hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

  • 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.

    hrbrmstr

  • 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.

    hrbrmstr

  • 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…

    hrbrmstr

  • 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 #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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  • Bonus Drop #99 (2025-10-04): Duly Noted

    THE DROPS ARE BACK! Today, we tackle three note-taking tools: Blinko, Piles, and Memos. Blinko is an AI-integrated self-hosted system with features for task management and Markdown support. Piles is a minimal web clipper lacking organization tools, while Memos offers a lightweight, self-hosted knowledge base focused on simplicity and data privacy.

    hrbrmstr

  • Bonus Drop #99 (2025-09-20): Train Of Thought

    The Bonus Drop has an ASAM update; presents Sniffly, an open-source dashboard by Chip Huyen for analyzing Claude Code usage (with some code & SQL to get similar data from Zed AI); and links to PostHog’s redesigned website resembling a desktop OS for better interaction and usability.

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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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  • 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 #DuckDB SQL queries.

    hrbrmstr