hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

  • Drop #717 (2025-10-14): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s Drop explores comic book lettering as a visual language with distinct grammar, emphasizing artistic conventions. It features the New Heterodox Mono font, blending elegance with functionality in programming. Additionally, it highlights the necessity of using relative CSS units for accessible web design and mastering modern typography principles for improved user experience.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #716 (2025-10-13): If You Build It, It Will (Probably) Run

    Today’s Drop has a focus on Meson, a build system/toolkit that streamlines builds and dependency management. Qman (build with Meson) modernizes Unix manual pages with user-friendly features, while mpv (also built with Meson) delivers a minimalist, high-performance media playback experience, focusing on control and extensibility.

    hrbrmstr

  • Bonus Drop #100 (2025-10-12): Al-terminal-tive Lifestyles

    The wekeend Bonus Drop discusses three al-terminal-tive CLI/TUI utilities: Skim, Liquidprompt, and Zenith. Skim is a fast fuzzy finder for seamless file searching. Liquidprompt offers a customizable, context-aware prompt for Bash/Zsh, enhancing usability. Zenith is an advanced system monitor featuring zoomable charts and historical data tracking, providing in-depth performance insights.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #715 (2025-10-10): Web-Slinging Friday

    Today’s webby Drop highlights the HTML element’s purpose, the Journal of Web Engineering’s efforts to establish web development standards, and the risks of old SSL certificates through BygoneSSL, which can lead to various cybersecurity threats.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #714 (2025-10-07): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s Drop introduces Retrocide Mono, a unique monospaced font suitable for retro-futurist designs, devoid of descenders for a mechanical look. It highlights James Edmondson’s OH no Type School as an interactive resource for learning glyph design. Additionally, it presents RoboFont, a powerful, Python-based macOS font editor offering extensive customization for type designers.

    hrbrmstr

  • 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.

    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.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #713 (2025-09-19): AVAST ME HEARTIES!

    Today’s Drop discusses accessing and utilizing U.S. maritime safety data, focusing on Anti-Shipping Activity Messages, while highlighting challenges faced due to changes in data accessibility. It describes a method to retrieve piracy-related datasets using R and DuckDB, emphasizing the need for continual data scraping to maintain a comprehensive dataset.

    hrbrmstr

  • 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.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #711 (2025-09-16): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s typography-centric edition of the Drop explores the significance of typography in video games, illustrating its evolution from functional necessity to a vital artistic element. It highlights how different games utilize fonts to enhance player immersion and identity, facing unique technical challenges and licensing issues. Meanwhile, the Go programming language has its own clear and…

    hrbrmstr