hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

  • Drop #687 (2025-07-31): A Trio Of Timely Topics

    Today’s Drop features three significant resources: Observable Desktop & Notebook Kit 2.0 enhances local notebook functionality for easier deployment, while Jono Alderson’s piece critiques the shifting focus of SEO from URLs to assertions for digital authority. Additionally, a guide on integrating Bitwarden with direnv improves secure credential management in coding.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #679 (2025-07-10): No, Thanks. I’m Just Browsing.

    Today’s Drop discusses 2 new “AI”-driven browsers: Dia & Comet, + introduces Kite. Dia offers an “AI”-laden browsing experience but lacks functionality and has privacy issues. Comet provides better integration and automation but is/will be costly. Kagi’s Kite focuses on delivering concise news summaries while ensuring user privacy.

    hrbrmstr

  • Bonus Drop #89 (2025-06-28): Shop^wInfer Local

    The Weekend Bonus Drop highlights 2 projects using local inference models for generating alt text and enhancing OCR, encouraging experimentation with these tools as a safeguard against the impending instability of mainstream AI services.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #673 (2025-06-30): Long[er] Form Monday

    Today’s Drop discusses the shortcomings of relying on LLMs in development, positing they may highlight poor tooling rather than technological progress. It also reviews Cloudflare’s secure video conferencing platform, Orange, and addresses the unsettling trend of businesses replacing human imagery with AI avatars, reflecting a diminishing emphasis on human value.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #672 (2025-06-27): If It Walks Like A…

    We have another 🦆-billed Drop today, featuring: DuckPlot — an open-source JavaScript library for generating charts from DuckDB with automatic SQL generation; The mcp-visualization-duckdb package, which allows users to create visualizations through natural language queries, bypassing SQL; & DuckDB-QuickJS which integrates a JavaScript engine for flexible data processing within SQL, enhancing DuckDB’s analytical capabilities.

    hrbrmstr

  • Bonus Drop #87 (2025-06-22): Taking One For The Team

    The weekend Bonus Drop reviews Microsoft’s basic terminal text editor, edit, deemed unremarkable due to its lack of features. It highlights the Raycast Ollama extension, showcasing its capabilities for efficiently managing local and remote LLM models with advanced integrations. Finally, it introduces ttl.sh, an ephemeral Docker image registry for secure, temporary sharing without authentication.

    hrbrmstr

  • Bonus Drop #86 (2025-06-15): I Think You May Be Projecting

    The Weekend Bonus Drop covers two data engineering projects utilizing #DuckDB. The first project improves rock-climbing trip planning by integrating climbing routes with precise weather forecasts. The second project organizes Garmin activity data into a clean database. Both exemplify real-world engineering challenges for personal projects, emphasizing practical problem-solving and hands-on learning in data management.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #663 (2025-06-11): Wednesday Morning Grab Bag

    The midweek Drop covers MarkText, a FOSS Markdown editor with real-time preview and advanced features; fingerprinting w/WASM, highlighting its precision + privacy implications; & Cerberus, a Caddy plugin that implements SHA-256 challenges to combat automated AI bot abuse, prioritizing service protection over user convenience.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #661 (2025-06-05): Context Is Critical

    Today’s drop reflects on Postman’s MCP “factory” which simplifies MCP server generation, but raises security concerns, as Virus Total reports nearly 8% of deployed servers (not just from Postman’s tool) showing vulnerabilities. It also talks about and posits on the “Natural Language Web” (NLWeb) — a protocol for querying websites in natural language, prompting debates…

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #660 (2025-06-04): Cyber Cyber Cyber 👨🏼‍🍳 🤖

    Today’s Drop is 100% focused on CyberChef👨🏼‍🍳! CyberChef is an intuitive browser-based tool for data manipulation and cryptography, allowing users to create recipes for data transformations effortlessly. The CyberChef Server offers a RESTful API for automated operations, while the CyberChef MCP server enables AI agents to perform tasks autonomously, enhancing data analysis capabilities. Explore these…

    hrbrmstr