Stiva 1.0.5 is live, and it's the first version of the app anyone outside a closed test group can install. Everything before it, 1.0.0 through 1.0.4, stayed inside a private testing track with a small group of testers. This is the one I'm actually calling public. I wanted to mark the occasion properly, explain a few things about how the app and this blog will work going forward, and be upfront about a couple of rough edges you might run into. What "1.0.5" actually means I already wrote about…
I like these tiny drawings with watercolor background as a visual summary of my days in Ao Nang. Faster and more fun than writing a long text. Adding an extra page is always an aesthetic element. If I keep adding pages I will never finish the notebook.
I have a use case where I need to copy files from Nextcloud to S3 storage using my phone, and I think I finally found the perfect apps for this. While I use rclone on my PC, I wasn’t aware of any app for this on Android. But there actually is some: RSAF (available on GitHub or F-Droid). It uses rclone and provides an integration into the native Android storage framework. Using the native file manager (which can be accessed more easily using a shortcut app like this), you can view, copy, move,…
This is another installment in the series of articles about the notable changes in CIDER 2.0. Today’s topic is one of those “ambitious ideas that lay dormant for ages” I keep mentioning: proper interactive macro stepping. The Dream CIDER has had macroexpansion support practically forever - C-c C-m expands the form before point into a dedicated buffer, a feature we inherited spiritually from SLIME. It works, but it has always felt a bit… detached. The expansion lives in another buffer, divorced…
If you cannot get enough squircle talk, Michael Tsai has a whole roundup of different takes, some of which you may not have seen already. Here is another thing: robbing icons of a variable for creative excellence and flexibility is just another form of context flattening. You know how Instagram and YouTube are host to professionals and amateurs alike? There are benefits to creating an impression of similar legitimacy, but the rigidity of social media platforms’ formats also collapses the…
This is David, your em-dash friendly yet very human web crawler, and you're reading the Weekly Filet, the newsletter for curious minds who love when something makes them go «Huh, I never thought of it this way!». Before we begin: I'm off in the Swiss Alps for two weeks, so the next newsletter will be in your inbox August 7th. If you need some extra reading while I'm gone, have a look at this year's book club recommendations: 26 books that moved curious minds to action.1. The Corruption of…
All I want from the next version of MacOS is one single security prompt per application. Allow the app to request all the access it needs and then give me one modal to accept/deny/etc. The security theater loop does not help anyone.
Debugging with the Sentry MCP/CLI along with the PlanetScale MCP is a massive superpower.On top of that, PlanetScale’s insights + recommendations find issues before they become a problem.
Following the celebration of my 20 years with Linux, I wanted to recreate the moment I installed Ubuntu “Breezy Badger” 5.10 for the first time, and with QEMU it was quite easy to do on my modern Fedora 44 environment of 2026. Install and Run First of all I downloaded the install CD for i386 of that old release, still available on the Ubuntu website after all these years. Once that was done, I proceeded to create a QEMU virtual hard disk to install the OS into: $ qemu-img create -f qcow2…
Yes, this one is a real word according to Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913). Borrowed from Latin, this word (and its cognates like the French bibliothèque and Spanish biblioteca) means "library" in modern English. Libraries are quiet havens for enriching my knowledge, but they can be restrictive with the amount of materials that I can find and borrow. They can range from a small bookshelf at home to a large building in a major city. While I have never visited a public library…
TLDR: “A collection of free information” This is a collection of 63 laws and axioms about building software – some serious, some not. Some are wildly obvious and general, others are unknown and specific. Some are genuinely about software development, and other are just about life in general. For example: Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong, will Gall’s Law: a successful complicated system started from a simple system and grew over time; complicated systems cannot start as complicated…
I believe that the creation of visualization apps to illustrate mathematical or scientific concepts is a particularly favorable use case for modern coding agents, as many of the downside risks attached to other LLM use cases are limited: Not mission-critical. As such apps are not authorative sources of truth and only used for secondary purposes, a small positive error rate in the output can be acceptable. Stand-alone. As the applets are not destined to be incorporated into a larger codebase or…
Most of us take a lot of photos on our phones and don’t do a good job of cleaning them up by deleting bad/redundant ones. As time goes on, more and more photos get accumulated and they fill up both the phone and the cloud storage we back up our photos to, only to reach a point where we’re out of storage and need to pay for more. Or, we have so many photos that it’s exhausting to look for a specific picture in a sea of similar photos. This happened to me and I wanted a simple solution to cull…
Six iterations, from initial to final, of slip-fit stove knob lockouts. Even for a few-hour project, I find it interesting to look back at the various iterations of developing something. In this case it’s six different versions of a slip-fit shim that latches on to our stove’s knob shafts, preventing them from being pressed in turning the gas on or igniting. Kristen wanted these to help avoid accidental knob turns (from people, dogs, etc) and being stuck inside by extremely poor quality air…
StarringTatiana Maslany, Jake Johnson, Dolly de Leon, Jessy Hodges, and Jon Michael HillOverviewCam Boys. Blackmail. Divorce. Soccer practice.A newly divorced mom falls down a dangerous rabbit hole of blackmail, murder, and youth soccer.Review Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed Tatiana Maslany is a star and I’ll watch anything that she’s in. Thankfully, this was a good one. Buy on Amazon
In my head, they say “Wassad” or possibly “Wazzad”.
One of the cool features of JPEG files is that there's the option to save low frequency components first. This means that a partially downloaded image will be displayed at low resolution instead of being cut off. In the file, this works by breaking up the compressed data into multiple "scans", each prefixed with a header. This is the first scan of a typical image: FF DA - "start of scan" marker 00 0C - Big endian length field (12 bytes) Includes itself 03 - Number of channels in scan (3) 01 -…
I've received a number of questions as to how the media library part of this blog works, and I figure it's worth a bit of time to explain — even though there frankly is not that much to explain. The soul of the thing is that each media item is a markdown file, just like the posts themselves. Here, for example, is a recent one, for Jay Kelly: --- title: Jay Kelly type: Movie date: 2026-06-30 rating: 5 year: 2025 director: Noah Baumbach status: Finished image: jay-kelly.jpg tags: - movie…
Most page transitions are polite interruptions. You click a card. The old page disappears. The new page appears. Maybe there is a fade. Maybe the content slides in. The navigation worked, but your eye has to start again. Find the title. Find the image. Rebuild the relationship between the thing you clicked and the thing you are now reading. Shared-element transitions are useful because they preserve object identity across that break. The thumbnail you clicked becomes the hero. The selected card…
App icons that conform to the bounds of a squircle are no different from the millions of constraints that define the macOS and iOS platforms we design and develop in. Of course it is an Apple-defined constraint. Most platform guidance we follow to make apps are Apple-defined constraints. Do not forget: we design and develop apps within the macOS container. We have to acknowledge that space when we design and develop apps. There was a term from an old Human Interface Guidelines document I love:…
I've played ping pong for many years. A thing you notice with anyone that's self-taught is that they tend to hit the ball flat. It works. If you work with a coach, they'll tell you the right way to hit the ball back is to loop. It takes longer for someone self-taught to learn to loop than for someone who picked up the paddle yesterday. Not because the beginner is better, but because they don't have many years of a very fast, very confident answer to "the ball is coming."Muscle memory isn't only…
North is up (aprox). 0.53 "/pixel. [24' x 23' field] FWHM = 3.75" A relatively unremarkable spiral galaxy... but hey, what's that in the background? Click to toggle annotations. (needs JS) Well, it's not actually in the background: the nebula is closer than the galaxy. This particular reflection nebulously is unusual because it's quite far from the milky way, and it doesn't have a central star. The light source here is actually the combined light of the milky way, hence "Integrated Flux…
Check it right now. Is it up to date? One of my personal interests is monitoring people’s browser update status. We have regular company calls where people will share their screen and all of the major browsers make it extremely obvious if the browser needs to be updated. Chrome especially makes it entertaining to monitor just how outdated it is. I wish I had a screenshot but I don’t. In the top right corner there will be a little badge that will be green/yellow/red depending on how outdated it…
I saw this on AliExpress, and I may be more than a little obsessed: The entire case is made from 1.2 mm-thick steel, with support for the following features: Full ATX motherboards 120 × 25 mm front fan behind a removable panel 7 expansion slots 1× 5.25 drive bay, and 2× 3.5 drive bays Two cutouts for RS232 serial ports That classic serif font The position of the power supply over the motherboard would limit you to slim CPU coolers, unless you installed an SFX power supply with an adaptor,…
During some downtime at work I wrote up a little R script to generate Classic Traveller1 planet UPPs and then made a dataset with one million worlds.2 The StatsIn this set of 1 million planets, there are 876,000 unique UPPs. The number of possible codes is vast and this dataset barely covers it. The most commonly-repeated UPP only appears 28 times. In general, the most common UPPs are variations on asteroids with 0-1 size, 0 atmosphere, and 0 water. This is a result of the way the rules…
My notes on configuring Emacs for web development.
Collage cut out, arranged, and glued by yours truly. I’ve been using AI in limited ways more frequently—mostly at work, where the expectation that we leverage Copilot (in all its guises) wherever possible is very, very high. At home, I use it sparingly, mostly as an aid to learn specific technical topics a little quicker (Apple development topics, in particular). I don’t use it to write any sort of prose, generate art or music, or speak on my behalf in any way, shape, or form. Which leads me to…
Greg Wolanski (@gregwolanski.com) believes in [OPML] files: I follow various websites using RSS. The list of sites I follow is a single OPML file that I can import to any RSS reader. Thanks to this single file, I don’t have to worry about being forced to use a specific app or painstakingly import my list of followed sites into a new one. Subscription lists are an excellent example of the evergreen "File over app" principle by Steph Ango (@stephango.com), the CEO of @obsidian.md. If you have…
Just submitted the first @hypertexting.com app update since the public launch. It’s full of fixes to issues reported by the initial wave of users, many of which were papercuts in the onboarding process. Hoping to get this through App Store Review before the next big press coverage and subsequent wave of new users! 🌊🌊
CDs are the new vinyl (again). The Verge:→ The Verge
