hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

  • 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

  • Bonus Drop #88 (2025-06-28):

    The weekend Bonus Drop discusses two developer tools: MCPJam Inspector and mcp-cli, designed for testing and debugging Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Additionally, it explores a project on replicating Apple’s Liquid Glass effect in web browsers using SVG filters and Three.js, emphasizing creativity and ingenuity in overcoming browser limitations.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #671 (2025-06-26): On Display

    Today’s Drop covers the recent, er…, “drop” of the W3C’s PNG-3 standard which introduces significant improvements, including official support for Animated PNG (APNG), enhanced color management, and EXIF data integration. It also covers Keith Clark’s RichInput web component enhances form inputs with real-time feedback; and links to a humorous post discussing the inevitable complexity in…

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #669 (2025-06-23): Monday Morning (Barely) Grab Bag

    The Monday Drop discusses 3 main topics: a Rube Goldberg-inspired data pipeline to archive X posts into #DuckDB, the #RStats package {fplot} for automating distribution plot creation in R, and an article from CSS-Tricks on advanced CSS color techniques, detailing color spaces and models for modern web development.

    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

  • Drop #667 (2025-06-19): Jora Making Me Crazy

    Today’s Drop is all aboutJora: a versatile search tool designed for efficient information retrieval and organization in data files. It supports easy query writing, handles errors gracefully, removes duplicates, and preserves original data. The ecosystem includes jora-cli for JSON processing, Discovery.js for visualization, and JsonDiscovery for browser-based exploration of JSON data.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #666 (2025-06-17): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s ominously numbered typography edition of the Drop explores the darker aspects of typography, focusing on Zalgo text, a chaotic representation achieved through Unicode, and Hellvetica, a subversively broken Helvetica font that distorts readability. It also discusses the Seven Deadly Sins of Typography, named after common mistakes, emphasizing how design can influence communication and provoke…

    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 #664 (2025-06-12): A Cadre Of Clever CLIs

    Today’s CLI-focused Drop introduces 3 neaat utilities: sasqwatch enhances the Unix watch command with output history navigation and diff highlighting for better command monitoring. sizeof simplifies measuring sizes of strings or files in bytes, promoting LLM-assisted development. srgn leverages tree-sitter and regex for precise, language-aware code manipulation, aiding large-scale refactoring.

    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