BlogDB

App Defaults - 2024

It’s that time of the year again: here’s my extended “frozen /uses page” for late 2024. Whenever multiple applications are listed, p marks private use, w marks software that I (have to) use at work...

Data Loading - Daft

I know I’ve been praising polars a lot lately, and I’m still in love. polars will be my continued go-to library for Data Analysis of Tabular data, and when building ETL (data pipelines) in 99% of t...

Handling tarballs in Python

Need to work with tar files in Python? Here's how to create and extract compressed tarballs effortlessly.

Importing a frontend Javascript library without a build system

I like writing Javascript without a build system and for the millionth time yesterday I ran into a problem where I needed to figure out how to import a Javascript library in my code without using a...

Native dual-range input

I just released @stanko/dual-range-input - a native dual-range input. Here is how it looks with the default styles: The "native" part is somewhat open for discussion. I call it native because the l...

A reading list for Japan

I visited Japan in Autumn 2024. As is tradition, I enriched my visit with as much reading about Japan as I could get my eyes on. Below is a list of the more interesting things I have read. Japanese...

Open Graph images: Format compatibility across platforms

A comparison of image format support for Open Graph preview cards across different social media and messaging platforms.

Announcing Labrync

Announcing Labrync (like labrynth + ncurses)

Chatbots Decoded: Exploring AI (Review)

Chatbots Decoded: Exploring AI is a new exhibit from the Computer History Museum (CHM) opening November 20th, 2024. In development for more than a year, the exhibit covers both the history of chatb...

Starting afresh

It’s nice to set up your digital workspace again sometimes, from scratch. One that isn’t your main computer so as to not interfere with ongoing work. You are freed from the shackles of backward com...

Lessons from my First Exit

In April of this year, I sold TinyPilot, the bootstrapped hardware company I founded and ran for four years. I wrote a post in May that told the story of the sale, but I’d like to share more about ...

FauxRPC and Protovalidate

CSS fix to prevent orphan icons dropping to a new line

When an HTML element becomes too narrow, its content starts to wrap into multiple lines. This is intended behavior and works well in many cases. However, for short text, it doesn't look great when ...

Perfect Image Processing with Hugo

With the correct image processing you can still get a 100 score from PageSpeed Insights despite an image heavy article. This is an evaluation of my Speedgoat race report in July. I use Hugo to buil...

A new webring for the weird and wonderful personal web

Following up on my recent post about colophons (“meta” pages), I’ve decided to create a webring to gather more personal websites through opt-ins. I chewed over the initial idea for the former blog ...

Leveraging logprobs to build better generative AI systems

Autofilling form fields has become an increasingly common and practical application of generative AI. With just a bit of context and a well-crafted prompt, AI can produce reliable results for vario...

Writing Fonts

In search of the perfect font for drafting and digital journalling. # Inter The story began when I was looking for Logseq themes. I chose miA, a theme inspired by iA Writer and MacOS UI. It recomme...

New microblog with TILs

I added a new section to this site a couple weeks ago called TIL (“today I learned”). the goal: save interesting tools & facts I posted on social media One kind of thing I like to post on Mastodon/...

Open source mac apps I love

I want to share some really nice open-source applications I use on a daily basis. I did a similar post about six years ago, so I felt there is a need for an updated one. I focused on the apps that ...

Custom syntax highlighting with Hugo and Tree-sitter

I recently helped migrate the homepage of Cognate, a stack-based, lisp- and ML-inspired programming language, to Hugo. Here’s how I added Cognate language syntax highlighting for our Hugo site. # O...