matteason

How much have you investigated the legality of this? In the EU biometric data is 'special category data' under the GDPR [0] and can only be processed in very limited circumstances unless you have the consent of the data subject [1]

[0] https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/organisations/know-your-obl...

[1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-9-gdpr/

I've used https://www.fully-kiosk.com/ on Android tablets before (as meeting room status screens) and that's worked really well

Assuming you've pressed the yellow Start button (on the TR-808; it looks different on other sequencers), check if you're on silent mode. Some web audio is muted in silent mode on iOS

This is really well done. I know from making https://ambiph.one that web audio can be really tricky. Lots of fiddly little inconsistencies and gotchas (mainly on iOS, in my experience). So building something that's this customisable, fun to use and runs solidly is a real achievement.

I've got vague plans to add generative music to Ambiphone and I've been using Ableton so far but I think this will be a really useful sketchpad for experimenting with sounds and patterns

You can disable it. Settings > When Notepad starts > Start new session and discard unsaved changes

Yes, this is Nintendo's official corporate account

The component has some JavaScript which blanks out the page immediately after the button being pressed, so if it takes a while for the browser to load the weather page it shouldn't matter as much

https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/exit-this-pa...

Oof, thanks, I'll bear that in mind! The docs page has been up for a year or so without any issues but if I put up a more fully-featured demo I'll be careful

Is this AI? It was submitted precisely two minutes (to the second) after the original submission and reads like something ChatGPT would write

Oh nice! Have you considered submitting it to https://design-system.service.gov.uk/community/resources-and... ? There's no Django solution there at the moment

Haha, hi AL!

Yeah the target for this definitely isn't the regular transactional GOV.UK services. I've added a note at the top of the installation guide:

> GOV.UK Vue (or any JavaScript library) might not be suitable for your project if it's a standard transactional government service. Make sure you read the guidance on progressive enhancement and building more complex services before starting. GOV.UK Vue is designed to be used in more complex services, like interactive mapping, or internal tools where you've determined that JavaScript is acceptable.

GDS are also currently doing exploratory work to investigate how Frontend can be more closely integrated with React/Vue/Svelte/Angular etc, so it's definitely not verboten: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-frontend/issues/5172

SSR/SSG is supported (the docs website is an SSG Nuxt app) but I need to do some work to improve how it works for certain components to ensure the state they're first rendered in is usable on its own (eg defaulting accordion components to open on the server-rendered version)

Exactly - services on GOV.UK are developed by teams across government (as well as agencies etc), and they're (mostly) free to use whatever tech makes sense for the team and the project.

GOV.UK Vue isn't intended for normal, bread-and-butter transactional services (usually a series of form pages) but for things like more complex internal tools, dashboards, mapping etc which would be using JS to provide interactivity

GOV.UK Vue doesn't provide any of the Frontend styling directly, it's up to the consuming project to include it. I've done that so that you can add Vue to server-rendered projects which already include Frontend.

Frontend updates are often CSS-only, so those will be taken care of by the consuming project updating it. For markup changes and new components, that's a manual process on my side. Markup changes are usually minor and new components are rare, so it's not too much effort to keep up. I work on GOV.UK services in my day job so I've always got an eye on what's coming up.

One example is the RNIB (Blindness and sight loss charity in the UK) - they use various bits of GOV.UK Frontend on their website, such as the breadcrumbs and accordion on [0]. Many local councils use it too (or a version of it).

Because it's so heavily tested for accessibility it makes sense to use in those kinds of contexts where accessibility is a very high priority.

GOV.UK Frontend can be heavily customised via Sass variables (eg the font stack in [1]) so the components don't have to look like GOV.UK if you don't want them to. GOV.UK Vue pulls all its styling from Frontend so it's as customisable as Frontend is.

[0] https://www.rnib.org.uk/living-with-sight-loss/assistive-aid...

[1] https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-frontend/blob/main/package...

Non-GOV.UK services are free to use everything except the branding, per [0]

Plenty of non-gov organisations use various bits of it, for example the breadcrumbs and accordion on [1]

[0] https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/design/making-your-service...

[1] https://www.rnib.org.uk/living-with-sight-loss/assistive-aid...

Edit: Re naming - GOV.UK [Thing] is an established convention for community tools, as shown on [3]. GDS are aware of the project.

[3] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/community/resources-and...

GOV.UK Frontend is already fully open source [0] with comprehensive documentation [1] and GDS encourage community contributions, libraries and resources [2]. If there was any worry about phishing that would be a question for GDS

[0] https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-frontend

[1] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

[2] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/community/resources-and...

Your og:image meta tag is pointing to a .webp image, which I expect many services don't support as the OpenGraph image. It's probably falling back to the author photo because that's the first PNG or JPEG image on the page.

Neat tool. A couple of suggestions:

I'd make it fetch the meta tags and image using the user agent string of the services you're showing previews for. For example, Twitter/X fetches meta tags with a user agent string of Twitterbot/1.0. Some sites may serve different content to different services in order to optimise the image for display on that service.

It also looks like your API may not be looking at Twitter-specific meta tags [0], as it just returns one set of metadata that's used by every preview. For example on https://govukvue.org I use the 'summary' card format, which shows a small image with the name and description beside it. But your tool renders it as if it's a 'summary_large_image'.

[0] https://developer.x.com/en/docs/x-for-websites/cards/overvie...

Is the font rendering any better on other platforms? On Windows it's so poorly hinted that the top and bottom of the lowercase 's' are disconnected

Ah I wondered where the HN traffic was coming from! Thanks for reposting!

> I'm in the process of applying for the Broadcastify Calls API which should give me access to real time feeds

I'd be really interested to hear how you get on with this - I've been wanting to add these kinds of feeds to https://ambiph.one but it looks like they're not issuing new licenses for the feeds and the Calls API looks like it's write-only from the docs?

Looks really interesting! Video wallpapers were actually a feature in Windows past [0]. I remember some feature in XP which let you show an HTML page as a wallpaper too which I enjoyed playing with, so I'll definitely give this a go

Just a heads up, a handful of your Read More links on the homepage are broken

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_DreamScene?useskin=vec...

This is only tangentially related but it always blows my mind how insecure airline booking portals are. For many (most?) airlines all you need is the booking reference (PNR number) and surname to log in and see flight itinerary, contact details and, in some cases, change or cancel the booking. No password or MFA needed.

The kicker is that your PNR number and surname are encoded in the barcode on your boarding pass, easily scannable with a phone app. If you ever post a boarding pass online you're unintentionally doxxing yourself and potentially letting people screw with your flights.

I've seen celebrities do this, and during the Cloudstrike outage one tech CEO posted his handwritten boarding pass on Twitter with the PNR in full view.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/08/why-its-still-a-bad-idea...

There are two previous discussions on WebKit's Quirks.cpp [0] here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33207685

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26165357

I wonder how big your site has to be to earn a spot in that file when you hit a Safari bug. Don't suppose Apple publish the criteria anywhere?

[0] https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/84ae355619354ee1bfa7da...

Wikipedia says both ultrasonic and electromagnetic are used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parking_sensor

One of the references is for a Mercedes system that uses ultrasound

This happened recently on Taylor Swift's rerecording of 1989 - a persistent tone at 15KHz on multiple tracks [0]. The Taylor's Version records have to be some of the most carefully-produced albums around, given that the goal is to accurately reproduce existing recordings, so it's amazing that it made the final release.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/TaylorSwift/comments/17iv3r2/for_pe...

Asking for my email address before I can do anything means I just won't use it, sorry. It's a shame because it looks like a neat idea

The usual flow for sites where you can create custom products is that you can get into the designer with no login and you only need to enter your details at checkout.

There's nothing useful on the landing page that would convince me to sign up - what kind of cakes can I order? What locations do you cover? What kind of designs? Can I add my own images or pick from a library or both? Do you do allergy-friendly cakes? What are your lead times? Pricing? That's all the kind of stuff I'd need to know before worrying about the design

I'd be a little bit careful with the name because 'Bionic Reading' have a big fat Patent & Trademark page, which does give the impression that they may well come after you for the name: https://bionic-reading.com/patent-trademark/

It's an interesting technique though. I'm building a notes app at the moment and someone's requested it as an accessibility feature. Do you use the extension day-to-day? Do you find it makes a difference?

Small nitpick, the download button takes you to a Chrome webstore page with the parameter 'hl=pt-BR' in the URL, which forces the page to show in Brazilian Portugese rather than the user's language

They're having another crack at it with GOV.UK One Login: https://www.sign-in.service.gov.uk/

I've participated in some user research with the team building it and I've also designed GOV.UK services pre-One Login that needed to verify people's identity. It's obviously a very difficult problem to solve when there's no universal central ID database. The people working on it are definitely cognizant of the failure of Verify and they're keen not to repeat it.

I do hate the 'GOV.UK One Login' name though. It's previously been called 'GOV.UK Account' and 'GOV.UK Sign In', I'm not sure what was wrong with either of those.

The same artists created a similar piece called Listening Post, which I love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzfnndd9fCk

I built a much more basic web-based version of it, using Twitter posts, a few years ago. It stopped working when the Twitter API became paid-for, but I screen-recorded a demo of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaRenG89G9g