Taco Steemers

A personal blog.

Other Pages

My professional work is proprietary, but occasionally I make something I can share here.

USBUD, the USB Storage Back Up Daemon

The goal of this project is to make sure your portable files are automatically backed up when you attach your USB device to your computer. It runs on Linux. As it is written in C, it does not require any runtime or application virtual machine. While I do provide the source, I don't provide binaries.

C, Linux, source on GitHub.

Explanatory videos

A few explanatory videos. Most are about Java, so far. Some of the videos have code sample links and further explanatory links in the video description.

The videos are on YouTube. Some videos have example code on GitLab.

An online tool to display the color output of web color text notations

Any text or (partial) code listing can be used as input, the output will be labeled colored rectangles. The tool supports the web color names, rgb(a), hsl(a), (ok)lab, (ok)lch, hwb and color notations. It can also show if the current browser supports the notation.

The tool can be found here.

Turn an image into a line drawing

This is a work in progress. Online tool to create a line drawing suitable for printing. Can be useful when making a painting, for example.

Markdown ToC generator

Bash script to generate the table of contents for a markdown file. Supports sub-headings.

The script can be found here. .

Timers

Simply a page with timers and stopwatches . A larger countdown time on a timer will produce more beeps.

This does not work on mobile because websites "sleep" when they are not being shown on the screen.

Vertical Board

Similar to a kanban board. The vertical board can be used to organise our thoughts or manage our tasks. You can download the files from the repository on Gitlab and use it from your own computer.

This does not work on mobile devices. It needs a mouse.

Here is a demo.

HTML, CSS, JS, offline, source on GitLab.

CSS generation for hybrid CSS and JS theme support

By using a hybrid CSS and JS approach to web dark/light mode theme support we automatically provide the user their preferred theme but still allow them to change the theme. It is good to give the user a choice, because although they may prefer to see their regular applications in a light theme, they may prefer to use our websites in a dark theme or a custom theme.

It consists of short scripts using bash and GNU tools.

The article is on this website, source on GitLab.

CSS tutorials / examples

Here are some CSS explanations or CSS / SVG effects that I like. Maybe these examples can be helpful to someone.

Fields of changing colors

I find them nice to look at from time to time. The changes are not fast or flashing. They are made with HTML and CSS, making use of CSS animations to change the colors.

The first

The second

Doodles that do not stay

Draw by triggering color changes. It works by tapping on touchscreens or moving the mouse around.

We don't need to control the outcome, and the outcome is not saved.

Breathing

Box breathing is a calming breathing technique. It is also known as 4-4-4-4 breathing. The idea is to breathe in a pattern. We breathe in for four seconds, hold for four, exhale for four, and hold for four. Then we breathe in again for four seconds, and continue the pattern.

I have made a visual aid to help keeping to the pattern. It works with CSS only. A counter will be shown after hovering or tapping in the bottom half of the screen.