Nix and NixOS continue to be the best way to manage and build software that I've found.

I wrote over on the Grafana blog about a few lessons or observations we learned while integrating OpenAI into the ADX data source. It's my first post on the Grafana blog and I'm pretty excited, so check it out!

I've become a big fan of the gh CLI tool from Github. It has eliminated the need for me to manage developer tokens for my scripts.

Today I removed two of my most-used apps on my phone, Apollo and Tweetbot. It feels like the end of an era.

Grafana had a hack week this past week and I opted to work on WebAssembly(WASM)-related things. My vague original idea was to see if I could compile the Grafana server for WASM.

I detail my new workstation build featuring the Intel i5-12600k.

I can’t believe I’m writing this but after 9 and a half years today is my last day at Sparkbox.

It's been 5 years since I wrote 'Thirty'. So now I have to come up with 35 things as I turned 35 yesterday.

How I work with Windows 11 as a KVM guest on a NixOS host using virt-manager.

I wrote down a few of my most used POSIX shell commands and features.

A random assortment of links and miscellaneous updates on things.

You only need about 8 lines in iptables to have a great home firewall.

Nice guide on Reddit about how to use the Siji font with polybar.

[..] install the siji font, and then run "view.sh" in the terminal. If you get an error, try to launch the install.sh again. You'll get a list of all the glyphs available, select the one you want [..] to use and then look where it says "Character 0x00e002" or something like that.

Of note is that you'll end up with weird looking glyphs but siji will interpret it correctly. This is because Siji maps character codes to different icons than other fonts do.

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Enable bitmap fonts on Ubuntu for an optimal polybar experience.

I've written a few small tools over the last couple months and I figured it's time I post about them.

I came up with a four different approaches for Hacktoberfest this year: The Dependency Scrub, Polygot Achievement, Unknown Lands, and the Bug Doctor.

Jamie Brandon has a nice post about "small tech": tech that isn't backed by a big corporation like Microsoft or Apple but still has an out-sized impact. I love the post and I thought I would add a few additional products to the list.

• curl is open-source and has thousands of contributors but is still primarily designed and managed by @bagder (Daniel Stenberg). If you ever do anything with http for any kind of development mastering curl is worth the time investment.

• git is the premier version control system on the planet. It started out as a side-project to manage Linux kernel development.

• Alpine Linux is a Linux distribution that is maintained by a small group of folks and yet is the first choice for most folks when creating Docker images.

• sr.ht does not have the type of scale or impact that the others items on this list have but I think it could some day. sr.ht is version control host, issue tracker, mailing list tool, and CI toolbox. It competes directly with Github, Gitlab, and Bitbucket. However, sr.ht is run by one person—Drew DeVault—and is 100% open-source.

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Owning your content means you can do interesting things with that data. Jim Nielsen did just that by tweaking his static site generator to see all the outbound links he's ever posted.

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Here's how to bind the compose key to caps lock in i3wm.

Cycle version v0.3.0 is now available which features syntax highlighting via Chroma.

Using a desktop manager like GNOME makes setting default applications easy. However when using a tiling window manager like i3 setting a default application is opaque to the newbie such as myself.

Eight years ago I started working at Sparkbox. Thank you Sparkbox team for giving me an opportunity to work with ya'll and for making me a better developer and person.

A great interview with the creator of Quicklisp, Zach Beane. I enjoy two things about this interview:

1. The inclusion of outdoor/farming tools in the list of tools.
2. Zach's conservative approach to languages and software tools.

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I've added Drew DeVault's openring project to the blog.

I'm going to give the idea of a public inbox as a place to have discussions about things on this website and elsewhere a shot.

This is a great explanation of Rust's module system. I wish I had this clear of a picture when I was using modules for the first time in creating oscar.

The big takeaway and deviation from npm is this:

We need to explicitly build the module tree in Rust, there’s no implicit mapping to file system.

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Great post from my friend and co-worker Bryan Braun on the value of demoing.

It didn’t matter that his demos weren’t fully built, or available for anyone to use. We simply needed to see it, in order to understand.

I find this is true for any kind of project: hobby or professional. Feedback — that elusive crucial ingredient to a good product — tends to arrive when someone else can see/hear/touch/examine what you're working on.

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According to my Cargo.lock file, my website currently depends on 364 crates. So it's really about standing on the shoulder of a carefully-curated set of giants.

364 may seem like a lot (and in a way, it is), but please reserve your judgement until after you've heard about everything it does.

I /love/ posts like this. Amos goes in deep on the decisions he made while re-writing his website from scratch. It's a truly awesome post.

I'm seriously tempted to copy his SQLite full-text search implementation for this blog, but that's a decision for another time.

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I’d like to see all the vim, vigor, and vigilance Apple applies to making sure no app on the App Store is making a dime without Apple getting three cents applied instead to making sure there aren’t any scams or ripoffs, and that popular apps support good-citizen-of-the-platform features within a reasonable amount of time after those features are introduced in the OS. I don’t know exactly how long “reasonable” is, but five fucking years for split-screen support ain’t it.

I've been thinking the same thing ever since the Hey app rejection right before WWDC. The App Store is supposed to be a place to get software that has been vetted by Apple but there seems to be a growing disconnect between what users imagine that vetting is and what Apple is doing.

I want to believe this tweet by Ben Evans is the goal of the App Store:

For the first time you could press one button and get an app, ready to run, and *trust* the app, and trust the payment. An app couldn't break your computer. It couldn't steal your data or break other apps or slow everything down and kill your battery. This is freedom.

— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) June 21, 2020

If we can trust the apps that come out of the App Store:

• why is the US considering banning TikTok because of its rampant data collection?
• why do we need a new notification in iOS 14 when apps query the clipboard?
• why do we need a microphone/camera indicator at the system level?

Maybe I was naive and alone in my assumption that Apple would root this stuff out during the review process. If they're not rooting this out then what is the point of the review process at all?

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What seems to be lacking is a “middle ground” that offers useful statistics to answer business questions, without becoming a specialized marketing tool requiring in-depth training to use effectively. Furthermore, some tools have privacy issues (especially Google Analytics). I saw there was space for a new service and ended up putting my original idea in the freezer and writing GoatCounter.

I agree 100% with this assessment and I'm excited about Goatcounter. I setup a free instance of Goatcounter for this site as a way to kick the tires on it. So far, I'm enjoying that it's privacy respecting and doesn't drag down page performance.

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If you have used tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, you probably have run into a suggestion to use “next-gen image formats”, namely Google’s WebP image format. Google claims that their WebP format is 25 – 34% smaller than JPEG at equivalent quality.

In any case, when converting images to WebP, check that they are actually smaller than the JPEG equivalent. There’s no need to serve larger images to your users than needed.

Great analysis of the WebP image format and a good reminder to not blindly follow what various auditing tools are reporting. Test and verify in addition to implementing the various suggested improvements.

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Britain is about to pass a significant landmark - at midnight on Wednesday it will have gone two full months without burning coal to generate power.

A decade ago about 40% of the country's electricity came from coal; coronavirus is part of the story, but far from all.

This is fascinating. The UK has been aggressively investing in renewable energy sources for years and it appears all that investment is starting to catch up with demand.

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I haven't written anything here about George Floyd's murder. I still don't have a cogent response but here's what I've been mulling over.

And it's not only about these security problems. Running KDE apps in fakepak? Forget about desktop integration (not even font size). Need to input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters? Forget about that too - fcitx has been broken since flatpak 1.0, never fixed since.

The way we package and distribute desktop applications on Linux surely needs to be rethinked, sadly flatpak is introducing more problems than it is solving.

Flatpak is an emerging alternative way to install applications on Linux that is apparently rife with security and usability issues. This is a bummer because there's lots of room in this space for improvement. The lack of multi-lingual input is especially egregious.

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I stumbled upon this post (Google cache link) when I was trying to process multiple files via xargs.

ls *.webm | xargs -I % ffmpeg -i % %.m4a

The key part of this one-liner is xargs -i %. This means that each line of STDIN passed to xargs is put into a variable and can be referenced as %. Hence, the following text which specifies ffmpeg -i x.webm x.m4a to make it convert.

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If you use iMessage on your Mac, you can access the SQLite database where all of your messages are stored. With a little setup, you can use SQL’s raw power to look through your old messages.

via Simon Willison

In this post Dan Kelch walks through how to access the SQLite database that backs iMessage on a Mac. He also shares a few helpful SQL snippets to demonstrate how powerful using SQL on your text messages can be.

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A few days ago Allan Odgaard wrote up the reasons for the frequent slowdowns he's experiencing in macOS Catalina and it's shocking:

Apple has introduced notarization, setting aside the inconvenience this brings to us developers, it also results in a degraded user experience, as the first time a user runs a new executable, Apple delays execution while waiting for a reply from their server. This check for me takes close to a second.

This is not just for files downloaded from the internet, nor is it only when you launch them via Finder, this is everything. So even if you write a one line shell script and run it in a terminal, you will get a delay!

I am writing this post to call attention to what I consider a serious design problem with Apple’s most recent OS where it appears that low-level system API such as exec and getxattr now do synchronous network activity before returning to the caller.

Marco Arment hit the nail on the head with his tweet summary of the post:

The macOS security team needs to ask themselves hard questions about their implementation choices when very smart people are disabling huge parts of their OS security layer just to get reasonable performance from common tasks.

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I've been using Rofi for about a year but didn't really understand how to write my own scripts for it until recently. In this post I explain what dmenu is and Rofi's implementation of it and also show how to change audio inputs on Linux via pactl.

Nilay Patel asked this of Siri on his Apple Watch. After too long of a wait, he got the correct answer — for London Canada. I tried on my iPhone and got the same result. Stupid and slow is heck of a combination.

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RIP my very first 0day and absolute best sandbox escape ever:

<key>application-identifier</key>
<string>...</string>
<!---><!-->
<key>platform-application</key>
<true/>
<key>com .apple.private.security.no-container</key>
<true/>
<key>task_for_pid-allow</key>
<true/>
<!-- -->

Tweet that demonstrates a recent zero-day (now patched) in iOS. This serves as your annual reminder that parsing xml-like things is a fraught activity.

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Janet Hutchins had the day off from her job as a nurse at a local hospital. She had been in town catching up with friends and had just gotten home and started making dinner. So she had only the slightest sense of the crisis that her colleagues had been dealing with across the NHS. That's when her son came upstairs and told her, a little uncertainly, that he seemed to have stopped the worst malware attack the world had ever seen.

“Well done, sweetheart,” Janet Hutchins said. Then she went back to chopping onions.

It's hard to pick my favorite section from this article about Marcus Hutchins — the hacker who stopped the WannaCry malware attack.

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The low performance parts don’t need to be React. Listing pages, static pages, blogs - these things are increasingly built in React, but the benefits they accrue are extremely narrow. A lot of the optimizations that are cropping up in these corners, things like bundle splitting, server-side rendering, and prerendering, are triangulating, essentially, what we had before the rise of React.

This isn't really about React but more about the over-engineering of large swaths of page-types and sites that used to "just work". I love React and it's been a giant leap forward for creating complex UIs on the web, that doesn't mean it's right for every situation.

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I've been using youtube-subscriptions for a few months now and I really enjoy it. It's described as a:

terminal client to browse youtube subscriptions

It's great to quickly see any new videos right in the terminal and videos play via mpv or vlc!

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The Pacific Crest Trail runs 2650 miles from the border of Mexico to the border of Canada through California, Oregon, and Washington. Hiking the whole thing usually takes months, but this video by Mac of Halfway Anywhere compresses the entire experience down to just three minutes presented in 1-second snippets.

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I've been working on oscar which is a small command-line utility written in Rust that polls the pbskids.org API for new episodes of any PBS show.

A trait of good software is the ability to quickly see and verify changes:

The result is what’s in-use today for HEY: a system that (almost) immediately deploys any branch to a branch-specific endpoint that you can access right away to test your changes without having to use the claims system or talk to anyone else (along with an independent job processing fleet and Redis instance to support the environment).

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In light of COVID-19 and lots of folks working from home, I've written down the three things I try to tune on my home network to deliver the best possible video call experience.

I recently purchased the ATR2100 microphone and absolutely love it.

Rust is a challenging language to work in coming from a more dynamic language like Javascript or Ruby. Here's a short breakdown of a compiler error message around Strings and ownership that stumped me for a bit.

Two tweets that I've had stuck in my tabs for _awhile_ and decided to stash them here.

I made a bash alias that takes a URL as an arguement and runs it through curl resuting in the Headers from each redirect, the final URL, and the number of redirects printed to the console.

Brent Simmons talks about what made computing so compelling and what we might be losing.

Dead Cells is an incredible single-player fighting platformer (not sure the proper term for it).

I desperately miss macOS but the Apple laptop hardware has atrophied to such a degree that the software alone isn't worth it.

How busybox crond hanging at startup sent me down a rabbit hole where I learned about entropy and Linux.

Cycle is a half-baked static site-generator that I wrote to publish this here interweb page. Cycle is not really ready for anyone else to use but me at this point. However I wanted to outline my rationale for the various design decisions that inform how Cycle works today.

This is just a short post to save a few links and document that "Server Javascript Responses" in Rails are still useful in 2018/19.

I haven't posted here recently. That's largely because I did the classic "Time to rewrite the blog, I'll post when it's done" thing. Well it's not done, but I messed up by not sharing my thought process and reasoning for the re-write. So, I'm trying to rectify that now with some scant and scattered sentences.

If you're writing on the Internet and you aren't hosting (owning) your content you're work will disappear; it's just a matter of time.

Screenshots in README.mds are really helpful to quickly demonstrate what your open source project does. Hosting those can be surprisingly difficult.

A quick look at how I made an Ivy extension that displays the links from the pinboard.in popular page

A small, friendly starting point for Emacs.

Micro.blog is simply a layer on top of existing RSS/JSON feeds; its simplicity echoes the simplicity of podcasting.

Apple released a statement on the battery and performance issues.

What the heck is git-worktree?

In a fantastic video the YouTube channel MagicalMessi documents all the various records that Messi has broken during his illustrious career.

In exploring what Ivy was capable of I had the idea to write a small package that used Ivy as the interface for my RSS service of choice, Feedwrangler.

I built a PC in May to replace my Xbox One (yay no more Live fees!). And then last week with support for AMD GPUs in 10.12.6, I took the plunge and turned that PC into a Hackintosh.

I don't do many link posts but Ian Bogost sums up my feelings perfectly about the Equifax breach.

I thought I'd list out a few of the talks I'm looking forward to and what I hope to come away with.

Five years is a long time, especially working on the internet, and I've loved every stinking minute of it.

An explanation of how to change or diminish major and minor modes in emacs

A log of my experience switching from helm to ivy; two completion plugins for emacs.

We really couldn't have picked a worse data exchange format.

I wrote an elisp function to yank JSON off my clipboard, prettify it.

Glenn Fleishman recently linked to a method for generating passphrases called Diceware. Being a fan of dice (d20 for life) I thought this was super cool and worth sharing.

I made an app, VDCAssistant-Killer, to restart the process that manages the Facetime camera on your Mac.

When you remove friction from a process or task, all the factors change. This seems obvious, but it's fundamental to understanding the world as it currently is.

A evolving collection of emacs tips aimed at someone starting out with emacs and evil-mode.

I've been in my fair share of video calls and I thought I'd share a few tricks that help limit my contributions to the chaos.

Today I turn 30. So here is a list of 30 things I've learned in the last year (or so).

Last week I gave a talk at GemCityJS about going serverless with AWS Lambda.

We all need a team. On the right team we can go higher and be better than we ever thought we could.

I've been on a web scraping tear lately. So, I thought I'd compile what I've learned and put together a repo as a howto/cookbook/guide thing.

My post for the Shift for January. I tackle the question within the question: how do we (internet workers) have more meaningful conversations in order to make the web better?

This week I wrote a bash function that curls the SendGrid API and sends a Boxcar notification.

Whew, time to share something with the world I haven't really talked about online at all, my first and only (so far) iOS app.

I've been playing around with SQLite recently and I've stumbled across a few things I want to remember, so I'm putting them here.

I wrote a love letter to Webpack over on the Foundry.

Not all projects need Grunt or Gulp, npm is a great build tool by itself. I recently replaced a Grunt task (with multiple plugins) with a npm script task.

I've been working on getting my Raspberry Pi to be a dedicated screen-scraping machine with CasperJS and Node. This post is intended to be a log for myself and hopefully a helpful resource for others.

Is the answer developing a subset of HTML/JS/CSS?

I've migrated my apps off Heroku and won't be using the service for personal apps going forward.

I've been trying to figure out how much memory a node app is using on my VPS, and I've found output from top or htop to be overwhelming.

The adventure is just getting started.

I'm curious to see how Medium continues to evolve.

Recently I've come to love MicroJS. I love that I can find tiny, specific libraries that do one thing, and do it well

I've used a SOCKS proxy while on public WiFi ever since reading Paul Stamatiou's article years ago. I only recently took the time to automate the process.

Hossein Derakhshan outlines how the web as he knew it has disappeared and been replaced by "The Stream", or social media. His post is beautifully written and I highly recommend reading it.

My microblogging setup with Twilio, Twitter, SMS, and WordPress.

I outline how I built my blog using React and the WordPress API. This post covers isomorphic app structure and data flow in React with React-Router.

I recently started using DuckDuckGo and Fastmail. So I thought I'd share a few thoughts on both services.

Benedict Evan's last three pieces are right on the money regarding mobile, and the web versus native apps.

Crafting a high-performing web experience for mobile is not easy, but it's not so impossibly hard that Facebook's Instant Articles is the only solution.

Why doesn't Google just offer data? There already is already a fantastic data-only plan in America, and it's on T-Mobile.

I set up a small Heroku app that uses Capybara to check Apple's website for availability and sends a text to my phone via Twilio.

So, in the past 6 months I've switched from Sublime Text to Vim. Here are some good articles and tips on Vim.

A basic AWS S3 bucket policy that restricts access to a single bucket, and allows access via the AWS cli.

Keeping up with the web industry is tough, but this approach nicely limits my twitter check-ins to once or twice a day during the week

Along with the move to Siteleaf I've also set up an App.net Broadcast channel.

I moved to Siteleaf from Jekyll

Set up a Git commit message template

How to set up your own App.net to Twitter cross-posting app.

Ways I use IFTTT. App.net to Twitter, App.net from Day One, and Camera Roll to FLickr.

An Alfred workflow that converts Javascript to Coffeescript

Use Huffduffer to listen to individual podcast episodes.

How to use CSS3 transforms to work with slanted elements

A simple Fluid userscript that adds a Read it Later button for Instapaper to any tweet containing a link

A short primer on the rename command line utility.

A great quote from a post over at 37 signals.

Great quote by Andy Budd on the value of time

I enhance the previous IP bash function as an Alfred Extension

A quick post explaining a command line function to copy your IP address to your clipboard

A rundown of some of my most used bash and terminal commands and functions.

A fantastic post from Michael Lopp.

Another great article from Lyza Gardner.

Chris Bowler weighs in with some fantastic advice for those who have families.

A quick tip on using Alfred in Web Development

A short post on how to theme the Chrome Dev Tools

How to migrate Tweetbot Beta to a new Mac.

Quick solution to fixing Heroku SSH key errors using ssh config.

I switched from GoDaddy to Hover.

Shawn Blanc poses some tough questions about life and purpose

Today I started working at Sparkbox as Front-End Dev.

Dave Winer has a great post on what happens when a service disappears.

A response to Charlie Pratt's blog post about the problem of social networks and catering to the crowd

I bring together a few different voices to illustrate the argument for blogs, open data, and open social networks.

A collection of reactions to how Twitter muddled there recent API announcement.

Hack together a faster Rotten Tomatoes experience on the iPhone

A code snippet to have posts offset and have pagination work.

A quick introduction to the beauty of plaintext and the Markdown syntax

How I now use Gists instead of snippets in Sublime Text 2.

Fantastic article by Kyle Steed on work, rest, and life

Tiffani Jones Brown talks about passion in volume 3 of The Manual

Jeremy Keith on convincing bosses to adopt new web standards.

how I use Readability’s Kindle bookmarklet to harness the web.

Simple does account set-up right.

A fantastic quote from a fantastic article over at Big Spaceship

The importance of story in products, design, and development.

The guidelines for data and how it pertains to Wordpress

Jonah Peretti's letter to employees and investors of Buzzfeed.

Jonathan Christopher hits the nail on the head

App Cubby's take on Google's acquisition of Sparrow

How much CSS am I reusing?

Robin Sloan's description of a programmer.

The infamous Zeldman dishses on the web and print

Matthew Butterick's talk on declining expectations.

Hard work and how to be creative

Sebastiaan De With describes his design process for doubleTwist's Alarm Clock

Elyse Holladay reveals her style guide guide.

Is it time for a Return to the CSS Zen Garden? Rick Monro thinks Responsive Web Design needs it.

Handy tip for pretty git logs.

Growing software versus building it

The Evening Edition is a great little resource

Is it possible to create an extraordinary product and have a healthy life outside of that proudct?

Thought from the Pastry Box Project's Bruce Lawson.

How to rewrite www to non-www in Nginx

My first bookmarklet, an ESPN Insider paywall

The title says it all. I completely forgot about the Wordpress HTTP API until today.

Adam versus Dropbox and oAuth. Frustration post incoming regarding curl, php, and oAuth.

An incredible time-lapse of Manhattan

I'm proud, nervous, and a little surprised that adamsimpson.net is finally live!