hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

  • Bonus Drop #85 (2025-06-08): Simulated • Wrapped • Neologized

    The weekend Bonus Drop discusses a typewriter simulator by Marcin Wichary, mimicking the experience of traditional typing while educating users about the history of keyboards. It also examines Jonathan’s effort to recreate the effective design of the now-defunct Weatherline app, highlighting the importance of simplicity and user needs in data visualization.

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  • Drop #662 (2025-06-06): Fool Around And Find Out Friday

    The Friday Drop discusses three neat web development topics: SnapDOM, which efficiently captures HTML elements as images, Mavo, which enables folks to create reactive web applications using HTML attributes without JavaScript, and Nicola Rennie’s TARD3IS tutorial, which teaches SVG manipulation through a fun D3.js project.

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  • 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…

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  • 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…

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  • Bonus Drop #84 (2025-05-31): Shop^w Infer Local With Context

    Today’s Bonus Drop discusses the integration of an MCP server within a local Ollama workflow for improved contextual inference. It emphasizes the importance of model selection, particularly favoring qwen2.5-coder for its performance and context handling. The MCP paradigm enhances modularity and flexibility, streamlining tool calling processes while maintaining conversation state effectively. Includes links to working…

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  • Drop #657 (2025-05-27): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s Drop explores the world of sound-responsive typography which reveals how typography transcends visual design by integrating auditory elements. This innovative approach allows text to dynamically respond to sound, creating immersive experiences. Wavefont exemplifies this trend, enabling data visualization through specialized typography that reacts to audio, enhancing emotional connections and storytelling through visual transformation.

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  • Drop #655 (2025-05-19): Just Another Manic Monday

    Today’s Dop discusses two main topics: rv, a solution for R dependency management, addressing speed, reproducibility, and environment isolation, and Jetrelay, a high-performance relay for Bluesky’s jetstream feed. It emphasizes solution-focused questioning to enhance team productivity, suggesting a shift from problem analysis to actionable solutions for better outcomes.

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  • Drop #654 (2025-05-16): Fool Around And Find Out Friday

    Today’s Drop highlights three spiffy tools: uchū offers a modern color palette for web design, emphasizing usability and flexibility; evildeno showcases Deno’s capabilities in offensive security operations, illustrating various attack techniques; and ThumbHash generates efficient image placeholders, enhancing website speed and user experience.

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  • Drop #652 (2025-05-13): Typography Tuesday

    Today’st typography-centric edition of the Drop covers recent typography controversies that include the improper kerning on Pope Francis’ tombstone, which highlighted the importance of precise letter spacing, and the criticism of Nebula Sans for mislabeling itself as “humanist.” Both incidents reflect how typography shapes perceptions and can evoke strong reactions from communities, surpassing mere decorative…

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  • Bonus Drop #83 (2025-05-11): The Mother[’s Day] Of All Drops

    The Bonus Drop returns! Today, we cover SveltePlot, a visualization framework improving upon Observable Plot with component-based reactivity; Dax, which streamlines JavaScript shell scripting across platforms; SSL libraries, highlighting the decline of OpenSSL 3.0 and alternative solutions; and an engaging web experience called Internet Roadtrip that offers a virtual group travel experience.

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