Scott Hanselman on Programming, User Experience, The Zen of Computers and Life in General
The Japanese are really good at woodworking. And I love watching the Yankee workshop, my dad makes Native American bows and arrows completely from scratch in his workshop with trees that he finds. This is all different from the stuff you get at IKEA, but I’ve been coding now for money for 35 years and systems are still complicated, computers still do dumb stuff, humans still do dumb stuff, this is…
People should not be judging AI-augmented coding by “1 shots.” If someone told you that their model did a “one shot of Minecraft” and they’re impressed by that, you need to consider how much semantic heavy lifting the word “Minecraft” is doing in that prompt. Ask them to one shot Minecraft without using the word Minecraft. It’s not trivial to one shot something unique, because programming is the…
Mac Tahoe (in Beta as of the time of this writing) has this new feature called Edge Light that basically puts a bright picture of an Edge Light around your screen and basically uses the power of OLED to give you a virtual ring light. So I was like, why can't we also have nice things? I wrote ( vibed, with GitHub Copilot and Claude Sonnet 4.5 ) a Windows Edge Light App (source code at…
I use my webcam constantly for streaming and I'm pretty familiar with all the internals and how the camera model on Windows works. I also use OBS extensively, so I regularly use the OBS virtual camera and flow everything through Open Broadcasting Studio. For my podcast, I use Zencastr which is a web-based app that talks to the webcam via the browser APIs. For YouTubes, I'll use Riverside or…
See the canonical version of this blog post at the Microsoft Open Source Blog ! Ten years ago, Microsoft released the source for MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 to the Computer History Museum, and then later republished them for reference purposes. This code holds an important place in history and is a fascinating read of an operating system that was written entirely in 8086 assembly code nearly 45 years ago.…
I've been doing not just Unit Testing for my sites but full on Integration Testing and Browser Automation Testing as early as 2007 with Selenium. Lately, however, I've been using the faster and generally more compatible Playwright . It has one API and can test on Windows, Linux, Mac, locally, in a container (headless), in my CI/CD pipeline, on Azure DevOps, or in GitHub Actions. For me, it's that…
There are many let's encrypt automatic tools for azure but I also wanted to see if I could use certbot in wsl to generate a wildcard certificate for the azure Friday website and then upload the resulting certificates to azure app service. Azure app service ultimately needs a specific format called dot PFX that includes the full certificate path and all intermediates. Per the docs, App Service…
GitHub Next has this cool project that is basically Copilot for the CLI (command line interface). You can sign up for their waitlist at the Copilot for CLI site . Copilot for CLI provides three shell commands: ?? , git? and gh? This is cool and all, but I use PowerShell. Turns out these ?? commands are just router commands to a larger EXE called github-copilot-cli. So if you go "?? something"…
Mastodon is a free, open-source social networking service that is decentralized and distributed. It was created in 2016 as an alternative to centralized social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. One of the key features of Mastodon is the use of the WebFinger protocol, which allows users to discover and access information about other users on the Mastodon network. WebFinger is a simple…
I have been blogging here for the last 20 years. Every Tuesday and Thursday, quite consistently, for two decades. But last year, without planning it, I got tired and stopped. Not sure why. It didn't correspond with any life events. Nothing interesting or notable happened. I just stopped. I did find joy on TikTok and amassed a small group of like-minded followers there. I enjoy my YouTube as well,…
I am not a Home Assistant expert, but it's clearly a massive and powerful ecosystem. I've interviewed the creator of Home Assistant on my podcast and I encourage you to check out that chat. Home Assistant can quickly become a hobby that overwhelms you. Every object (entity) in your house that is even remotely connected can become programmable. Everything. Even people! You can declare that any…