hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

  • Drop #644 (2025-04-28): Monday Morning Grab Bag

    Today’s Drop covers Wave, a versatile terminal combining command-line and graphical features with AI integration; Geolocus, an open IP geolocation database offering physical and logical location data; and Lichen, a Rust-based tool for managing software license files and headers. Each tool aims to enhance productivity and accessibility.

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  • Drop #643 (2025-04-22): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s typography-centric edition of The Drop highlights new developments and challenges in font design. Key points include Microsoft’s Kermit typeface aimed at aiding children with dyslexia, the issues related to thin fonts causing accessibility problems, and the declining status of the em dash due to AI overuse in writing, threatening typographic culture.

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  • Drop #640 (2025-04-17): Twisted Topics Thursday

    Today’s Drop discusses MotherDuck’s #DuckDB Model Context Protocol server with a walk through a look at my sensor network data. It further highlights the rise of automated bots, which now constitute 51% of web traffic, and, lastly, emphasizes the privacy concerns surrounding modern web browsers’ telemetry practices.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #638 (2025-04-14): You Call That A Theme?

    Today’s cobbled together themed Drop sports Browser MCP, a tool that integrates LLMs with web browsers for automation tasks; Arc Export which helps convert pinned tabs from the Arc browser to HTML bookmarks, and a D2 extension for Zed, w/a bonus link to Jumping River’s excellent low-down on R’s 4.5.0 release.

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  • Drop #635 (2025-04-09): Happy WednesdAI!

    Today’s “AI”-centric edition of the Drop focuses on the “Model Context Protocol” (MCP). This new, standardized integration system for LLM/GPT-ops enhances data connectivity and addresses prior fragmentation. However, it significantly lacks security measures, making it vulnerable to command injection and tool poisoning. Practical examples, including a Star Wars API implementation, highlight MCP’s potential while also…

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  • Bonus Drop #81 (2025-04-06): Bonus²

    This weekend Bonus Drop discusses DuckDB’s integration with dbt for effective data transformation, enhancing workflows with features like spatial functions and reverse ETL. It also highlights shell command efficiency improvement tools and introduces Ollamacommit for generating Git commit messages locally, improving privacy and workflow for developers.

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  • Drop #633 (2025-04-04): Friday Morning Grab Bag

    Today’s theme-less Drop showcases Hollama, a user-friendly web interface for LLMs; Tactile Vega-Lite, which enhances accessibility in data visualization for blind users; and Pussh, a parallel SSH tool for managing commands across multiple servers.

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  • Bonus Drop #77 (2025-02-23): Hidden Agendas

    The weekend Bonus Drop showcases how to encode hidden data within Unicode characters, the Atlas of Surveillance which documents law enforcement technologies, and a crowdsourced Project 2025 “progress” tracker.

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  • Drop #604 (2025-02-13): Toss-Up Thursday

    Today’s Drop features treefmt (a multi-language source formatter orchestrator; a framework for evaluating technological progress (w/emphasis on AI); and, introducesCLI tool for selectively downloading GitHub repository content.

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  • Drop #603 (2025-02-12): Suggest • Static • Search

    The Drop has returned after a hiatus, and we focus, today, on some tech that was partly responsible for said hiatus. Zed’s new beta Edit Predictions kicks coding efficiency up a few notches; Eleventy (11ty) facilitates data-driven site generation, and Pagefind offers robust static site search capabilities.

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