Sal's recent blog posts
You know the ones: “The web is dying.” “No one will create anymore.” Blah blah blah. Come on, chin up. Sure, things might get worse by some measurements. Maybe much worse. But for all we know, that could lead to humans getting so fed up with modern tech that we embark on some sort of renaissance. Or it could be Skynet tanks rolling over skulls. The point is: nobody knows.…
Naturally I clicked into The Listening Museum when I saw it in Kottke’s feed. “36 mechanical keyboards and switches, curated and sound-mapped. From IBM Model M (1985) to Topre to thocky modern customs. Click any card, type on your real keyboard, hear it as if it were on your desk.” I clacked a few clacks and felt some solid Obama-not-bad vibes. But what stuck with me most was one…
The Altar II is a mechanical Magic Keyboard. From the HN announcement : Today I’m revealing Altar II, an ultra-low profile (4.75mm) mechanical keyboard designed to replace your Magic Keyboard. It’s the keyboard I wish Apple made. Altar II has fully mechanical switches, plus a magnetically detachable dial, haptic feedback, a red backlight, and a native macOS companion app. As someone who likes…
Here’s a cool fish trick: abbr --add jjc --set-cursor -- 'jj commit -m "%"' This adds an abbreviation , which is a like an auto-expanding bash alias, that puts your cursor at the % character. So when I type jjc in my terminal and hit space, that expands to: jj commit -m "<cursor>" Handy!
I’m working from the beautiful Oregon coast for a few days this week. I set up a makeshift desk in front of three large-ish windows with a view of Neahkahnie Mountain . My image in video calls looks so much better here compared to my home office, which is in our underground basement and has only one tiny little window to let light in. It’s amazing what natural light can do. On that…
My wife has insisted for some time now that my hearing sucks. Meanwhile, I think she’s a bit of a low talker. I had my ears checked this week by an audiologist, and my hearing is “borderline” normal except for a particular band of frequencies in which I have achieved “mild” hearing loss. And it just so happens that the typical adult female voice falls within those…
As threatened , I moved the blog to pico.sh pgs because pico.sh is so dang cool and much more in the spirit of indiewebbing than Cloudflare. That’s all I’ll say about it, and I say it only because I once again ask: if I broke anything, please email me! With that, I promise I’ll stop blogging about this blog for the rest of the month because I’ve been doing way too much of…
Baty just posted this and I just have to follow suit. It’s hilarious and painful how relevant it is to my blog lately : On the x-axis, and just spiritually, I’m somewhere around the “Moved from Jekyll to Hugo people.” But I’m pretty high on the y-axis as well, which probably means I need to chill out . Comic credit to Rakhim .
Wow, pico.sh looks very enticing. I found it last night after reading Brennan’s post, Free Speech and the IndieWeb , which discusses the reasons he doesn’t use Cloudflare. See also his longer post on this topic . I have been feeling a little dirty about using Cloudflare for hosting this little indie blog. Plus, Cloudflare frustrated me this week when it wouldn’t update my broken…
I was succumbing to my Hacker News habit recently and saw this post from Rands: The Title Cards in Blade Runner Are Fucking Amazing . PT Mono was in the list of fixed-width fonts that made his cut. For some reason it stuck in my brain. Maybe because I hadn’t heard of it. Later, I found myself perusing macOS’s Font Book app. There, in the relatively small Fixed Width collection of…
As I mentioned , I accidentally published all my draft posts. You know, the ones I cheekily listed at the bottom of my ripgrep post . All public and in my RSS feed. Dangit. What happened I can’t know for sure, but here’s what I suspect happened. Sloppiness on my part When Hugo builds my production site, it puts the files in the public/ subdirectory. I then upload that subdir to…
Adding to the fun of this Hugo migration, I accidentally published all my draft posts this morning. If you happened to see the actual words of those posts (they might be cached in your feed reader), I realize you now can’t unsee them. My sincerest condolences. I’ll do a followup post once I figure out what happened and how exactly I fixed it.
Here’s a good post and tips from Mike Harley: How I make my blog posts more resilient . Mike recommends self-hosting media. I’ve been back and forth about doing that vs. using something like Cloudinary or Cloudflare. I think Mike makes a good point, and I’ll keep the images in my blog repo. Mike also puts permalinks in his posts proactively (excuse the accidental alliteration) so…
You know those moments where you think, dang, computers are so insanely fast now … so why in the world does software still feel slow?? Well ripgrep is the antidote to that feeling. It’s just mind-bogglingly fast. I flippin’ love ripgrep. I use it for so much stuff. Anyway, today I found a nice snippet that lists all my blog posts that are still in draft status: rg '^draft( = |:…
It’s smoky in Portland right now. For the moment, we’ve got the worst AQI of any “major” city in the world. Here’s what it looks like outside (image from Oregonlive.com ): It’s a drag. My kids both have camps this week that have either been canceled or compromised. Exercising outside is a bad idea. I’m monitoring our indoor AQI with a couple sensors and…