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Drop #639 (2025-04-15): [Tardy] Typography Tuesday
Today’s [tardy — due to DOGE] Typography Tuesday covers a study questioning I-beam designs using typeface cross-sections, the manicule’s historical significance as a symbol, and a modern sans serif font, Ronzino, contrasting with Arial in design and functionality.
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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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Bonus Drop #82 (2025-04-12): Quick Hits
The weekend Bonus Drop contains 3 “quick hits”. One highlights Lit web components’ advantages, another showcases FLOCKMTL’s integration of LLMs into #DuckDB SQL workflows, and features Granary’s role as a universal translator for social web data.
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Drop #636 (2025-04-10): Three Off The Top
Today’s Drop sports “Bare”, a lightweight JavaScript runtime optimizing for modular app development; JAWSM, a project executing JavaScript directly in WebAssembly, enhancing performance and reducing file size; and Remind, a command-line calendar tool for managing complex schedules through text files, catering to users who prefer simplicity in scheduling.
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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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Drop #634 (2025-04-08): Typography Tuesday
Today’s typography-centric edition of the Drop discusses the evolution of smart quotes and accent marks in typography, highlighting their historical context and modern usage. It also introduces the Style Manual, which provides guidance on British and American English punctuation, and features the DT Hebrinks typeface, a free serif font. Overall, it emphasizes the importance of…
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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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Drop #631 (2025-03-31): Happy [Belated] BoothDay To You
Today’s Drop covers three significant topics: Charles Booth’s transformative social research on urban poverty through innovative mapping, the alarming expansion of aggressive immigration enforcement under the Trump administration causing widespread disappearances, and a vital NIH grant termination tracker promoting transparency and accountability amid funding cuts. Each emphasizes the power of individual initiative and data in…
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Bonus Drop #80 (2025-03-30): Shameless
The Weekend [Shameless] Bonus Drop showcases a spiffy accessible color palette generator, a project that will help turn the “news” into a research corpus, and some updates on various personal projects.