TWIL vol.2 (MV3 delayed, HTTP Codes resource, Mars Insight EOL)

For all the stuff I stumbled on this week that won't fill a post...

Google puts the brakes on MV3... again

I've written about MV3 (manifest version 3) a couple times, seeing as I have a couple small addons that needed to be updated and I was annoyed with the extra work. In case the title of the second post doesn't make that obvious, lol.

What is Manifest V3 and why is Google pestering me about it?

If you’ve ever dug into the underpinnings of a browser extension, or maybe even created one yourself, you’ve seen the manifest.json file that acts as a sort of usage guide for an extension. Not the kind of usage guide most people would want to read, but it’s vital for

G.Winney 🖱Grant Winney

Migrating to MV3 and what I didn’t learn from it

I migrated my addons to MV3, and learned that version numbers increase, DRY is overrated, and 3 and 15 are probably important but I have no idea why. What I didn’t learn is how MV3 made my addon better.

G.Winney 🖱Grant Winney

When I first wrote about it, the hard stop on all MV2 development was about 2 weeks from now, at the start of 2023. When I wrote about it again, and decided to upgrade my addons, I noticed the hard stop had been pushed out to mid 2023. Revisiting their mv2 support timeline, it seems that the dates have been pushed again, a little more vague this time.

There was an announcement from the Chrome Extensions team too. "Thank you for all the feedback and passionate discussion thus far..." Oh I bet it's been passionate. 😅

Finding the right HTTP response code

Someone at work was looking into the appropriate HTTP response status code that one of our API endpoints should return under a certain condition, and I stumbled on this helpful diagram.

GitHub - for-GET/http-decision-diagram: An activity diagram to describe the resolution of HTTP response status codes, given various headers.

An activity diagram to describe the resolution of HTTP response status codes, given various headers. - GitHub - for-GET/http-decision-diagram: An activity diagram to describe the resolution of HTTP...

GitHubfor-GET

It's interesting to trace the path (start in the lower-left corner), walking through each description to figure out the best response code for any given path. A green arrow means "yes", red means "no".

It's been around for years, but it was new to me.. late to the party as usual, lol.

RIP Insight

The Insight Mars Lander lost power this week after 4 years and was forced into retirement due to its solar panels being covered in dust. Despite the myriad backseat engineers on the web (especially Twitter) suggesting how NASA should better manage the dust, it turns out that space dust is an issue they've looked into. Shocker. It is interesting that Curiosity is still going after 10 years though.. maybe because of its location in a crater, or perhaps it needs less power for core functionality?

You can read more about what was discovered with Insight, view the photos it took, and check the weather it recorded (outdated and irregular and now ceased, but still interesting).

NASA has loads of APIs too, if you want to access anything programmatically. There's one that shows photos from the rovers, but oddly they didn't make the Insight's photos accessible through it. There's also one to access the weather data from Insight, but for obvious reasons that'll have limited use now.

I wrote about the NASA API before, along with several other space-related APIs, which you can check out in the post below.

6 space-related APIs to check out ahead of the Artemis I launch

The week of NASA launching Artemis I is a good time to check a few of the many APIs that make tons of raw space data accessible for anyone to use.

G.Winney 🖱Grant Winney

That's it for this week. Merry Christmas!