hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

The Future is Now; Talon; Ruffle The Future is Now Apologies for leading with a fairly disturbing report over at the Global Network on Extremism & Technology (GNET) that’s fully titled: “The Future is Now: The Use of 3D-Printed Guns by Extremists and Terrorists“. GNET is a special project setup by the International Center for…

Squeak 6.0; Actually Portable Executables; Historical Meteorological Sneakernets Squeak 6.0 Before I introduce the latest version of Squeak, I first need to wax poetic about Smalltalk; except that I’ll let the Squeak Wiki do the waxing. Its four ❡, but I promise its good reading: Today’s IT industry is developing and selling lots of new…

Warpgate; Submillimeter-scale multimaterial terrestrial robots; Terraforming Mars (FOSS) A less code-heavy edition today to give y’all a break from git cloneing. Warpgate Perhaps the most ubiquitous cybersecurity problem in any organization (outside of not patching installed software) the lack of something called “network segmentation“. MITRE ATT&CK (a globally accessible knowledge base of defender resources, including adversary…

Zig; Bun; Carbonated Dust I will begin with a “Doh!”. I had not realized my VS Code Markdown → Substack’s terrible editor was dropping links that I decorated with <code> blocks (I’ll go back and add URLs to all the previous links that were dropped later this week). Zig I wanted to mention “Bun” today…

QuickJS; cmux & sslh; Sand Batteries QuickJS I 💙 programming languages of all flavours (yes, I even have a pre-revelation, two-sizes-too-small Grinch 🖤 for Python), and some of the most fun I’ve had programming these past few decades has involved language and compiler design/implementation. I’d venture to say that most coders have no idea just…

fswatch; sandbox-exec; aws-nuke I’m technically still on holiday, so this is a bit more lightweight edition than normal. Back to the usual babblings Tuesday! fswatch This isn’t exactly “new”, but I am regularly surprised at how few folks know about fswatch, a tool and library that monitors filesystem locations for changes. It’s likely easier to…

JSON Visio; Espanso; Bull***t Charts Reminder: we are on holiday next week. Further reminder: 🇺🇸 liberal democracy suffered some major blows, again, this week. Try not to sit on the sidelines if you’re a citizen. JSON Visio JSON Visio [GH] is “data visualization tool [created by Aykut Saraç (@aykutsarach) ] for your JSON data which…

Secrets; q; Hurl Secrets Full-disclosure: When 1Password went all stupid lazy and moved from native OS apps to wrapping entire web browsers to present simple user-interfaces, I ditched them. In truth, I also ditched them due to how much they seem to hate macOS systems administrators, forcing them to do some tricks to get the…

Davies’ Maps; ReadySet; Viddy Davies’ Maps If you regularly cruise the javascript data visualization parts of the internet, you’ve very likely seen the handiwork of Jason Davies (@jasondavies). From word clouds, to bullet charts (I think we really need to rename this chart type), and nearly every cool thing in-between, Davies has applied his maths…

MarkWhen; netop; The Connected Abode: Preface MarkWhen It’s not often that I come across a new toy and has pretty much all the features I want present and accounted for with no need for some extra hacking. MarkWhen [GH], by self-described “technologist” Rob Koch, ticks all the boxes for me when it comes to producing…