hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

domain; dog; DNS Looking Glass Today, we hyper-focus on DNS, first featuring a near-bulletproof DNS library, then a DNS client utility I cannot believe I have not dropped yet, and, finally, a neat DNS troubleshooting resource. The inspiration for this post is that we’re going to have at least one collaborative innovation event this year.…

Flame; Plain Old Python Functions; Arc Boosts Flame If you self-host service(s) you likely have some way to catalog and gain access to them, especially if they’re web-based services. This can be done in a legacy bookmarks fashion, or via custom spaces in the nascent/modern Arc browser (which we feature a bit in the third…

Gephi 0.10; Deere John; Risky [Data] Business Programming Note: I have a more focused edition coming on password managers that will include a surprise guest author contribution (they’re dropping deets on how to use KeePassXC everywhere, which likely gives the author’s identity away to about 1/15th of the newsletter subscriber list). I’ll be adding more…

whoami Surprise; iTerm AI; Tau I’m away from the compound for a couple of days, and I pen this edition on the Amtrak Downeaster as it careens down what seem like ancient tracks to one of my least favourite locations on the planet: Boston, Mass. Being on (at least this leg of) the Downeaster is…

Getting By With A Little Help From AI We kick off the 2023 “Weekend Project Edition” series with a small, exploratory project to help us all get used to our new AI overlords assistants. HTTPie (pronounced aitch-tee-tee-pie) is a “command-line HTTP client. Its goal is to make CLI interaction with web services as human-friendly as possible. HTTPie…

svgasm; svg.path; svg2pdf (Rust) I’m a big fan of scalable vector graphics (SVG) likely due to also being one of those weirdos who actually likes XML (in certain contexts). SVG composition mental model just seems to “make sense”. The D3 JS library also helped keep my SVG crush alive, since that’s one of the primary…

Ham Radio All-in-one-Cable; [T]rain Trackr; The Whole Thing (In Python) I often forgo adding physical (electronic) items in these drops, since they generally require some coin and usually some not-as-common-as-one-might-think skills. To make up for that, I’m including three (well, four, really, but the last one in FIN requires an entirely different skill set and…

My 2023 “Defaults”; Copyright Catharsis; Ten New Year’s Resolutions For Editors^WWriters I spent a non-insignificant part of 2023-01-02 finally re-arranging my iOS home screen for optimal usage. I won’t go into those (dreadfully boring and possibly embarrassing) details. However, I thought it might be helpful to drop what my “defaults” are for 2023 in terms…

Your 2022 Annual Report; Calendar Wheels; Pointer Pointer It’s Day 02 of 2023, and I’ve already typed “20223^H^H3” just under 20 times since Sunday. I take that as a sign that it’s going to be a really weird year. Your 2022 Annual Report Most of us, even in just some small way, tend to use…

Navel-gazing ¾ Year Of Drops I had intended to publish a few more single-shot “left behind” drops, but we ended up driving back to the Maine compound early to see just how bad the storm damage might have been. Thankfully, there were no busted pipes and just some minor cleanup was necessary. This freed up…