hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

  • Drop #656 (2025-05-26): A Different Kind Of Memor[y|ial] Day

    Today’s Drop emerges from a brutal travel/work week for a Memor[y|ial] focused issue that takes a peek at the DuckDB 1.3.0 release, which enhances data analysis with external file caching, improving performance by 75%, and introduces recursive query functionality for complex data structures. It further showcases jOOQ enables type-safe SQL queries in Java/Kotlin and features…

    hrbrmstr

  • 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 #622 (2025-03-17): Monday Morning Grab Bag

    Today’s Drop covers Plonk.li — a new gist service on the ATproto network, storing pastes in Personal Data Servers to enhance data portability; Nash — a portable web-based note-taking app without server dependencies, supporting various formatting options;; and highlights Arc Browser’s new integrated ad blocker.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #584 (2025-01-02): Looking Back To Move Forward

    Today’s Drop discusses the 2024 digital landscape which shows that global internet access is unequal, with only two-thirds online and substantial disparities between income levels; IPv6 adoption surpassed 30%, and decentralized networks like Threads and Bluesky gained millions of users. 👀 to see where we’ve been and where we might be headed in these areas.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #583 (2025-01-01): Wrapping Day

    The inaugural Drop of 2025 takes a look back at the Drops of 2024, my 2025+ daily drivers, and covers a new-to-me tool: Mise.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #580 (2024-12-20): Safety First

    Today’s Drop puts us back into the safety zone, starting with “The 2025 Digital Security Checklist” which highlights strong passwords, encryption, and multi-factor authentication as essential for protecting digital assets. We then get introduced to systemd’s Credentials system to avoid keeping seekrits in the clear. Finally — just in time for the holiday season —…

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #578 (2024-12-18): Wonkish Wednesday

    Today’s very wonky Drop showcases 3 RFCs: HTTP Message Signatures enhance message integrity beyond TLS; RFC 9620 emphasizes designing protocols considering human rights; and RFC 9557 improves timestamp formats, allowing for rich metadata.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #567 (2024-12-06): In Defense Of…

    Today’s Drop explores three distinct topics centered around safety. We take a deep look into DuckDB’s sophisticated query optimization capabilities, examine a new security tool for GitHub Actions workflows, and review the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s comprehensive guide to surveillance self-defense. Each section provides practical insights and actionable guidance for their respective domains.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #552 (2024-11-08): One. Step. Forward.

    Today’s unexpected Drop emphasizes online safety, privacy, and resilience amidst growing threats from tech companies and governments. It starts a conversation about secure communication tools like Signal and offers resources for reducing online privacy exposures.

    hrbrmstr

  • Bonus Drop #55 (2024-07-07): Untangling The Web 🕸️

    The weekend Bonus Drop features SigmaOS, an alternative browser with similar goals Arc has, but using WebKit. Additionally, a new query language “get” for web data extraction is introduced, and a CORS proxy “corsproxy.io” is mentioned, with some example usage.

    hrbrmstr