hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

  • Drop #732 (2025-11-17): Reliable Sources

    Today’s Drop explores the evolving landscape of coding tools and resources, particularly emphasizing AI’s impact on the decline of small npm packages like blob-util. It introduces Brimstone, a Rust-based JavaScript engine aiming for high ECMAScript compliance, and discusses optimizing DNS lookups to enhance website performance, recommending strategies like dns-prefetch and preconnect.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #731 (2025-11-13): That’s So Random

    Today’s Drop digs into Homebrew’s big 5.0 release, Chaser System’s research into just what these coding agents do on/from your system, and ends with a way to get rid of some “AI” frustration.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #729 (2025-11-10): Publish Or Perish

    Today’s Drop expores tools for a project that involves curating and publishing content beyond a blog. Three systems—MkDocs Material, Trilium Notes, and Wiki.js—are evaluated based on features, ease of use, and security. Each platform has unique pros and cons regarding collaboration, performance, and the technological stack required for hosting.

    hrbrmstr

  • Bonus Drop #102 (2025-11-09): It Always Feels Like Someone Is Watching Me

    The (depressing) Weekend Bonus Drop discusses modern surveillance practices, highlighting a new tool that removes tracking links from Google Docs exports and showcases the Surveillance Watch map, which reveals the surveillance industry’s global scope. It also critiques how gaming companies collect player data under the guise of achievements, normalizing surveillance in entertainment.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #727 (2025-11-06): Forgotten But Not Gone

    Today’s Drop brings some items from simpler times back into active memory: the HTMLTableElement API for creating data tables without libraries, the ‘leave’ terminal command for GTHeckO reminders, and an effective modern use for the HTML element.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #726 (2025-11-04): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s typography-centric edition of the Drop discusses the COLRv1 standard for color fonts enabling dynamic, scalable typography with gradients and animations. It features two specific fonts, Primecolor, which utilizes OpenTypeSVG for vivid lettering, and Nabla, inspired by vintage arcade style, both showcasing the capabilities of COLRv1 in modern web browsers.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #725 (2025-11-03): Monday Grab Bag

    Today’s Drop pits terminal emulators against each other (and the results are sad + surprising). It also showcases a11y.css, a lightweight tool for instant accessibility checks on webpages, and Ben Joffe’s fast-date algorithm, which improves date conversion speeds by 2-10% through a simplified approach.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #723 (2025-10-29): CSS • JS • HTML

    Today’s Drop discusses three core web topics: CSS’s 239 methods of representing the color blue (O_O), the inefficiencies of using await in JavaScript loops, and the HTML Popover API for creating overlays. It emphasizes the complexities arising from legacy choices in CSS, performance patterns in JavaScript, and the [in]accessibility features of popovers.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #722 (2025-10-28): Typography Tuesday

    This week’s typographic edition of the Drop explores 3 key resources: 1984.design’s Typography Basics provides a friendly guide to type communication, while Codepoints.net serves as a searchable atlas for Unicode characters. And, The Is It Tofu? tool helps prevent missing characters in web content.

    hrbrmstr

  • Bonus Drop #101 (2025-10-26): Really Random Resources

    The weekend Bonus Drop covers Typst 0.14.0 which introduces significant enhancements, including automatic tagging for accessible PDFs, improved HTML export, and character-level justification. We also link to Phil Gyford’s memoir that reflects on his nostalgic first experiences with the internet in 1995. Finally, it covers and provides a Dockerfile for Restring, a SvelteKit web app…

    hrbrmstr