

Yesterday I’ve tweeted about this one, but it’s too great to not mention here too. It’s the video clip for “Bear Claws” by “The Academic”. For this video the band has used the lag of a Facebook Live video to their advantage. By doing so, they’ve created a loop sampler. Also note the clever use …

Show Facebook Computer Vision Tags Chrome Extension

Since April 2016, Facebook has been automatically adding alt tags to images you upload that are populated with keywords representing the content of your images. This Chrome Extension visualizes the tags (which can be found in the markup) <img src="https://facebook.com/some-url.jpg" alt="Image may contain: golf, grass, outdoor and nature" width="316" height="237"> Show Facebook Computer Vision Tags …

Facebook Live Reactions

Facebook Live Reactions is a Linux script for creating Facebook Live Streams that contains interactive reaction counts. It also includes an interactive shoutout feature that gives live shoutouts to users who typed “shared” into the comment box. The livestreaming itself is handled through ffmpeg; whilst PHP takes care of the counting of all reactions and …

Why I’m excited about Yarn

Today, Facebook – in collaboration with Google and others – released Yarn, a new package manager for JavaScript. Introducing Yarn: a new package manager for JavaScript from @fbOpenSource, @tildeio, @googledevs & @exponentjs. https://t.co/2LfN5OXjOv — Yarn (@yarnpkg) October 11, 2016 In comparison to npm, the Yarn website pushes these three main benefits forwards: Speed Reliability Security …

The mobile device lab at Facebook

Insightful post by the folks at Facebook on how they transitioned from testing their apps on a single device to a mobile device lab (holding 1000+ devices) at their Prineville data center. Having tried out several things, they eventually built their own custom racks which not only hold the devices, but also function as an …

Front-End Performance: The Dark Side @ Fronteers Spring Conference 2016

Video of the talk “Front-End Performance: The Dark Side” by Mathias Bynens which he gave at Fronteers Spring Conference 2016 which I attended: In security-sensitive situations, performance can actually be a bug rather than a feature. This presentation covers timing attacks on the web, and demonstrates how modern performance-related web APIs can sometimes have a …

How you can use Facebook to track your friends’ sleeping habits

“lastActiveTimes”: { “3443534”: 1456065265, “675631492”: 1456066386, “8657643”: 1456062331, “255277634”: 1456052450, “6423324”: 1456065173, “235323452”: 1456065096, “3265233223”: 1456066381, “2432885644”: 1456064016, “7464340313”: 1456062500 } In the HTML source code of Messenger.com you can find an object containing userids associated with timestamps of last activity – as shown above. Given this it’s really easy to scrape and combine this …

Facebook: Mobile @Scale London recap

Less than three years ago, engineers from Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Pinterest, and Facebook — including two from the then brand-new Facebook London office — met at Mobile @Scale in Menlo Park to talk about the challenges of building mobile software at large scale. Last Wednesday, the first Mobile @Scale London showed how far mobile development …

Getting the share count of a URL

At work I’m working on a project in which we need to track the share count of a URL. Below are my quick notes. In all examples I’m getting the share count of https://www.facebook.com/. Note that I’m using the jq notation to extract the actual result from the response. Just GET it Facebook Request: curl …