hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

Archive

  • Drop #754 (2026-01-06): Typography Tuesday

    The first Typography Tuesday Drop of 2026 covers two presentations. The first is from the 39th Chaos Communication Congress and explores the complexities of real-time text rendering while the second introduces a font that features built-in TeX syntax highlighting. Additionally, Google Sans Flex, a versatile open-license font, is highlighted for its adjustable design attributes.

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  • Drop #753 (2026-01-05): Monday Morning Grab Bag

    Today’s Drop discusses advancements in scrollytelling using CSS rather than JavaScript, the CSVW/FDP standards for enhancing CSV files with structured metadata, and Craig Silverman’s new OSINT media venture, Indicator, aimed at teaching verification skills amid rising disinformation.

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  • Bonus Drop #106 (2026-01-04): K.I.S.S.

    The first Bonus Drop of 2026 presents three simplified tools: Mastoshare enhances Mastodon link sharing by routing users to their home instances without tracking; doxx allows terminal viewing of .docx files with formatting; nettool.sh is a Bash script that consolidates networking tasks for sysadmins. Each tool boosts efficiency in its respective domain.

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  • Drop #751 (2026-01-02): Fool Around And Find Out Friday

    The Friday Drop covers: lint-http, a Rust-based forward proxy tool for analyzing HTTP traffic; a Cooked.wiki FOSS alternative along with the challenges food blogs face due to AI and LLMs in recipe content; and Columnar’s predictions for data infrastructure in 2026, focusing on Apache Arrow’s growth and the need for improved interoperability and accessibility in…

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  • Drop #750 (2026-01-01): The Drop’s Daily Drivers For 2026

    The inaugural Drop of 2026 outlines various tools and software I ended up using in 2025, organized into categories such as development environment, programming languages, and productivity. Notable mentions include Zed, vim, and Raycast for coding, while DuckDB and Grist support data management. ~60 tools covered.

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  • Drop #749 (2025-12-31): 2025 — Dropped

    The final Drop of 2025 looks back on posts, totaling 265,227 words, exploring fonts, digital tools and other resources.

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  • Drop #748 (2025-12-30): Typography Tuesday

    The final Typography Tuesday edition of the Drop for 2025 discusses the political implications of font choices, particularly the U.S. State Department’s switch from Calibri to Times New Roman, highlighting biases related to DEIA policies. It also emphasizes typography’s impact on public safety and introduces Fantasque Sans Mono, a visually playful yet functional programming font,…

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  • Drop #747 (2025-12-29): Monday Morning Grab Bag

    Today’s theme-less and abbreviated Drop looks at two topics: Out Of Band Security Testing (OAST) and the Gleam programming language. OAST enhances vulnerability detection by leveraging external servers to expose blind vulnerabilities, while Gleam combines the reliability of the BEAM virtual machine with type safety and modern syntax aimed at web developers.

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  • Drop #746 (2025-12-26): Boxing Day Grab Bag

    Today’s Drop discusses three main topics: mq, a Rust-based Markdown processing tool designed for structured data transformations; UBLOCKAI, a comprehensive blocklist of AI-generated content to enhance search engine results; and Friendly SQL, a guide featuring innovative SQL techniques for data manipulation in DuckDB.

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  • Drop #745 (2025-12-23): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s Drop covers the RFSL’s “Human Writes” font designed to evade Meta’s ad ban, allowing messages deemed political to be visually obscured. It also covers David Jones “pay-what-you-want” bundle of fourteen fonts, “Advent of Type 2025.” And, shows how to “hack” Adobe to use their fonts without breaking the bank.

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  • Drop #743 (2025-12-22): Monday Afternoon Grab Bag

    Today’s Drop discusses three tools: daff, MDXport, and GrAIphViz. Daff enables efficient processing of tabular data changes, resembling git for CSV files. MDXport allows users to easily convert Markdown to high-quality PDFs using a browser-based platform. GrAIphViz employs structured flowchart rules to enhance AI instruction clarity.

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  • Bonus Drop #105 (2025-12-20): Exploits • Errors • Education

    Today’s Drop proffers RSC Explorer for visualizing React Server Components vulnerabilities, a Cloudflare Error Page Generator for creating custom error pages, and SQL Quest: The Bank Job, a gamified SQL practice to enhance skills using realistic data.

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  • 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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