hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

Archive

  • Drop #742 (2025-12-17): The Rumors Of The Drop’s DemAIse Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

    Today un-hiatus’d Drop discusses a proposed AI URI scheme governed by the fictitious Artificial Intelligence Internet Foundation, raising concerns about its legitimacy and origins. It also outlines the features of Deno 2.6, including improved type-checking, new utilities, and enhanced security tools.

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  • Drop #741 (2025-12-08): Monday Afternoon Grab Bag

    Today’s Drop covers three main topics: Euporie, a terminal-focused suite for working with Jupyter notebooks featuring various applications; Alan, a macOS utility for outlining active windows; and the intriguing voyage of Argo float 7900904, which collected crucial ocean data near East Antarctica during an unexpected journey beneath ice shelves.

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  • Bonus Drop #104 (2025-12-06): Places, Pages, And Packets

    The Bonus Drop tries to make up for two lost Drops this week and discusses three main topics: the underutilization of LOC DNS records for geographical coordinates due to privacy concerns, the Gitmal tool designed for self-hosting Git repositories with visually appealing outputs, and a new IETF draft proposal for allocating the IPv6 block 44::/16…

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  • Drop #740 (2025-12-02): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s edition of the Drop focuses on typography, nostalgia, and tools of the past. It features John D. Berry’s essays that celebrate the history of typography, Letraset’s origins as a tactile tool, and introduces Glina Script, a versatile handwritten typeface.

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  • Drop #739 (2025-12-01): Web-Slinging Monday

    Today’s Drop discusses the growing problem of excessive web page weight, highlighting a median size of 2.6 MB that impacts load times and accessibility. It features two lightweight web development resources: Pure Web Bottom Sheet for building efficient UI components and PicoStitch’s method for creating responsive bar charts using minimal CSS.

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  • Drop #738 (2025-11-28): PCAPs Or It Didn’t Happen

    Today’s Drop discusses the integration of Wireshark’s capabilities into web environments through Wiregasm, a WebAssembly version enabling packet analysis directly in browsers. It introduces tools like Wireview, WebShark, and Packet Dissector leveraging Wiregasm, and highlights WireMCP for real-time traffic analysis, enhancing network inspection accessibility across various platforms.

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  • Drop #737 (2025-11-25): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s typography-centric edition of the Drop discusses the intersection of typography and AI, featuring the Gregory Grotesk typeface, characterized by its versatility and clarity. It also highlights Monotype’s Human Types project, exploring designers’ collaborations with AI. Additionally, the ~new CSS line-height unit enhances web typography, resolving spacing issues for cleaner layouts, emphasizing simplicity and effectiveness.

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  • Drop #736 (2025-11-24): In Living Color

    Today’s color-full Drop covers Color.js, a revolutionary JavaScript color library that excels in advanced color operations, offering accurate gamut mapping and ΔE calculations across many color spaces. It also showcases Color Palette Pro, a tool that simplifies color selection with intuitive palette generation, and introduces Super Coloring which provides engaging adult coloring pages (for printing…

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  • Drop #735 (2025-11-21): Retro Edition

    The Friday Drop highlights three retro resources: Microsoft’s open-sourcing of Zork I-III for interactive fiction preservation, DOCTYPE magazine which revives hands-on web coding, and Retro Game Coders offering tutorials for 8-bit game creation. Each resource emphasizes education through tactile engagement with technology, preserving historical programming techniques.

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  • Drop #734 (2025-11-20): Fast And Powerful

    Today’s Drop discusses three “fast & powerful” tools: hl, hk, and MPD. hl is a command-line tool for formatting and exploring logs quickly, hk is a high-performance Git hook manager that runs tasks in parallel to enhance Git workflows, and MPD is a music player daemon providing seamless audio management across multiple clients.

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  • Drop #733 (2025-11-18): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s Drop discusses the LINE Seed brand typeface, designed for multilingual use. It also explores Japanese chopstick sleeves as cultural artifacts reflecting Japan’s modernization and shares Jonathan Hoefler’s insights on typographic illusions.

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  • Drop #732 (2025-11-17): Reliable Sources

    Today’s Drop explores the evolving landscape of coding tools and resources, particularly emphasizing AI’s impact on the decline of small npm packages like blob-util. It introduces Brimstone, a Rust-based JavaScript engine aiming for high ECMAScript compliance, and discusses optimizing DNS lookups to enhance website performance, recommending strategies like dns-prefetch and preconnect.

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  • Drop #731 (2025-11-13): That’s So Random

    Today’s Drop digs into Homebrew’s big 5.0 release, Chaser System’s research into just what these coding agents do on/from your system, and ends with a way to get rid of some “AI” frustration.

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  • Drop #730 (2025-11-11): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s Drop introduces three unique typefaces: Myrna, which enhances code readability by equalizing symbols and letters; Tongari Display, inspired by Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai; and Avería, generated by averaging various fonts on the creator’s computer. Each font showcases innovative design principles.

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  • Drop #729 (2025-11-10): Publish Or Perish

    Today’s Drop expores tools for a project that involves curating and publishing content beyond a blog. Three systems—MkDocs Material, Trilium Notes, and Wiki.js—are evaluated based on features, ease of use, and security. Each platform has unique pros and cons regarding collaboration, performance, and the technological stack required for hosting.

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  • Bonus Drop #102 (2025-11-09): It Always Feels Like Someone Is Watching Me

    The (depressing) Weekend Bonus Drop discusses modern surveillance practices, highlighting a new tool that removes tracking links from Google Docs exports and showcases the Surveillance Watch map, which reveals the surveillance industry’s global scope. It also critiques how gaming companies collect player data under the guise of achievements, normalizing surveillance in entertainment.

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  • Drop #728 (2025-11-06): Fincky, Functional, Friday

    Today’s Drop looks at three tools: a local, browser-based detective map for free-form note-taking; a vintage, command-line reminder system that prioritizes privacy; and a guide on How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm.

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  • Drop #727 (2025-11-06): Forgotten But Not Gone

    Today’s Drop brings some items from simpler times back into active memory: the HTMLTableElement API for creating data tables without libraries, the ‘leave’ terminal command for GTHeckO reminders, and an effective modern use for the HTML element.

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  • Drop #726 (2025-11-04): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s typography-centric edition of the Drop discusses the COLRv1 standard for color fonts enabling dynamic, scalable typography with gradients and animations. It features two specific fonts, Primecolor, which utilizes OpenTypeSVG for vivid lettering, and Nabla, inspired by vintage arcade style, both showcasing the capabilities of COLRv1 in modern web browsers.

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  • Drop #725 (2025-11-03): Monday Grab Bag

    Today’s Drop pits terminal emulators against each other (and the results are sad + surprising). It also showcases a11y.css, a lightweight tool for instant accessibility checks on webpages, and Ben Joffe’s fast-date algorithm, which improves date conversion speeds by 2-10% through a simplified approach.

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  • Drop #724 (2025-10-31): If It Walks Like A Duck

    The Friday Drop is just super ducky! It highlights the integration of mlpack as a DuckDB extension, enabling machine learning models like AdaBoost directly within SQL queries. Additionally, the Dash extension provides a user-friendly data exploration and dashboard tool, while the experimental magic extension offers file classification capabilities.

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  • Drop #723 (2025-10-29): CSS • JS • HTML

    Today’s Drop discusses three core web topics: CSS’s 239 methods of representing the color blue (O_O), the inefficiencies of using await in JavaScript loops, and the HTML Popover API for creating overlays. It emphasizes the complexities arising from legacy choices in CSS, performance patterns in JavaScript, and the [in]accessibility features of popovers.

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  • Drop #722 (2025-10-28): Typography Tuesday

    This week’s typographic edition of the Drop explores 3 key resources: 1984.design’s Typography Basics provides a friendly guide to type communication, while Codepoints.net serves as a searchable atlas for Unicode characters. And, The Is It Tofu? tool helps prevent missing characters in web content.

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  • Bonus Drop #101 (2025-10-26): Really Random Resources

    The weekend Bonus Drop covers Typst 0.14.0 which introduces significant enhancements, including automatic tagging for accessible PDFs, improved HTML export, and character-level justification. We also link to Phil Gyford’s memoir that reflects on his nostalgic first experiences with the internet in 1995. Finally, it covers and provides a Dockerfile for Restring, a SvelteKit web app…

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  • Drop #721 (2025-10-23): Atlas? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    Today’s Drop critiques OpenAI’s new browser, “Atlas,” describing it as an inferior tool that compromises user privacy. It advises against its use, and cites issues with handling prompt injections and a lack of concern for user safety.

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  • Drop #720 (2025-10-20): Back In The Highlight Again

    Today’s Drop looks at recent updates in log & code visualization tools, highlighting (heh) Logalize for its customizable log colorization, and ch for its simple word highlighting in live streams. It also introduces Lexical Differential Highlighting, which improves code readability in some programming languages by using distinct colors for visually similar tokens, enhancing cognitive processing.

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  • Drop #719 (2025-10-17): Free-Form Friday

    Today’s Drop covers Gephi Lite, a user-friendly, browser-based tool for network visualization, allowing exploration of graphs on mobile devices without installation. It also digs a little into Isochrones which represent areas reachable within specified travel times, accounting for real-world conditions. And, it links to the prompts in The Obsidian AI tagger which enhances note-taking through…

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  • Drop #718 (2025-10-16): Toss-Up Thursday

    Today’s Drop shares insights on three resources: WorkKit, which decodes Apple’s iWork formats; a critique on software “un-quality” normalization; and AstroDither, a creative coding project for audio-visual interaction.

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  • Drop #717 (2025-10-14): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s Drop explores comic book lettering as a visual language with distinct grammar, emphasizing artistic conventions. It features the New Heterodox Mono font, blending elegance with functionality in programming. Additionally, it highlights the necessity of using relative CSS units for accessible web design and mastering modern typography principles for improved user experience.

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  • Drop #716 (2025-10-13): If You Build It, It Will (Probably) Run

    Today’s Drop has a focus on Meson, a build system/toolkit that streamlines builds and dependency management. Qman (build with Meson) modernizes Unix manual pages with user-friendly features, while mpv (also built with Meson) delivers a minimalist, high-performance media playback experience, focusing on control and extensibility.

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  • Bonus Drop #100 (2025-10-12): Al-terminal-tive Lifestyles

    The wekeend Bonus Drop discusses three al-terminal-tive CLI/TUI utilities: Skim, Liquidprompt, and Zenith. Skim is a fast fuzzy finder for seamless file searching. Liquidprompt offers a customizable, context-aware prompt for Bash/Zsh, enhancing usability. Zenith is an advanced system monitor featuring zoomable charts and historical data tracking, providing in-depth performance insights.

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  • Drop #715 (2025-10-10): Web-Slinging Friday

    Today’s webby Drop highlights the HTML element’s purpose, the Journal of Web Engineering’s efforts to establish web development standards, and the risks of old SSL certificates through BygoneSSL, which can lead to various cybersecurity threats.

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  • Drop #714 (2025-10-07): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s Drop introduces Retrocide Mono, a unique monospaced font suitable for retro-futurist designs, devoid of descenders for a mechanical look. It highlights James Edmondson’s OH no Type School as an interactive resource for learning glyph design. Additionally, it presents RoboFont, a powerful, Python-based macOS font editor offering extensive customization for type designers.

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  • Drop #714 (2025-10-06): Monday Morning Grab Bag

    Today’s Drop reflects on the “vibe coding revolution,” questioning its impact on resource creation for coders. It also introduces three projects: The Garage, an efficient object storage system; wxpull, a minimalist weather tool using open data; and faup-rs, a fast URL parser in Rust.

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  • Drop #713 (2025-09-19): AVAST ME HEARTIES!

    Today’s Drop discusses accessing and utilizing U.S. maritime safety data, focusing on Anti-Shipping Activity Messages, while highlighting challenges faced due to changes in data accessibility. It describes a method to retrieve piracy-related datasets using R and DuckDB, emphasizing the need for continual data scraping to maintain a comprehensive dataset.

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  • Drop #712 (2025-09-18): Toss-Up Thursday

    Today’s Drop discusses diverse topics including readability tools to enhance writing clarity, the challenges of obtaining structured JSON from LLMs, and Apple’s introduction of a private CSS property for Liquid Glass effects.

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  • Drop #711 (2025-09-16): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s typography-centric edition of the Drop explores the significance of typography in video games, illustrating its evolution from functional necessity to a vital artistic element. It highlights how different games utilize fonts to enhance player immersion and identity, facing unique technical challenges and licensing issues. Meanwhile, the Go programming language has its own clear and…

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  • Drop #710 (2025-09-15): Monday Morning Grab Bag

    Today’s Drop discusses FFmpeg, Linkhut, and Peekaping. FFmpeg offers a detailed guide on media processing. Linkhut is a flexible social bookmarking platform, and Peekaping serves as a self-hosted uptime monitoring solution.

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  • Bonus Drop #98 (2025-09-14): Observable Notebooks Data Loaders Example

    This week, the Bonus Drop features a practical example of using Python data loaders in Observable Notebooks 2.0. Data loaders enhance notebook performance by executing code in advance, facilitating access to diverse data formats. Observable currently supports Node.js and Python for data loaders, requiring Python 3.12+ and self-managed dependencies.

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  • Drop #709 (2025-09-12): Keeping It Super Simple

    The Friday Drop is all about reducing cognitive load & keeping things simple. It showcases incplot, a terminal plotting tool for visualizing structured data, highlights 3 classic Unix utilities, & links to a minimalist guide to Linux commands.

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  • Drop #708 (2025-09-11): Toss-Up Thursday

    More is less, in today’s Drop since it’s most-ly featuring pagers, SQL tutorials, and a bonkers number of drop-in CSS themes to make you looks like a CSS, SQL, and terminal genius.

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  • Drop #707 (2025-09-09): Typography Tuesday

    In today’s typography-centric edition of the Drop we have a typewriter-inspired mono font, a “back-to-school” font, and a nigh-forgotten line wrapping technique that (IMO) needs to have its own dedicated CSS attribute.

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  • Drop #706 (2025-09-08): Idle

    Today’s Drop sits idly by while you learn about various “idle” items. (You’ll have to click into this one for the deets.)

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  • Bonus Drop #97 (2025-09-07): Bridging, Building & Browsing

    The Bonus Drop discusses the transition from Inoreader to FreshRSS, highlighting RSS-Bridge as a tool to convert websites into RSS feeds. It explores using SmolLM3 for named-entity recognition, and reviews Flow, a Chromium-based browser considered as a potential alternative to Arc after its acquisition by Atlassian.

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  • Drop #705 (2025-09-05): If It Walks Like A 🦆…

    Today’s 🦆 Drop showcases DuckDB’s capabilities for processing NGINX logs and integrating with Observable Notebooks 2.0 for interactive SQL querying. It also introduces the Textplot extension for real-time visualizations in SQL queries.

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  • Drop #704 (2025-09-04): Toss Up Thursday

    This unplanned anti-“AI” themed Drop covers: FreshRSS, a powerful self-hosted RSS aggregator; Compromise, a JavaScript NLP library for practical text analysis; and “Clankers Die on Christmas,” a satirical take on artificial intelligence.

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  • Drop #703 (2025-09-02): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s Drop discusses some spiffy syntax highlighting hacks using OpenType features, shows how to de-Google your fonts, and intros the unexpected journey of “@” into our everyday lives.

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  • Drop #702 (2025-08-29): Archival Edition

    Today’s Drop emphasizes the significance of preserving independent copies of vital information resources like Wikipedia, especially amidst increasing political pressures. It highlights tools and initiatives such as Kiwix for offline access, the Antifa Torrent Server for government data, and open community efforts to safeguard weather data, enhancing data accessibility and preservation.

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  • Drop #701 (2025-08-28): Thursday Morning Grab Bag

    Today’s Drop discusses advancements in CSS, highlighted by the calc() function, and its surprising applications, particularly regarding infinity in calculations. It also examines vulnerabilities in AI image scaling as reported by Trail of Bits. Lastly, it mentions Yamanotes, a music box featuring JR Yamanote Line melodies.

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  • Drop #700 (2025-08-26): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s typography-centric edition of the Drop showcases 3 notable typefaces: Areal, a modernized version of Arial optimized for the web; Another Man’s Treasure, a TrueType font honoring the TRS-80’s character sets; and Myra 4F, a decorative Ukrainian display font. Each highlights unique design goals and cultural significance.

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