hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

  • Drop #720 (2025-10-20): Back In The Highlight Again

    Today’s Drop looks at recent updates in log & code visualization tools, highlighting (heh) Logalize for its customizable log colorization, and ch for its simple word highlighting in live streams. It also introduces Lexical Differential Highlighting, which improves code readability in some programming languages by using distinct colors for visually similar tokens, enhancing cognitive processing.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #655 (2025-05-19): Just Another Manic Monday

    Today’s Dop discusses two main topics: rv, a solution for R dependency management, addressing speed, reproducibility, and environment isolation, and Jetrelay, a high-performance relay for Bluesky’s jetstream feed. It emphasizes solution-focused questioning to enhance team productivity, suggesting a shift from problem analysis to actionable solutions for better outcomes.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #580 (2024-12-20): Safety First

    Today’s Drop puts us back into the safety zone, starting with “The 2025 Digital Security Checklist” which highlights strong passwords, encryption, and multi-factor authentication as essential for protecting digital assets. We then get introduced to systemd’s Credentials system to avoid keeping seekrits in the clear. Finally — just in time for the holiday season —…

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #562 (2024-11-26): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s Drop features The Type Archive, established in 1992, closed in 2022 due to financial issues but has been digitized by the Science Museum Group. We also take a quick peek at Damien Guard’s 2023 Advent of Fonts and introduce the free brush-style font, Perfect Moment, which showcases handcrafted aesthetics while maintaining legibility across various…

    hrbrmstr

  • Bonus Drop #66 (2024-11-03): Eye Sea Ewe

    Today’s Drop talks about ICU (International Components for Unicode), whic is essential for Unicode support in software. The recent ICU 76 release improves character handling and formatting capabilities. Tools like opstr and go-icu-regex enhance string operations and regex handling, while Intl.NumberFormat in JavaScript simplifies numeric formatting across various styles and currencies, ensuring robust functionality.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #527 (2024-09-10): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s (well, *yesterday’s*) typography-centric edition of the Drop features accessibility, font evaluation, and San Francisco’s font evolution (and it’s 10th birthday!).

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #479 (2024-06-05): Mid-Week Grab Bag

    Today’s Drop’s covers three distinct topics: the impact of Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) on job applications (and how to hack the system), the Charm ecosystem for terminal user experiences, and the milestone release of DuckDB 1.0.0.

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  • Drop #424 (2024-02-20): Typography Tuesday

    Andy Kirk’s Visualizing Data newsletter is recommended for its quality. Max Esnée’s web app, Stack & Justify, automates the creation of type specimens, saving time and inspiring creativity in typeface design. BlockFace, a modular typography printing kit by Will Mower, bridges digital and physical creative processes. Glyph of the Day, a blog by Kate Sherwood,…

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  • Drop #418 (2024-02-09): Weekend Project Edition

    Your Own Private Ephemeris CLI We spent some time talking about, well, time, this week; specifically, times of various ephemeris. While each of the sections in Drop #416 had a CLI component, we don’t need to settle for someone else’s vision of how things should work! So, today, we’ll use a starter Golang project to…

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  • Drop #405 (2024-01-22): Back In The Saddle

    Today, we cover the introduction of three utilities. Puddy helps compare public DNS resolver results, WebGrep is a Python tool to search and analyze web pages, and fast-rustup speeds up Rust’s rustup setup by running component installs in parallel, significantly reducing installation time. Each tool provides efficient solutions to specific tech-related challenges, enhancing user experience.

    hrbrmstr