hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

  • Drop #719 (2025-10-17): Free-Form Friday

    Today’s Drop covers Gephi Lite, a user-friendly, browser-based tool for network visualization, allowing exploration of graphs on mobile devices without installation. It also digs a little into Isochrones which represent areas reachable within specified travel times, accounting for real-world conditions. And, it links to the prompts in The Obsidian AI tagger which enhances note-taking through…

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  • Drop #718 (2025-10-16): Toss-Up Thursday

    Today’s Drop shares insights on three resources: WorkKit, which decodes Apple’s iWork formats; a critique on software “un-quality” normalization; and AstroDither, a creative coding project for audio-visual interaction.

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  • Drop #715 (2025-10-10): Web-Slinging Friday

    Today’s webby Drop highlights the HTML element’s purpose, the Journal of Web Engineering’s efforts to establish web development standards, and the risks of old SSL certificates through BygoneSSL, which can lead to various cybersecurity threats.

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  • Drop #714 (2025-10-06): Monday Morning Grab Bag

    Today’s Drop reflects on the “vibe coding revolution,” questioning its impact on resource creation for coders. It also introduces three projects: The Garage, an efficient object storage system; wxpull, a minimalist weather tool using open data; and faup-rs, a fast URL parser in Rust.

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  • Bonus Drop #99 (2025-10-04): Duly Noted

    THE DROPS ARE BACK! Today, we tackle three note-taking tools: Blinko, Piles, and Memos. Blinko is an AI-integrated self-hosted system with features for task management and Markdown support. Piles is a minimal web clipper lacking organization tools, while Memos offers a lightweight, self-hosted knowledge base focused on simplicity and data privacy.

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  • Drop #713 (2025-09-19): AVAST ME HEARTIES!

    Today’s Drop discusses accessing and utilizing U.S. maritime safety data, focusing on Anti-Shipping Activity Messages, while highlighting challenges faced due to changes in data accessibility. It describes a method to retrieve piracy-related datasets using R and DuckDB, emphasizing the need for continual data scraping to maintain a comprehensive dataset.

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  • Drop #712 (2025-09-18): Toss-Up Thursday

    Today’s Drop discusses diverse topics including readability tools to enhance writing clarity, the challenges of obtaining structured JSON from LLMs, and Apple’s introduction of a private CSS property for Liquid Glass effects.

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  • Bonus Drop #98 (2025-09-14): Observable Notebooks Data Loaders Example

    This week, the Bonus Drop features a practical example of using Python data loaders in Observable Notebooks 2.0. Data loaders enhance notebook performance by executing code in advance, facilitating access to diverse data formats. Observable currently supports Node.js and Python for data loaders, requiring Python 3.12+ and self-managed dependencies.

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  • Drop #708 (2025-09-11): Toss-Up Thursday

    More is less, in today’s Drop since it’s most-ly featuring pagers, SQL tutorials, and a bonkers number of drop-in CSS themes to make you looks like a CSS, SQL, and terminal genius.

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  • Drop #706 (2025-09-08): Idle

    Today’s Drop sits idly by while you learn about various “idle” items. (You’ll have to click into this one for the deets.)

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