NUGGETS

"it's me and my stuff" - victor

"searching for simplicity in computing" - rui

"perennially under construction" - roel

#396

"open new tabs with me" - brin

"may i interest you in some LINKS?" - daniel (archived)

"i make the bleep bloop music on my computer" - kyrla

#395

if, like me, you find the message box too intimidating — "this will be just as cringy and permanent as the notes in my high school yearbook" — consider some inspiring one-liners from v1 of the internet phone book:

#394

you can join v2 of the internet phone book. v1 did not have enough sites to feel like a thick phone book, so please join and make v2 bigger. feel free to ask me for help if you want to make a personal website but aren't sure where to start.

#393

the layout and card previews will be similar to simplenote.png. it is a fast, information-dense, text-oriented, visually pleasant, and unsurprising UI, which is the highest praise i can give an interface.

#392

and we can do this without figma! plain webpages are great for prototyping. javascript can query content collections, measure text widths, and generate component variants. (i'm desparately trying to fill the figma-shaped hole in my design engineer persona)

#391

for example: a really short or empty name may be jarring, and a really long name may be missing text-overflow ellipsis. we can preempt these visual bugs by populating components with shortest, longest, and median text early in the design phase.

#390

i was inspired by piccalilli's design process (see the 2nd video). i like the contrast grid, and the broader idea of having a pattern library and component playground (#162) that shows all UI permutations.

#389

i started making a struggle meals recipe website (screenshot.png). the plot barf was my attempt to make recipe attributes (price, effort, portions) perceivable at a glance, but then i realized that spider plots are poor information design.

#388

on repeat: magdalena bay's cover of ashes to ashes

♫ we know major tom's a junkie
strung out in heaven's high hitting an all-
  time
    low

#387

FYI, you can still get a triptik.jpg from AAA.

i like having written directions for long trips. it's also good for people who are trying to degoogle or use dumbphones (#129)

#386

been listening to techno music:

#385

... while listening to hvac experts who explain all the nuances to air quality — nuances regarding testing methods, confounding pollutants, chemical processes, and ventilation tradeoffs.

#384

... and how indoor CO2 levels can easily reach 1000+ ppm. i would love to buy a CO2 monitor and test my home, office, car, and city. in the meantime, i will follow the duetschen and keep lüftening and touching grass

#383

... and how atmospheric CO2 levels have increased from 280 ppm before the industrial revolution, to 400+ ppm these days, so we are all probably a tad icker and dumber because something is in the air

#382

(continuing #196) i often think about CO2 levels and their effect on cognition, like how woozy kurt seemed in his experiment

#381

shorter names are symlinks. for example, libcap.so points to libcap.so.2, and libcap.so.2 points to libcap.so.2.77. this lets applications link against a stable major ABI while being agnostic to minor library updates.

#380

TIL about the naming convention of shared C libraries like libcap.so.2.77. the long name is versioned with format:

lib<name>.so.<major>.<minor>.<patch>

#379

i've planned a gentle path to VPS proficiency: first, just log in and vim; then self-host small stateless apps for myself; then stateful apps for myself, then for the public; and then, maybe one day, hosting apps for paid customers.

#378

but just like renting a domain name opened a lot of doors — custom email, #253-254, indie web homesteading — i think renting a VPS will similarly open lots of opportunities.

#377

- there's a lifetime of interesting projects sans server management. you can write native apps and devtools. you can do so much on the frontend with javascript + fetch + wasm + other web apis + free static site hosting. all gratis and libre.

#376

- there's momentum from teen coding days, avoiding projects that require a credit card. i'm still frugal poor today (#367) and leery of subscription payments, preferring to work with free tools.

#375

- there's fear of the unknown, driven by inexperience facing the adversarial internet: fear of misconfiguring something, of getting hacked, of cloud fees and surprise bills, of wasting resources, of scrapers and miscreants dogpiling my system.

#374

this is my first time renting a VPS. it's a big deal for me. i usually avoid cloud/backend projects for a few reasons:

#373

so now i'm running vim in a VPS. i got the cheapest digital ocean droplet ($4/mo, 512M ram, 10G ssd, 500G/mo egress). i log in thru termius, a terminal emulator that organizes my ssh keys and ip addresses.

#372

i've been searching for a good vim notetaking setup on my ipad. i used vscode.dev for a while, but it was fiddly and slow, and my files disappeared whenever the ipad collected tab memory. i tried vim.wasm, but it didn't work on safari.

#371

- i'm more aware of the dopamine drop after finishing stimulating activities, and regulating myself accordingly, instead of tweaking out with nervous energy and looking for my next dopamine fix e.g. reflexively opening my phone.

#370

- i got hooked on mobile mobas and autochesses for a couple evenings. i play obsessively until i hit a wall where progress requires money, or inordinate amounts of time and commitment, or cooperation between random gamers, and then i uninstall.

#369

- i kept my depression mustache for a few months in an effort to grow a fu manchu (like master shifu or the bad guy from mulan), but this week i shaved it. i catch myself stroking mustache tips that are no longer there.

#368

- trying to budget my food spending stricter than ever. no restaurants. shopping only at aldi. thinking about sustenance per dollar. lots of rice and beans. i got 10 lbs of russets for $4 with the goal of making gnocchi and baked potatoes.

#367

some monthnotes:

- had an active week of jogging + basketball + soccer + pickleball, which feels especially nice after weeks of couch potatoing, and also after letting my gym membership expire (#7)

#366

"may all your pointers always point to the right place"

— b. kernighan, in a book signing

#365

it's cool to see what other people do on their adventures. i liked eli's picross rpg, wraith's drip-fed novels via mastobot, eugene's learn-along techno music case studies, and sophia's generative art.

#364

i've long underrated these contrived community challenges like parkruns or blaugust or occ (i could do these anytime on my own, right?) now i see that goal-oriented semisocial streak-keeping is powerful because of the accountability and momentum.

#363

seeing a written record of my little accomplishments feels nice. it's like a tada list, a counter to my forgetful and self-critical tendencies.

#362

i explored several funplanned projects and finished some longstanding todos. i rebalanced my creation-to-consumption ratio (#103), which is i think is the most important part.

#361

december adventure review: kinda like my normal tinkering, except with more fun and momentum and energy, especially because of the time off work-work. one could even call it a micro-sabbatical if one wants to sound micro-boring.

#360

tldr for rust developers: 

# your-package-manager install chafa or chafa-dev, and ffmpeg
# then in Cargo.toml:
[dependencies]
chafa = { git = "https://github.com/wong-justin/chafa-rust.git", tag = "0.4.0", features = ["link-dynamic"] }
#359

tldr: x86-64 linux users (including windows wsl users) can download the latest vic release and use it right away, as long as ffmpeg is on $PATH.

#358

(day 29) i tidied yesterday's changes — lots of refactoring and double checking and fiddling with gh actions. i will tentatively say that the chafa rust bindings are usable enough to share. hopefully the installation instructions are clear.

#357

(day 28) i built vic with static linking! still need to make git commits, write docs, test on other machines, and make github releases.

#356

(day 27) i worked on static builds for vic, thanks to michael's unblocker. i've learned a lot about building C projects this year: static vs dynamic linking, licenses, rust bindings, compiler flags, unix conventions, package management, containers

#355

(day 26) i thought of another approach: writing the FNV hash function in GPU shader code. that would shave off several orders of magnitude of execution time.

#354

optimistically, i could make it a million times faster and brute force all 11-byte inputs in a few days. but realistically, i don't think i'm clever enough to reach that optimization, and the smallest zero-hash input may be several bytes longer anyways

#353

(day 24) i did some napkin math. there are nearly one sextillion 11-byte alphanumeric inputs, which is the best case scenario for the 69th FNV challenge (#348). my naive rust code would take 45000 years to generate and hash those inputs :(

#352

i will also start reading the "assembly for dummies" genre, starting with nicebyte's series and manuel's series and nayuki's page and ffmpeg's lessons.

this is so exciting.

#351

i thought FNV, being so tiny, would be a good opportunity to learn assembly. but my 8 lines of rust compiled to 70-some instructions. so instead, i will study handwritten implementations that only use 10-20 instructions.

#350

now i will approach the unsolved 128-bit challenges. implementing big ints could be fun. i'll need to optimize it since there are so many inputs to check. i could even try looking at the assembly code...

#349

so the maintainers made a fun challenge to find inputs that hash to zero. i have been nerd-sniped into this game. i started by implementing the trivial 32- and 64-bit hashes and confirming a few test cases.

#348

FNV is not ideal for cryptography, because 1) the function is so fast that adversaries could reverse hashes with brute force, and 2) the accumulator could get stuck at zero, meaning adversaries could induce hash collisions

#347

the algorithm even includes ascii art lore. the hash is seeded with a number based on someone's email signature that has an ascii bat:

/\oo/\

#346

for each byte of input, an accumulator is xor'ed with that byte and multiplied by a special number.

the special number is carefully selected to be mathematically chaotic so output varies wildly.

#345

(day 23) TIL about a neat lil hashing function called FNV, via matteo. the algorithm is simple:

#344

(day 22) i made a sticker-collage.jpg

every year or so, i sit down with my sticker collection and the back of an old deskpad calendar. it's very meditative and scrapbooky and fun

#343

with four keybinds:

alt + left = snap to left 2/5
alt + right = snap to right 3/5
alt + up = maximize
alt + down = minimize

#342

(day 21) is the shortest day of the year. sunlovers find comfort knowing it can't get any worse than this.

i uploaded my old fork of the rectanglewin window manager for windows

#341

i liked niki's birds-eye diagram.png of the unicode codepoint space. most codepoints are unallocated, and of the allocated, most of them are CJK (chinese, japanese, korean)

#340


notice how "character" is nebulous enough to fit any definition, and therefore usually worth avoiding. in its place: glyph, codepoint(s), or byte?

#339
#338

some definitions:

#337

curious vim users may enjoy this command, mentioned in the monospace dump: hover a glyph and ga to get the hexcode(s).

pairs well with fontdrop.info, my favorite font inspector

#336

other fun codepoints i found along the way: 7-segment digits 🯰🯱🯲🯳🯴🯵🯶🯷🯸🯹, quadruple prime ⁗, stacked asterisks ⁑, dominoes 🁬🀵, and dancing stick figures:

🯈 🯇 🯅 🯆

#335

the candidates, mostly arrows:

➚ ◹ ◥ ⧉ ⬈ ⇗ ⤤ ☛ ⎘ ↗︎ ↪ ↬ ↝ ↣ ❯ ➳ ➦ ➥ ➣ ⌝ ≻ ↱ » ⟿ ⮺ ⭧ 🡕 🡭 🡽 ❏ 𝀑

#334

(day 20) beautiful weather, 75F and sunny. i took a hammock nap.

in the evening, i went on a unicode adventure. i wanted to find a glyph that looks like wikipedia's external link indicator.

#333

"the trend is often to run blindly towards new technology. you have to be aware of what you're giving up in the process."

#332

"with every new feature, it seems a desirable old feature goes away, or gets left by the wayside. there's room for both to co-exist. people have to realize that they still need to take the time to produce good art, good films, good music."

#331

""don't forget that the five minutes of rewind time is never dead time... with your machine, you have lost that thinking time." you've gained something else, but you've lost something."

#330

that comes from michael hawley, working at lucasfilm in the 1980s. he brings up word processors as a comparison to their new film editing computer. it's a hundred times faster than their old machine, but:

#329

"...they can distinguish whether a student did his work on a word-processor or on a typewriter, because word-processor prose looks like a collage. it's a valid point."

#328

"that makes it gratuitously easy to accidentally break little threads of thought that might otherwise have run through your writing. nowadays, english teachers are all complaining..."

#327

"you're constrained, because you don't want to retype the damn thing... with a word processor, it's so easy to make changes: you can bounce around, back and forth, cut and paste and copy and snip and grab from anywhere." (#139)

#326

"composing prose on a word processor is not like composing prose on a typewriter, because when you use a typewriter you have to get your ideas down coherently, produce a statement with direction, and see that the message gets across."

#325

here's a quote that i've been thinking about a lot, on typewriters versus word processors, and the effect of new tools on creative work:

#324

3) perhaps reading lots of novels and watching shows like word world (#200) cultivated a vivid imagination

and ofc 4) i probably have some genetic affinity for numbers and shapes

#323

i think some childhood activities developed that visual intuition:

1) playing with number blocks.jpg
2) doing origami. origami is really a math game: sliding quantities around, exploring numerical relationships

#322

it makes addition and subtraction really intuitive for me. one day i hope to make an animation of these number shapes, even tho they're a bit blurry and shifty. it's like trying to sketch a dream.

#321

like for 5+7, the dumpy butt of the 5 nestles into the cap of the 7, compressing into a stack of twelve. or for 6+4, the 6 stem slides up the 4, and the 4 stem slides down the 6, like a yin-yang, to form a complete stack of ten.

#320

unrelated: the same person has a post about visualizing numbers, and it's been on my mind for a few years, because it's similar to how i see numbers. digits have shapes when they combine. nobody else talks about this!

#319

i read about cameron's pen plotter project. he pre-darkened facial features to get better results. so i went back to #311 and added some pixels to highlight the eyes and mouth. i felt like i was profaning the mona lisa, but it helped.

#318

(day 18) i cleaned up vic: updating notes, removing a logging dependency, fixing a github action, and even using git tags for the first time. i feel much better about the codebase now.

#317

(day 17) i thought about string art more, and realized i can score each line based on the difference between whiteness and actual pixels. then i can draw the highest scoring lines and omit the low scoring lines.

#316

i tried to use euporie because python notebooks are nice for image processing. but i ran into hiccups with image display and package installs. i fell back to writing rust and livereloading the output in the terminal with chafa.

#315

(day 16) progress.png on string art mona lisa. i can draw lines through a circle. next is the algorithm to turn an image into lines. i want to try applying the fourier transform. if that doesn't work, i'll use a brute force search.

#314

"i spent an interesting evening recently with a grain of salt"

— mark v. shaney, markov chain usenet troll account, ca. 1984

#313

i'm pleased with the results so far. there's enough substance to turn this into a full blog post, especially if i can replicate string art with crab graphics.

#312

(day 15) crab mona lisa is finished! you can see the results on my desktop.png. it took 5+ hours to render the unoptimized script. the red version is a test build that shows out-of-bounds movement.

#311

(day 14) i like john's take on turtle graphics: a horseshoe crab that leaves a snail trail in its wake. i want to draw the mona lisa using that crab. the trick is to move really fast. here's today's progress.png.

#310

keypresses are scheduled with a timer and sent with nvim_input(). they're picked up by the event handler vim.on_key(callback), which manipulates some strings and displays them in a modal with vim.api.nvim_open_win()

#309

core ingredients: nvim -c lets you send keypresses at startup. i wrote about this before, and i still think it's a cool feature.

everything afterwards is just lua.

#308

why rewrite showkeys? i prefer shell snippets because they're tweakable and portable, especially compared to (n)vim plugins, which have extra boilerplate and a confusing ecosystem.

#307

(days 12-13) i finished flattening the 200 LOC plugin into a 60 LOC copy-paste snippet. here's the repo.

#306

(day 11) i just piddled with #297 in an attempt to remove the plugin dependency.

#305

it gave me a private IP address where i could install my app through a web dashboard. it also let me debug the app over telnet (!?)

tomorrow i dig deeper.

#304

i spent the next hour setting up my dev environment and running the sample app. it was surprisingly easy to get started. to enable dev mode on the device, i pressed home x3, up x2, right, left, right, left, right on the remote.

#303

that's probably a corporate safety measure, and probably not a big deal for an indie app, but in any case, hypothetically speaking, i may or may not be developing an app for a platform that rhymes with "tofu"...

#302

there's one interesting clause: "you will not issue a press release or public communication concerning the subject matter of this agreement, or publicly announce the development or availability of an application" without roku's approval. oops.

#301

i started by registering a dev account. i spent an hour reading the terms and conditions. there's the usual "anything can be suspended at any time, don't do anything annoying or illegal," yada yada.

#300

in the evening, i found another project. there's a roku screensaver with hot air balloons that mum really likes. i helped set it up again, but to my dismay, it had been infested with ai-generated images. gross! i resolved to make a replacement.

#299

(day 10) was a nap day. i put earbuds in and played my go-to sleep aid, 10hr white noise. it's one of those bilateral stimulations i find deeply relaxing.

#298

so today i made a vimscript that can automate inputs in a vim terminal session. combined with the showkeys plugin and obs, i should be ready to make nice reproducible TUI demos. here's a sample: vimscripted-tui.mp4 (482KB)

#297

there's asciinema, but 1) it records input with output, so i can't store the inputs alone. and 2) my particular TUI creates tons of ANSI output per second which bloats the filesize. and 3) neither ascciinema nor vhs support showing keypresses.

#296

(day 9) my old vic_demo.mp4 was made with vhs, but 1) it had unreliable speedups and slowdowns. i don't think vhs likes video player TUIs. and 2) vhs downloads a chromium dependency, which is a bit heavy. and 3) the feedback loop is slow

#295

(day 8) was a total nothingburger. i read a ted chiang short story that made me want to hug my mom.

#294

(day 7) merely added docs for the feature in #288. i should make a single source of truth for controls in the cli help text and the readme text. i also worked on my end-of-year post. it's a relief to write something that doesn't require research.

#293

for now, i use dprint (which uses markup_fmt) to format my webstuffs. i like how it can format html with inline script and style. it handles .astro files too. i like how it's faster than eslint and simpler to configure.

#292

my change was only three lines of code, but i'm proud of those three lines. i want to get better at reading code and jumping into new repos like mitchell. i also want to write an autoformatter of my own, so i'm happy to see how others do it.

#291

i kept a notes file to record my attempts and test hypotheses. "maybe x works? tried y but z happened." i found the main function to be pretty gnarly, so i ended up reading each line and writing myself a pseudocode summary.

#290

(day 6) i accomplished #287 after a few hours. my process: i made a new test and livereloaded it with entr. i glanced through some source files and read struct definitions. i wrote print statements to dump variables.

#289

also made small changes to vic: added a +/- 5 sec feature, and fixed the order of arguments in an ffmpeg command. i still need to add big features of threading and audio. but concurrency is tough, and i think i should refactor first.

#288

(day 5) the html formatter i use, markup_fmt, currently wraps prose sentences to 80ch. i want to disable that because i prefer one sentence per line. today i built the project locally and poked around. tomorrow i should figure out which code to change.

#287

spotify wrapped also happened today, so i spent the morning reminiscing. i gathered ~60 songs for my end-of-year post.

#286

(day 3) i worked on a visualization of my commit history, like the one on github profiles but using the cal command. i started with a shell script, then transitioned to perl for better string manipulation. here's a sneak peek

#285

TIL pacman -Rs removes a package with its would-be orphans. see also pacman -Qdt to list existing orphans. i used these to remove pandoc and vlc because they had too many dependencies slowing my arch updates. (i use pandoc-bin and mpv instead)

#284

ideally i would write an ffmpeg output device or an mpv output driver, but i'm not quite comfortable tinkering in C. for now, i experimented on a branch of vic and ended up with this result.png.

#283

(day 1) i want to make a chafa filter for realtime video. the closest thing is this mpv command that converts a webcam stream to unicode blocks:

mpv av://v4l2:/dev/video0 -vo=tct --profile=low-latency --untimed

#282

gonna try december adventure, the low-key alternative to advent of code. i like gentle nudges that help me work on fun projects (#155), and i like seeing what other people are tinkering with.

#281
#280
#279

...which reminds me of parker's writing ritual. it's one of many efforts to reclaim my attention. i find myself surprisingly focused when following his tips:

#278

i think of the paris review interviews where writers describe their their idiosyncratic routines. the only common thread seems to be lots of reading, writing, and deep focus...

#277

i must remind myself of the tool-agnostic camp, aka productive people. i think about this video of roald dahl sitting in his dingy writing hut with pencil and paper and a lapboard. he did not need storyboard software or a customized text editor.

#276

i like how easily i can collapse (zfat) and rearrange (dd, p) notes. i like how it complements my existing process. i am disappointed that <details> is a poor element for inline footnotes, and a deceptively poor element in general, but oh well.

#275

so i made a vim & html mechanism that handles both of the aforementioned writing workflows. it's like annotations or comments in wysiwyg document editors. i'm working on a style guide / colophon of sorts where you can see an example.

#274

malleability, after all, is where software shines. the more central a tool is, the more it ought to be comfy and fit your brain. mcphee depended on several highly customized scripts for his text editor (see end of #270)

#273

some people prefer scrivener or gingko writer or card buddy, which all seem great for refactoring prose ("see the forest or the trees"). but i prefer to mold vim to my tastes and avoid being locked into a closed-source editor.

#272

then there's the editing phase (draft no. 4), putting boxes around parts that need work. "you draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity."

#271

first is the fact-ordering phase, where mcphee describes laying thirty-some index cards on a large sheet of plywood, so that he could move parts of the story around until he found the right structure.

#270

i'm trying a new way to draft lengthy posts. it's inspired by nonfiction writer john mcphee, as introduced by james. i'm focused on two workflows:

#269

i've been thinking about gus' smallweb subway for a while. great idea, great name. maybe one day i'll fork it to crawl more webrings (perhaps using mike's list) and make a bigger map.

#268

continuing #122:

#267

it feels so natural and obvious compared to diataxis' forced abstractions, where i'm still left wondering "what's the difference between a tutorial and a how-to guide?"

#266

a sensible documentation model: fabrizio's seven actions. people read docs to appraise, understand, explore, practice, remember, develop, and troubleshoot, usually in that order.

#265

in my drafts:

#264

i learned sinusoidal movement can be approximated with cubic-bezier(0.364, 0, 0.636, 1)

i also learned that iframes cannot have a resizable drag handle. you gotta use a parent container instead

#263

you can record your own demo using this link on a big screen:
/unlisted/iframes
?tl=https://example.com
&tr=https://example.com
&bl=https://example.com
&br=https://example.com

#262

i screencasted some of my sites being fluidly resized: animated-iframes.mp4 (3.2MB). i like how it captures a lot of layout work in a matter of seconds.

#261

only disadvantages:

#260
#259
#258

so glad i got a 4k monitor a couple years ago. advantages:

#257

then TUI-specific programs on the right: gaze livereloading vic, bacon organizing rust compiler output, tail -f logs, and tig (partially offscreen) for git

#256

screenshot saturday: just my desktop.png. standard things on the left: documentation, notes, and code. firefox browser, neovim editor, ghostty terminal with nvim dark theme. all within niri, the scrolling desktop environment.

#255

the naive perspective is "why do i need to buy a domain to publish code", and the other perspective is "we need namespaces, and DNS already provides that along with decentralization and proof of ownership, so let's just use that"

#254

TIL reasons why java/android packages use reverse DNS names like com.google.android.apps

it's mostly about namespacing and preventing security issues in the supply chain

#253

beach boys' pet sounds reminds me of katamari's sunbaked savanna reminds me of bobbing's dog reminds me of graham kartna's gymnyc1999 tmp reminds me of animal collective's dragon slayer

#252

just set up void linux on an old 32-bit netbook (wonger@craptop). curious to see what i can do with 10GB of disk space and 2GB ram. also interested in comparing void with arch, esp re: package management and system init

#251

and that's it! fluid typography and spacing made easy. note that it all depends on clamp() which is baseline 2020.

#250

note this is not a fixed typographic scale (1em 2em 4em), but it grows with viewport size, so bigger screens can have bigger text and looser margins. no more breakpoints; only choose min and max supported viewports, and the rest is interpolated.

#249

use the vars like t-shirt sizes: 

margin: var(--space-s);
padding: var(--space-m);
font-size: var(--step-2);
#248

and for spacing: 

--space-s: clamp(1.125rem, 1.0739rem + 0.2273vw, 1.25rem);
--space-m: clamp(1.6875rem, 1.6108rem + 0.3409vw, 1.875rem);
--space-l: clamp(2.25rem, 2.1477rem + 0.4545vw, 2.5rem);
#247

it generates CSS variables for font sizes: 

--step-0: clamp(1.125rem, 1.0739rem + 0.2273vw, 1.25rem);
--step-1: clamp(1.35rem, 1.2631rem + 0.3864vw, 1.5625rem);
--step-2: clamp(1.62rem, 1.4837rem + 0.6057vw, 1.9531rem);
#246

i should probably explain the value of utopia.fyi instead of just namedropping it all the time. their blog posts are good (one, two), but i'll try to summarize everything in a few nuggets:

#245

in the works: screenshot.png, a site for searching the computer chronicles (#30). currently wrangling tailwind. i think i'll go back to utopia.fyi's fluid sizing and spacing instead of tailwind's awkward breakpoints.

#244

added two small but helpful options to vic: --dry-run and --log. feels good to write rust again.

#243
#242
#241
#240

thoughts after reading the cuckoo's egg:

#239

i remembered to check for false negatives from temporary server/network errors, and for false positives from parked domains, thanks to viktor's post. there were also several curl-resistant sites that behaved normally when visited in a web browser.

#238

nearly half of the casualties were due to glitch.com's shutdown. yet another reason to own your URLs, or lease them as long as possible, whatever you wanna call it. see also #211

#237

i estimate 2-3% of the indie web dies per year, based on my script searching the internet phone book directory for 4xxs and timeouts:

curl 'https://internetphonebook.net/data/ipb-db.json' | jq '.[] | .url' | xargs -I {} sh -c 'echo {} >> results; curl -LI {} >> results'
#236

but this year, i've become a muesli enjoyer (oats + nuts + seeds + fruit). it's been a great struggle meal: healthy, filling, energizing, affordableish, and easy to make (just boil). a bit birdfoody, but i don't mind, especially after adding honey.

#235

favorite cereals:

#234

and the newspaper format, refreshingly analog, reminds me of paul's inky letters and loren's college-ruled year in review.

#233

and for 23 years! sorry, matt, but i think she's the OG weeknoter (#45). putzing around, making little mistakes, finding little joys. it's all so pleasantly mundane. reminds me of katie's receipt from the bookshop.

#232

and her poems, like this ode to grape nuts:

"you look like kitty litter
make my mouth blistery
but i love to eat you
that's your mystery"

#231

so much to love about jennifermillsnews.org:

#230

been rocking out to from the pyre all week. really fun and solid album. favorite tracks: rifle, count the ways, agnus dei

#229

some site updates: new navbar, new endmarks, and a bigger font size on bigger screens. shoutouts to max for inspiring me to revisit these elements.

#228
#227
#226
#225

i don't really have a non-tech personal canon. the closest thing i have is enjoyables, but that's just an art gallery, not particularly influential to my core thinking or feelings. also, i've not been enjoying my enjoyables page because:

#224
#223

great pieces i recently found and might add to the canon after they sit with me for a while:

#222

if anyone knows who to credit for the unison big idea post, lemme know. maybe it's an ongoing team effort. ofc lots of canon pieces were team efforts. for example, engelbart had 17? helpers during his demo. shoutouts to uncredited helpers everywhere

#221

honestly, i just wanted to make an asmr playlist of tech talks. quiet nerd speak is the ultimate sleep aid. somehow, tho, i only ended up with nine videos, and some of the presenters are quite enthusiastic and loud

#220

michael published a similar piece on the very same day: "[software essays that] stuck in my mind and changed the way I think." what a grand coincidence. i'll also share david's design canon and the behind-the-scenes of brendan's everything-canon.

#219

more uncomfortable honesty in the process: "do i actually agree with the underlying idea, or have i fallen for sweet nothings?" and also "there's still a large gap between my taste and ability." i think about that ira glass quote a lot

#218

it's difficult to write about myself. questions of identity; lots of introspection. "what do i actually think and do, beyond a surface level? what are my aspirations?" and, unfortunately, stymied by "what will other people think of me?"

#217

i thought the personal tech canon would be another low-effort listicle like #86, but it was actually quite time-consuming. 60-90 mins to read/watch each source, do research, and draft a blurb. then repeat 2-3x until satisficed.

#216

new post: tech canon. so many nuggets to release. later, tho, because now it is 4am, and ive been up all night trying to finish this post before october arrives and i turn into a pumpkin

#215

it might also be a good opportunity to style the feed. i always wonder "what will RSS-unaware readers think when they click feed.xml?" because all you see is gobbledygook. some user-friendly formatting and an explainer should help

#214

sorry for flooding your feed reader and having an uncool URL. now to write my third feed generator as prophesied (#192). i guess it's a good opportunity to replace RSS with atom, which is technically better.

#213

the RSS bot for my homepage spazzed out yesterday :⁠( i also realized i've been sharing the wrong feed URL. once i clean everything up, my main feed should be at /⁠feed.xml (not the github.io one). the nuggets feed remains unaffected

#212

an idea: archive websites by CNC laser engraving them into stone. then we could have a website cemetery like killedbygoogle.com but irl

#211

updates to the monospace dump:

#210

at least i have a minimum viable elixir webserver. one index.html and a few endpoints, using plug_cowboy for http. no phoenix, and definitely no liveview (never knew it was so heavy!)

#209

been one of those head-against-wall days. trying to wrangle a cmake project with a bunch of dependencies. very far from my comfort zone. wouldn't it be nice if a perfect dockerfile or nix flake fell into my lap right about now

#208

currently - an emulator records video to a hardcoded path.
the goal - write to stdout so i can run multiple instances, streaming output over http chunks instead of writing to disk.
chance of success - unsure

#207

(2) reminds me of my grandma, tasked with using a computer for the first time: we told her to click something on the screen, so she picked the mouse up and held it to the monitor, confused why it wasn't working

#206

(1) more stories of people struggling with computers (#144): a widowed typist, thirty years ago, and joe, ten years ago. text was their only salvation. skeuomorphism might've been helpful too

#205

granted, i have a carpet floor, and no chronic injuries
and i don't have to worry about creepy crawlies on the ground (compared to, say, australia)
and i still enjoy sofa naps
see also #82

#204

one year review of floor sleeping:

#203

(3) hard parts:

#202

(2) fun parts:

#201

(1) an unfinished project: emoji game. i envisioned a game where emoji animals exploded into letters, sorta like word world meets galaga. i gave it a shot during js13k last year but flopped (game jams are hard)

#200

been binging (young) billy joel and (old) rod stewart performances

old grey whistle test (1986) (yt) is my favorite so far

#199

released my portfolio! feels good to give visual work a visual home. also addresses #149-151. unfortunately, no fun URL as i had planned in #56.

#198

found CSS properties that were proposed but rejected, including bleed, box-flex, flex-align, grid-flow, hyphenate-dictionary, leading-trim, masonry, max-font-size, rotation, text-first-indent, vertical-position, voice-pitch-range...

#197

been thinking about indoor air quality and light quality for a while. see ben's lux and christian's air. ofc the simple answer is to just go outside more, which makes me interested in jon's outdoor computing routine.

#196

dog.jpg

#195

and if you've been on the internet long enough to wind up here, then chances are your life is saturated with internet and media, so let's go outside and turn off the screens for a while, shall we? (i am projecting)

#194

i have dozens of interesting websites and blogs on speed dial. i have hundreds of sleeping tabs waiting for a rainy day. i can visit them! they don't need to visit me. like keenan, i do not enjoy an unending stream of material. i choose a slow web.

#193

now i have two perly feed generators under my belt (#53). hopefully by the third i will remember the atom spec.

despite this, i am still feed-averse.

#192

new slow-drip feed for #182. random acts of poetry (repo). short and sparse. "oh yes i forgot about this, what a serendipitous moment for my day." compare to typical feeds (overconsumption, backlogs and burdens, attention invasions)

#191

then thinking of text-only news:
neuters.de, text.npr.org, lite.cnn.com, cbc.ca/lite, brutalist.report, and plaintextsports.com

perhaps supporting a secondary frontend is a viable solution

#190

"if we can implement this feature accessibly or remove it entirely, then is the inaccessible version worth maintaining?" "if we can implement this feature with reduced-data or remove it entirely, then is the data-heavy version worth maintaining?"

#189

TIL the experimental CSS feature prefers-reduced-data. imagine, though, the parallel universe where reduced data was the norm, and prefers-extra-data was the enhancement. (my website comes from that universe). reminds me of that accessiblity stance...

#188
#187

some mundane running updates:

#186

TIL a QR code can prefill a text message: smsto:5555555555:hello world

see also WIFI:T:WPA;S:mynetwork;P:mypass;;

via nate

#185

is it international cat day? i thought every day was cat day... anyways, i liked alexey's cat catalog from last year.

#184

see also six word stories, aka "flash fiction":

"please select your child's eye color." — dbohdan

"for sale: baby shoes, never worn." — unknown

#183

nugget-sized poetry at escarp.org:

"in the wet rainforest of the third apocalypse, the only dry tinder is her literary past. she chooses death. mold eats the paper." — blueberrio

#182

favorite publix baked goods:

#181

(9) that pretty much wraps it up. i'll keep my dependency versions pinned as long as possible (no need to update). i still want to look at the source code for any security or maintenance risks.

#180

(8) verdict? a little bloated, yes, but similar to other site generators. zola has ~10 direct dependencies of ~580 total, and hugo has ~80 direct dependencies of ~180 (or ~260?) total.

#179

(7) there's some fluff: a few different fetch implementations, and eight multi-version packages, despite trying npm dedupe. par for the course, i guess. no big deal since output code should remain unaffected.

#178

(6) there are 11 types of licenses among astro's dependencies. mostly MIT.

there is opt-out telemetry. (i don't mind sending them a few diagnostics. it feels like a contribution to open-source)

#177

(5) there are node-ish packages for fetch, URLs, promises, cookies, MIME types, and so on. there are small utilities for tasks like string handling and data structures. there are a few packages for font handling, and a few for terminal output.

#176

(4) astro uses several packages for syntax processing (HTML, CSS, JS, TS, JSX). astro relies on a few bundler binaries: esbuild, rollup, and parcel. it also uses libvips, an image processing binary; and the .astro compiler, which is wasm.

#175

(3) astro uses ~280 total packages. ~60 of those are direct dependencies, and of those, ~30 are dependency-free.

most transitive dependencies spawn from vite, markdown-remark, unstorage, shiki, and boxen.

#174

(2) i'll be birds-eyeing dependencies of astro v5.10.0. you can follow along with the excellent tool node-modules.dev (if you have enough screen space and bandwidth)

#173

(1) simlar to "what's in my bag",
zak has what's in my pocket,
and anh has what's in my browser.

today, i present "what's in my node_modules?" not as fun as the others, but vetting dependencies is important.

#172

finally, some "easy" recommendations in the typical narrative format, simply well-produced and entertaining: the short game, and alphago (#127).

#171

i also enjoy some sports documentaries. full of drama. here are the ones that sit in my heart, so gritty and human: senna (i don't even like f1), obree (i don't even like cycling), and hoop dreams.

#170

i like no-voiceover documentaries. they're all about "show, don't tell." they have interesting material and editing. i'm especially drawn to absurd realities like vernon, fl (#120). atomic cafe is another good example.

#169

koyaanisqatsi is free on youtube for now. it's one of my all-time favorite movies. in fact, it's the only movie that has a blurb on my unfinished enjoyables page. i'd recommend giving it adblock, a large screen, and at least twenty minutes.

#168

todos:

#167

settled on a responsive layout for the pdf-filling webapp: screenshot.png. happy to use desktop space wisely, even tho mobile is the primary target. hopefully the bottom nav is intuitive. nifty middle slider thanks to this guide.

#166

just realized that pickleball is one of the best racquet sports
for fanning yourself

also in the running: padel and beach tennis

#165

(3) initial cons:

#164

(2) initial pros:

#163

(1) just finished the wasm "backend" for a client-side webapp. now i'm evaluating front-end frameworks & design systems. ibm's carbon components seem promising. i've been tinkering with a playground of their widgets.

#162

happy world emoji day! emojipedia celebrates with a live analytics dashboard.

coincidentally, i've been retrofitting some posts with a bottom emoji. are they dinkuses, dingbats, or fleurons? who knows

#161

three funerals in a month ought to be enough

#160

(3) needs improvement:

#159

(2) some good things:

#158

(1) an unfinished project: visualizing documentation sites. i'll only share a screenshot.png since the live page is too heavy. inspired by kayce's intertwingularity post, i scraped some sites and looked at links between pages.

#157

here's a list of automated accessiblity page checks in deque's axe-core. TIL many accessiblity checkers, like lighthouse, use that library.

#156

(10) finally, thanks to ian and the rest of the folks from lmt2. it's nice to bounce ideas off other people and to have some friendly accountability to finish projects.

#155

(9) the other was a computer chronicles episode: s15e26, my web site, featuring a gallery of regrettable food, yahoo employees curating websites, drag-n-drop website builders ("homestead"), an accessibility segment (!), and the legendary dancing baby (!)

#154

(8) two fantastic videos found me during the months i was working on my post. one was greg giving a lively recurse talk about deploying backend webapps, which is the bizarro antithesis to my lil' static website deployment. greg is great.

#153

(7) anyways, more fun ideas:

#152

(6) ...("a junior dev? in this economy? bahahaha") but maybe "i can deploy a website with my eyes closed" is worth something?

we will see what happens once i finish my portfolio and try to connect with people at companies

#151

(5) the progression from capable junior ("i can learn this") to capable generalist ("i've done this before, but i'm rusty") to expert ("i've done this a hundred times; i can do this with my eyes closed, and fast"). the first two do not sound like strong hires...

#150

(4) (trigger warning: three nuggets about the job market, or lack thereof) i've been thinking about jobs and portfolios, about hiring signals and levels of proficiency:

#149

(3) wish i had:

#148

(2) the speedrun layout was merely a way to show checkpoints. i was pretty slow and messed up a lot, but i think that fits the theme of my post. the speedrun software is called livesplit. shoutouts to divvy for window sizing and obs for screen recording.

#147

(1) new post on screen readers, publishing HTML, accessibility, and being good enough: blindfolded deployment. took me months to figure out whaand it t to say and how to say it. the punchline was just the beginning: screencast.mp4

#146

some beautiful orchestral music i've been enjoying:

warsaw concerto, by richard addinsell

marion's theme, by john williams

#145

thinking about #128 again after helping mom set up a new phone. we're nearing the age where "let me teach you how to accomplish this new task" becomes "let me handle this for you, because software is getting too complicated, and you're crying"

#144

(2) if you still need to use less as a pager, at least it's configurable: LESS=-RIj.5 colors, ignorecase, centering, and more. via john

#143

some helpful terminal configs:

(1) MANPAGER='nvim +Man!' for vim creature comforts, along with features like K to follow manpage links or gO for section navigation. via josh

#142

find indie-web residents in your area: table for nownownow.com

find HN folk: meet.hn

find local meetups: meetup.com

#141

(2) it's great for journaling, or freewriting, or brainstorming random ideas. i have an alias to dump output to a daily text file, and another alias to read everything concatenated like one big plaintext diary.

#140

(1) i've been enjoying salar's writenow for a few months now. it's like rafał's ensō (distraction-free, append-only), but for the terminal.

#139

pleasantly surprised by whisper.cpp: easy for me to build, and good examples in the readme; transcribing words along with timestamps, and color-coded confidence levels; accurate, and not too slow on my machine. (screenshot.png)

#138

some thoughts on note capture: minimal friction (decisions, actions, time); hardware triggers, voice input with whisper.cpp + llm cleanup, spark files, one big text file vs many text files, bebop app, picture in picture mode as a sticky note

#137

some thoughts on exercise: weightlifting revealing neglected muscles, adapting to my body proportions and limitations, leverages, barbell workouts, struggle meals with protein, rossiter stretching, jogging as long as possible (zone 2)

#136

some thoughts on poetry in motion: andy anderson skateboarding, expressive movement in melee, soccer finesse, world-class runners, napoleon dynamite dancing

#135

(4) a representative test phone is a pixel 4a (i would still be using mine today if google hadn't order 66'ed all of them)

disclaimer, again: these are broad recommendations and estimates; just a starting point.

#134

(3) people in emerging markets often have hand-me-down android phones, 3-4 yrs old. also sometimes computers, 5-8 yrs old

a representative test computer is a used laptop with ~6G ram and ~4 cores

#133

(2) "emerging markets" ~= poorer countries with growth

iphones comprise only ~6% of emerging markets

networks continue to get faster

#132

(1) alex's performance inequality gap is the most comprehensive answer to #94, i think.

even though statistics are complicated and telemetry is sparse, here are some takeaways from his latest report:

#131

"waves are toys from God"

— clay marzo, surfer

#130

another great idea from that design studio, on calm tech and boring phones: flip the phone case and access the screen thru a minimal interface. like turning a smartphone into a smartwatch. todo: make my own lil' companion app

#129

on user-friendly design, effective documentation, and the pit of success: an interactive phone manual. it's the only tutorial i've seen where old people actually have a chance. probably my favorite tutorial ever.

#128

(2) compare to hacking the game of go, where researchers had to prune a much larger tree of board states in realtime.

#127

(1) found a great writeup about finding the best boggle board. not sure why i love boggle so much; something about finding hidden patterns. it's also a goldilocks playground for programming: easy UI, nontrivial algorithms, reasonable size.

#126

just finished an hour-long jog, and i'm absolutely chuffed. running has never felt so smooth. shoutouts to naps, water, protein, carbs, and cool breezes.

#125

TIL excalidraw can generate a simple bar chart / line chart if you paste simple csv data from the clipboard. see the blog post and the demo.webm

#124

another type of fun software i want to try, but never had the creative drive: generative art. maybe these exercises could get me going?

#123

some hypercard art bits: mari's collection.

i want to like hypercard, but every time i pull up decker, i feel lost and uninspired. html/js/css is still my preferred medium for art and code.

#122

(5/5) - made an enclosure.jpg for my mini-pc under my desk. my wall-mounted folding desk-setup.jpg is coming together. the goal: hide everything and save space by folding flat (within 6" of the wall). todo: monitor arm, cable management, and much more

#121

(4/5) - nearly finished with programmers at work. every interview is fascinating, and computing history (#30) is useful
- other interviews on my mind: the documentary vernon, fl. just letting old florida guys ramble. absurd and also fascinating

#120

(3/5) - spent a weekend debugging my broken arch system. i touched grub.cfg and fstab and the physical SSD. i learned how to repartition. lots of chrooting and mounting. i rate the experience 4/10. not fun but learned a lot

#119

(2/5) - florida getting hotter and wetter (finally?)
- feeling bleh in general
- made kale and kielbasa soup twice in one week
- on repeat: mort garson's lilting this is my beloved. it totally transports me every time

#118

(1/5) a smattering of recent happenings:
- i've had a (good?) post sitting in my drafts for two months. gotta buckle up and finish it
- also itching to work on vic. just need a few more ounces of creative juice and energy. or discipline

#117

"and for my next trick,
i will eat another crunchwrap supreme."

— mike

#116

(2/2) more rust -> wasm/js notes:

#115

(1/2) notes on rust -> wasm/js:

#114

(3/3) beyond merch, neovim actually has a sustainable funding model tons of donations. the ledger is at open collective. i like seeing open-source maintainers taking full-time compensation instead of being broke or working at wendy's.

#113

(2/2) some_runners.jpg. i'm the guy in the neovim t-shirt, of which i have a one-year review:

#112

(1/1) i ran a 5k (barefoot, ofc)


next year, i'll get sub-30, and maybe try a marathon too

#111

walked by a gator.jpg last week

#110

when i say i like sports, this basketball analysis is a great example of what i mean. strategy, mind games, outsmarting the opponent. not just running around with balls, but winning the mental puzzle. same thing with esports like melee. mind games.

#109

(2) (because personal website havers are honest, thoughtful oversharers, which are exactly the kind of reviewers you want). the implementation could include a browser extension to check if $curr_url has been reviewed; also, domain verification.

#108

you know how you can't trust online reviews because the store can manipulate/bribe/generate them? what if there was POSSE for ecommerce reviews? write a review on your personal website (#14), then syndicate to a collection of trustable reviews.

#107

i think the original is more digestable though, and anything else should be tested yourself. for example, compression ratios vary a lot (1-20x?) depending on the data and algorithm, and cloud costs vary a lot (1-100x?) between pricing plans.

#106

props to simon & jonathan for updating the "numbers every programmer should know". reads & writes, network latencies, cloud costs, compression ratios, all tested. also a nod to UX folk: the duration of an attention span and a blink.

#105

other things i love from _why:

#104

on creating more and consuming less: "when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than your ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."

_why the lucky stiff

#103

haiku by a robot
710
711
712

— nathan

#102

another personal webpage with decades of history that i deeply enjoy: simon's life timeline.

other blog organization strategies: tim's calendar and chris' alphabetical index.

#101

i like the table of contents to paul's website. he organized his posts hierarchically, not simply chronologically or tagged like most blogs. his pages have a rich history. i just wish it was collapsible like riki's treehouse.

#100

some tender folky songs on my mind lately:

#99

(5/5) and something wholesome:

"we can see a lot of things on a smartphone. you can learn more about life."

— woman, 40, tunisia

#98

(4/5) a sobering reminder from that report:

"[owning a smartphone] is not my priority. my priority is basic needs."

— woman, 37, philippines

#97

(3/5) there's data like global internet speeds, but that's a limited picture. more compelling is this pew report. forget page speed for a moment; can these people afford a phone, or charge it, or learn how to use it, or prevent it from being stolen?

#96

(2/5) i'm not sure where to find this information, though. i wanna book a plane ticket and get to know the people and their tech usage, performing an informal survey of my own.

#95

(1/5) i've had a long-running fascination with internet usage in poorer areas like india. what kinds of phones do they have, what browser version, how much data, how fast. i'm trying to think outside my little american bubble and develop websites with empathy.

#94

if you need to answer HTML spec questions like "what is allowed inside an <a> tag" or "can a <p> have a <div>", then here's a list of content rules for HTML elements. it's the same info from the MDN reference, just in all in one page.

#93

(2/2) then i plastered the stickers all over my friend's house. i also left him a secret_note.png, ciphered with those same emoji images.


my favorite sticker was probably the melon-dog

#92

(1/2) a lil' old project of mine: i turned emoji mashups from emojikitchen.dev into stickers. i scraped the best images from the site and positioned them in printify's ordering widget (example_sheet.jpg). i paid ~$30 USD for 3 sticker sheets iirc.

#91

i'm still thinking about browsing large git repos, like in #84-85. i wish there was a TUI where drilling down into blames/histories and comparing diffs/branches are visual, first-class actions. like a crossover between the 5d chess game and debase

#90

if you like manu's people & blogs series, then you'll probably like elliott's handmade web interviews too. more photos, more intimate, less bloggy, more websitey.

#89

some admirable light/dark modes:

#88

TIL people made verbal representations for hexadecimal. 1F is frosteen, fimteek, or fleventeen. A0 is annty, tentek, or atta. 100 is a hundrek or one bitey, and 100000000 is one billby. more at wikipedia

#87

new post: pronunciations.

i also stumbled upon these gloriously nerdy song parodies while searching for the official pronunciation of "suse linux". i love them just as much as krazam's videos.

#86

git fetch && tig <remotename>

lazygit branch, then "u" then "enter" then "+"

git fetch && git diff --stat main <remotename>/main

#85

trying to improve my git workflows, starting with "show me what's changed upstream before i merge", aka incoming commits. here's a screenshot.png of useful commands i've found so far.

#84

i'm considering another round of gsoc this year. it's always fun to see the features that organizations have roadmapped. for example, the internet archive wants to make a book lending system for libraries around the world.

#83

(9/9) extra housesitting things:

#82

(8/9) i triple check that the water and lights are off, that the doors are locked. so much could go wrong. i wonder if i'm too anxious for housesitting. i'm realizing that i crave a predictable, personalized, easy home. maybe i'm getting old.

#81

(7/9) i've rehearsed the beginning of my condolences: "hey $friend, hope your trip is going well..."


one time, a pet dog accidentally became unleashed and killed a chicken on the farm. not a happy cleanup.

#80

(6/9) petsitting: usually i'm there to watch a dog or cat. that means food, water, poop and pee; allergy meds for me, and often meds for the pet too. i always worry "what if the pet becomes terminally ill while the owners are on the other side of the world?"

#79

(5/9) hygiene: my minimum viable setup includes a travel-sized toothbrush + toothpaste, razor, deodorant, hair product, body soap, and lotion. a towel, too, if they're low on linens. i'll visit my home at one point to do laundry and grab anything i forgot.

#78

(4/9) food: most tell me "eat what you want", but i'd rather not cook in someone else's kitchen. i usually order takeout and have leftovers. maybe i'll boil eggs, or maybe use the air fryer if they have one. maybe i'll borrow a snack.

#77

(3/9) i get to experience how other people start their day. is there a screened-in porch? a nice view of the sunrise? a lounger chair? a shady tree? any running water nearby? what birds are chirping? is there a kettle for tea?

#76

(2/9) i enjoy treating the stay as an offline retreat and not asking for wifi. i'll typically bring my notebook, a novel, and maybe my laptop for offline coding. no youtube binging. although i like watching movies on their streaming services.

#75

(1/9) some thoughts after doing lots of housesitting, aka, "of all the houses i've sat before":

housesitting is like a paid vacation for a floater/bachelor-type of person.

#74

celebration music, both for the aforementioned milestone and also for a working feed (#53-54):

incredible (my most replayed song last year, a total banger. i can't stop bouncing)

#73

(2/2) here's to many more screenfuls!

for future milestones, i'm considering: a random nugget button, or a pile-of-notecards skeuomorphic view; and perhaps semantic search or filtering.

#72

(1/2) meta: i now have a whole 4k_screenful.jpg of nuggets. the widescreen layout is a months-long brainsplat, all in one page. no pagination, minimal scrolling. sorta like a newspaper spread or like magic ink (more looking, less interaction)

#71

this nugget intentionally left blank.

#70

(5/5) when she doesn’t respond, i know she’s used up all her words, so i slowly whisper i love you thirty-two and a third times. after that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe.”

— j.m.

#69

(4/5) late at night, i call my long distance lover, proudly say i only used fifty-nine today. i saved the rest for you.

#68

(3/5) when the phone rings, i put it to my ear without saying hello. in the restaurant i point at chicken noodle soup. i am adjusting well to the new way.

#67

(2/5) “in an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day.

#66

(1/5) the quiet world is my favorite poem — my favorite piece of writing, actually. you can read it in its original formatting, but i'm also copying it here because i'm a digital magpie and this is my place for beautiful things:

#65

"go away or i will replace you with a very small shell script"

— a cheeky t-shirt worn by a cheeky david korn, author of ksh.


(bonus: TIL david korn met the band korn. pictures)

#64

beware, stationery nerds: the first link in #62 is a trap. everything on that site is so tempting and clever. stub recycler, calendar stamp, pencil extender, pencil chocolate??


"needs, not greeds. needs, not greeds.."

#63

little inventions i enjoy:

#62

TIL the classic cli tool wttr.in has a v2.wttr.in, which has some cute graphs.


also the same dev created cht.sh, which TIL has learning guides like cht.sh/perl/:learn and cht.sh/latency

#61

stayed up way too late for this: fetch-dysentery. fun little oregon trail + neofetch crossover. the pixel art could use some love, but overall im pleased :)

#60

in the works:

#59

(2/2) "i write maybe three and a half thousand sentences a year. is this too many, or not enough, or about right? i have no idea. i write one sentence, then another, and repeat until done."

yes, just sentences, just working toward my quota

#58

(1/2) "think of it like this, as just cranking out a daily quota of sentences, instead of being a writer, which feels like a claim that will need to be stamped and approved."

— joe moran, "first you write a sentence"

#57

thinking about the url for my portfolio:

#56

"people love to romanticize being a writer when really it's just clacky-clacky backspace snacky"

- nicole

- veronique

#55

oh crumbs, the feed is broken... here's some waiting music in the meantime until i can get home and fix it. (flamingosis has some groovy mixes)

#54

i just made an rss/atom feed for this page. thanks for the suggestion, dima and radek. beware: it's a bit of a firehose. it's also generated by an amateur perl script. let me know if something breaks.

#53

a neat one-liner to browse arch packages, using fzf and yay (two palindromes):

yay -Slq | fzf --preview 'yay -Si {}' --height=97% --layout=reverse --bind 'enter:execute(yay -Si {} | less)'

credit & screenshot.png

#52

enough rambling. have you seen the astronomy picture of the day?

#51

(7/7) one more benefit: this page is an idea incubator. some of these nuggets will hatch into full posts. and sometimes i find myself writing several nuggets in a row, only to i realize i had enough juice to write a full post after all, if it weren't for #47...

#50

(6/7) an interesting phenomenon, as julia noticed: this page is like bookmarks but better. before, if i found something cool, i'd bookmark the link and forget about it. now, if i find something cool, i'll write a blurb and share it here, and i'll remember it.

#49

(5/7) casual nuggets relieve the tension. sometimes i want to say something useful or interesting, but it's too short or tangential. sometimes i want to share something non-tech. where does it all go? before, nowhere. now, here!

#48

(4/7) i put too much pressure on my main blog: overediting, triple checking, filtering out ideas. i only write in the format "i made a thing with code, look, i'm proud of it, and here's how it works". it's quite limiting. and slow.

#47

(3/7) microblogs are not just for devs and techies, though. many twitter expats use micro.blog or thoughts.page to fill the void of social media.

#46

(2/7) microblogs are the new hotness. see #1. see also zak's shell script and screencast that looks very similar to my workflow. not to mention the cool cousin of microblogs: weeknotes. like alice's or dima's.

#45

(1/7) new post: an ugly alias. it represents most of my computering — shortcuts, vim, scripting, deep diving into technical niches, and writing html. i'm fond of the screencast.mp4. i ended the post early, though. here are some nuggets that didn't make the cut:

#44

TIL: if you test a new domain at home, then test it the next day at work and see an https error, it's probably not your fault! your workplace network may have a "newly seen domain" blocking policy. the solution, as usual: wait 24 hrs.

#43

deployed smoothly!

#42

snagged a domain: in-one.page. i think i'll redesign multiple documentation sites, starting with ghostty.in-one.page. i wish more documentation would let me ctrl+f everything on a single page. pagefind is good too.

#41

also on car modifications: i want ventilated/cooled seats in my car. (driving in florida heat gives me swamp butt) i thought cooled seats were only in fancy cars but TIL there's aftermarket installation options.

#40

randomly thinking about car window speeds: who decided how fast is too fast? how slow is too slow?

fwiw, my window moves 16in (40cm) in 3.5 seconds. should it be faster? can i make it a lot slower for comedic effect?

#39

working on a documentation page: /⁠ghostty-reference. happy to make something that looks professional. (thanks, starlight) happy with the UX too:

shows-not-tells, fits on one page, platform filters, less wasted space.

#38

til: astro has a dev toolbar, hidden at the bottom of the screen. you can mouseover or press tab. it has buttons to report an astro bug, copy debug info, inspect interactive islands, audit accessibility features. pretty nifty.

#37

some random niche songs i love:


1 is punky, 2 is catchy, 3 is smooth

#36

(3/3) i think donny's guide is the prequisite for matthew's typography book, which is more comprehensive, more opinionated, more elegant, yet less practical, despite the title.

#35

(2/3) in summary, look for: a generous x-height, open apertures, even letter-spacing, clear terminals, distinguishable ascenders and descenders, and enough contrast in stroke thickness. aka: give eyeballs what they want.

#34

(1/3) this is the most practical guide i've found for looking at fonts. it's not just about vibes. donny points out exactly what makes a typeface legible. he also shares basic guidelines and css snippets for web typography in general.

#33

til: bash and readline are both maintained by one fellow!

#32

(2/2) the chronicles show the progression of culture along with tech. like, what was life like pre-internet? how did employment change with the introduction of computers? how did the first unix terminals work? what was the first software? who were the early adopters?

#31

(1/2) the best history of computing imo, from 1984 to 2002: the computer chronicles. you see the world gradually discover computers. great hosts, neat demonstrations, good interviews.

perhaps start with S11E7, the internet.

#30

if bored: check the 404 pages of your favorite small-web sites. for example, see tom and jack and sandy and manuel and many others that i'm forgetting.

bonus: http.cat

#29

some instrumental songs that make me feel warm and fuzzy inside:

#28

i got a jaw harp. it makes the boing boing sound in spud infinity and fantastic mr fox. i thought it would be an easy instrument, but no! i struggle to coordinate my face, fingers, and breathing.

#27

cat.jpg

#26

(3/3) on the third hand, where else could i write about huffing my own farts? maybe that's what traditional social media is for. or diaries. or regular blogs.

(ever uncomfortable, the author continues sharing random links)

#25

(2/3) on the other hand, i imagine readers sifting through the page and finding useful nuggets. that keeps me going. i also imagine they enjoy indie-web-voyeurism just as i do: curious to get inside people's heads and see something personal.

#24

(1/3) i'm realizing a few weeks in: microblogging feels incredibly vain. both kinds of vain: vain as in huffing my own farts, and vain as in useless. on one hand, i imagine this page gives the same vibes as a loner tweeting unfunny jokes.

#23

just came across keybr, which is spaced repetition for typing practice. it gradually introduces new keys. it analyzes results, too: see my heatmap.jpg of hits and misses (i often flub c, i, t, and p)

#22

i loved dave's reflection on his experience with p5js. he has a lot of passion, creativity, smarts, and good vibes. happy to see him grow with the project.

p5 2.0 seems promising! bonus: the interactive welcome demo

#21

before llm agents, there was jessica's atomist, a "robot pair" for elm codegen. i think about it every year. 1) elm's strong type system and compiler made it possible 2) today, we can almost generate refactors for any language 3) still need better ux

#20

favorite tiny desk concerts:

#19

adding to #1: my nuggets are also inspired by "linkblogs" like tv.goodenough.us or jarrod's 7 things. sometimes you just want to share a cool link ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(we are all digital hoarders)

#18

comments? questions? concerned? reach me at justin@wonger.dev. i like receiving emails from other internet wanderers.

have a swell day ◝(ᵔᵕᵔ)◜

#17

kombucha tier list:

  1. brew dr, crisp apple
  2. health-ade, passion fruit + tangerine
  3. synergy, multi-green
  4. publix greenwise, honeycrisp apple
#16

been wanting to write a post: "freetaxusa has great form design". just gotta do my taxes and take lots of screenshots.

#15

one-month review of the xsto wallet:

#14

reducing friction: my alias for alias itself. before: new aliases do not persist until you copy them to ~/.bash_aliases. after: just type alias key='value' as usual, and it automatically saves to file. small UX victories.

#13

i've cooked up a fun alias for sudo !! (no shift required):

alias oops='$(fc -ln -2 -2 | sed '\''s/^/sudo /g'\'')'

it's basically "get last line of history and prepend sudo".

#12

(5/5) ultimately, i'm saying: try weightlifting. find a gym conveniently nearby, find a friend or personal trainer to mentor you for a couple months, find exercises you enjoy, find a time that works for you, find 30-whatever dollars a month.

#11

(4/5) maybe it's cliche to be a gym evangelist. i share these gym nuggets only because it's drastically improved my life. it's much more valuable than a bookmarklet or song recommendation. and that's coming from a twice-a-week newbie!

#10

(3/5) the gym is a refreshingly positive feedback loop: i lift weights, then i'm pumped with endorphins, then i eat & drink well afterwards, then i'm happy and productive for a bit, then i sleep well, then the next day is easier.

#9

(2/5) i've grown used to negative feedback loops: feeling depressed, then not taking care of myself, then losing energy and motivation, then falling behind on todos, then feeling crappy all over again, but worser.

#8

(1/5) just deadlifted my bodyweight for the first time! shoutouts to squat university for superb weightlifting tips. first gym goal: complete. gymgoing is now a lifestyle, not a phase. it's sorta saving my life.

#7

another random music rec: a dream is all we know, by the lemon twigs (spotify). poppy 70s vibes, if that's your thing. their last two albums have been fantastic. i caught a few earworms.

#6

(2/2) this means you can unbloat recipe websites in a few taps with this "foodmarklet":

javascript:void((()=>{let js=document.createElement('script');js.src="//unpkg.com/foodmarklet";document.head.appendChild(js)})());

(source)

#5

(1/2) did you know you can make bookmarklets (userscripts) on mobile? (full instructions)

  1. bookmark any page
  2. change the url to your code
  3. give it a title like !script
  4. to activate, tap the address bar and type !script
#4

one of my favorite songs this year: "sisters of a down". such an unlikely crossover, yet it works so well. i can't get enough. now i'm searching for more indian music and more metal.

#3

before settling on /nuggets, i considered: /thoughts, /tidbits, /notelets, /musings, /shareables, /lately, and /not-twitter. feel free to adopt one for your own site. they deserve a home...

#2

the indie web, particularly jarrod, inspired this page. see also: linus' stream, geoff's one-liners, and simon's TILs. the styling riffs off an earlier experiment of mine, /⁠enjoyables.

#1

greetings from my new microblog! "nuggets: a taste of who i am and what i do." sometimes tech, sometimes not. always casual.

sincerely,
wonger.dev.

#0