hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

o11y Primer/OpenTelemetry; o11y MELTdown; USE o11y in 60-Seconds On page 121 of “The lore and language of schoolchildren” (free to borrow), the chapter on the “Code of Oral Legislation” begins with this declarative: The schoolchild, in his primitive community, conducts his business with his fellows by ritual declaration. His affidavits, promissory notes, claims, deeds of…

Botkit; Botpress; BotMan The rapid evolution of large language models has been a boon for those would seek to usurp humans even further from the loop when it comes to Q&A sessions for encounters such as product/service inquiries, customer complaints, and generalized help requests. I will admit to likely preferring automated assistance in some contexts,…

Turbopak; Freeform; Planet Hulk or Supernova? For $REASONS it’s a crazy $WORK week, which impacted my ability to get a drop in on Wensday (deliberate spelling as I’ve been on a ranty protest against, of late, regarding the silent ‘d’ in the traditional spelling of yesterday’s day name). Turbopak Virtually any halfway large or complex…

vl-convert; lux; altair Themes There is a rich data visualization ecosystem around the Vega and Vega-Lite grammars. Today’s drop includes a new CLI utility for working with Vega[-Lite] specs, dead simple Vega-powered interactive EDA, and theming resources to make Vega output less, um, “Vega”. vl-convert Vega-Lite specs are nothing more than JSON files that conform…

💿 Master; awstracer; Raindrop.io 💙 → Twitter 💿 Master If you have never had the joy of listening to the sound of a half-dozen stepper motors tapping out a discordant staccato beat as they orchestrate the siphoning of data from thin, reflective discs, you have missed out on a remarkable era of computing. Our “app…

HotHost; DomainMOD; Cachet Weekend projects are fun and all, but if you fire up a bunch of internet-facing services, how do you keep track of them all? Use some of your side-project time this weekend to finally get a handle on the health of your ecosystem. My weekend project is the Knowledge Drop I’ve been…

Browserless; Headless Recorder; shot-scraper There may not be any horsemen in this edition, but plenty of other headless wonders await your attention. I can lead you to these resources — and you may eagerly delve into each one; but, as the poem says, “What happens after is up to you.” Browserless Even though the responsibilities…

AI-Driven Blog Augmentation; Pipes vs Humanity; Linux In Your Browser AI-Driven Blog Augmentation This section is super short, as the target article is pretty detailed/thorough. Picking images for section headers in this newsletter is pretty easy. Either a screenshot of a tool/site or some Unsplash image usually suffices as a decent decoration for a given…

wtfutil; webhook; termshark Working in a shop with incredibly talented Golang engineers has given me a bit more appreciation of the language (FWIW Smalltalk is still the best, followed by Rust and R), so today’s edition features three useful tools that even Inspector Gadget would find useful. wtfutil Continuing on the regularly recurring theme of…

Undead FOSS; RustDesk; onefetch The road trip to see #2.1 took up way more time than expected, so I’ll have to weave in the mDNS (et al.) Knowledge Drop later this week. Today, we rummage through some weekend finds . Undead FOSS Despite the ridiculously early emergence of fake 🎄🎄🎄 at big box stores, it…