Recent content on Steve's Notes
Nebula Sans is the new brand typeface for Nebula, the premium streaming service from independent creators. Based on Source Sans and designed to be a drop-in alternative to Whitney SSm, Nebula Sans is available for anyone to use under the SIL Open Font License. I’ve always liked Whitney - I mocked up an early version of this site using it - but with a $2,400 license fee , it’s just a…
Modern Macs autoboot when lid is opened, this can be a problem for a lot of people (oilrig workers, for example, have to demonstrate their computers are not powered on before flying to the rig). Documenting Apple’s guidance for posterity. To prevent startup when opening the lid or connecting to power: sudo nvram BootPreference=%00 To prevent startup only when opening the lid: sudo nvram…
If after all those years of using your Mac you are still fighting with Finder to get it to behave as you wish, look no further, FinderFix will get it to open every new window in the exact same position and size you want it to. The inability for Finder to remember what size I want my windows to open at has long been an annoyance. This seems to fix that pretty well.
A long time ago I came to an understanding with JavaScript; I didn’t like it and it didn’t like me. When I adopted Eleventy for the previous version of this site around a year ago, I hadn’t appreciated how much JavaScript I’d have to write. I initially thought I’d get away with it, but as I tried to add new sections to the site along with extra bits of functionality,…
Taken from subscriptions in NetNewsWire . I’ve only recently started building up my RSS feed list again, so this is a bit bare for now, more to follow. Andy Bell Brandon Kelly Bryce Wray Craig Hockenberry John Gruber Rob Knight Sara Joy
I’ve added a very quick-and-dirty copy to clipboard function to the site. I’ll find a better/neater way to do that soon, I have a few plans for a larger update to the site. New look’n’feel coming soon.
Clearing favicon caching on Safari is not simple. The commonly accepted steps are below, however in practice this doesn’t appear to work (for me, at least). I’ll update as I investigate. Clear caches from the develop menu Fully quit Safari Delete ~/Library/Safari/Favicon Cache entirely Reboot Launch Safari and re-test website
I’ve spent a little time over the last few weeks gradually reclaiming old blog content from various sources. Some has been pulled from the Wayback Machine , some from old Pinboard archives, some from site backups. Going back over two decades, almost none of it has any value, it’s certainly well beyond being useful , so it’s perhaps entertaining at best. It’s facinating how…
Hugo have just released v0.141.0 which now includes an alignx option on images.Text . Slightly niche perhaps, but it’s exactly what I wanted to generate my OpenGraph images and center the text (more on that another time).
Great little tool for making pretty screenshots. Drag and drop in any screenshot and you can play with borders/background colours/etc.
Pass3words was built to scratch an itch. I generate a lot of passwords at work, and whilst there are dozens of password generators out there none of them were quite friendly enough for what we wanted. The site pulls three random words, from a very large “friendly words” list and presents various forms of the same password. A basic, but still secure, password consisting of just the…
A simple Raspberry Pi based tool to monitor one or more network connections for uptime, ping time and IP address. Planned to have a cloud control panel where you can sign in to see each of your Pingdicators “phoning home”. Still in early development.
Like pass3words.com , Notes was built to scratch an itch. Running an IT company, we constantly had a need to move small pieces of textual data between systems. Serial numbers, long URLs, etc. Nothing with high security, nothing that was being kept for more than a few minutes. We just needed a quick way to paste on one machine and copy on the other. Notes is not intended for long term storage of…
Steve accidentally spent twelve years as a web developer before returning to his roots. He now runs an IT company in the North of Scotland and spends nearly all day in his inbox. This site is (currently 1 ) built in Hugo , replacing the ill fated Eleventy site that I launched at the end of 2023. The source is available on GitHub , please don’t judge my code. I’m not a Go developer, I…
HTML isn’t only for people working in the tech field. It’s for anybody, the way documents are for anybody. HTML is just another type of document. A very special one—the one the web is built on.
Browsing the internet used to be a hobby of mine. Ever since my dad got us a modem when I was around ten, I spent hours at a time just looking at different websites. The internet felt like a limitless expanse of free expression. Now, despite how many more people use the internet, I usually end up at the same three or four websites, and I end up a lot more bored.
Rediculously expensive, but you can’t deny the engineering is impressive.
Great little privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative with a very sensible pricing model. QGDPR-compliant with no cookies or user-identifiable data storage. Securely hosted in Europe for your peace of mind. I’ve installed it on this site (not that there’s much traffic to analyse!).
Replaced the word list with Friendly Words . I was getting the odd slightly dubious generated password and as much as I tried to sanitise the list, there were just too many words to check. So far, this seems to be producing much better results.
It’s amazing what you find above ceilings.
We open tomorrow. This is like Groundhog Day.
Now that’s what you call an IKEA delivery.
There’s colour going on the walls.
Of course it’s not overkill for a home install, what do you mean.
Work well underway at the new space.
I stumbled on this when I was looking for ‘safe’ word lists for using on Pass3words .
Really good deep-dive. The truth is, if you want to build the most-accessible product possible, you need to use both pixels and ems/rems. It’s not an either/or situation. There are circumstances where rems are more accessible, and other circumstances where pixels are more accessible. P.S. I really like Josh’s website, fairly simple design but so much attention to detail.
Huge thanks to Aaro Luomanen for this post, this was my starting point for generating OG images on this site when I moved to Hugo. There are a bunch of cloud services that offer og:image generation, like Cloudinary or Vercel’s og, but I didn’t want to pay for those. I want my whole website to be static and cheap to host. I managed to generate some sweet og:images using Hugo’s image manipulation…
Built a gate too.
Fence finished (almost).
We’re on the move again, planning out the new space.
Love this. Drop in any image, get an instant side by side comparison slider, and a download link for the optimsed file showing size savings. Free, open source and the images never leave your computer.
The start of a new fence, the old one wasn’t going to survive another winter.
Caving in Budapest, what else do you do when you’re on holiday?
It’s time to rethink how we cook a set of favicons for modern browsers and stop the icon generator madness. Frontend developers currently have to deal with 20+ static PNG files just to display a tiny website logo in a browser tab or on a touchscreen. A guide on what you need (and only what you need) when it comes to generating favicon files for your site. Handy if you want to roll your own,…
Add a touch of your inner self to your every day with the Touch series mouse. Embrace a calming soft almond color palette or a soft grey base with warm orange highlights. I love the retro look of this thing.
Oops…! I did it again. The latest post in this saga is here . When I launched this site a few days ago I posted that I’d settled on Kirby as my CMS 1 of choice. This wasn’t exactly a spur of the moment thing, it’s a system I’ve been dabbling with for quite a while. In fact, my introduction to Kirby came from the talented Simon Collison when he designed and built my…
The Movie Database (TMDB) is a community built movie and TV database. Every piece of data has been added by our amazing community dating back to 2008. TMDB’s strong international focus and breadth of data is largely unmatched and something we’re incredibly proud of. Put simply, we live and breathe community and that’s precisely what makes us different. Great alternative to the…
15.02.2025 Complete rebuild/redesign Built on Hugo Added new sections for Notes, Links, Images and Wiki Added functionality to generate Open Graph images automatically Moved hosting to Bunny Many other minor changes, too numerous to list 06.01.2024 Simplified and fixed theme toggle Fix for pages with missing meta data 04.01.2024 Major: Changed from Kirby to Eleventy . Added footnote support in…
For the last few weeks Matthias Ott has been running a newsletter about designing and publishing on the web, with a heavy emphasis on owning and running a personal website. There’s an archive available of past issues, well worth a peruse. Every time a new issue drops, I remember that it’s something I want to (re)launch. I open Sublime Text, try and remember what CMS I was playing with,…
Hardware Laptop: Apple 14" MacBook Pro, M3 Max, 36GB Memory, 1TB Flash Storage Monitors: Lenovo ThinkVision P40w-20 (Home), Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved (Work) PC: Custom Build, White Fractal Design North , Ryzen 7 5800X, Radeon RX 7900 XTX, 64GB Memory, 2TB + 1TB WD Black NVMe SSD Tablet: Apple 12" iPad Pro, 2021 M1 Model Mobile: Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max, Titanium Software Browsers Safari, Firefox &…
Really handy for pulling text-based 2FA codes from Apple Messages on your Mac ready to paste. This can be done natively on macOS in Safari, but is not supported in other browsers.
Insanely useful tool to help self-host Google fonts. Supplies both the font package to download, and generates the CSS ready to drop in.
Handy tool to generate a Tailwind style colour scale from a single given colour.
Another handy Tailwind cool, this one finds the closest native Tailwind colour to the one you supply.
Making a new door.
Starting the process of turning the old garage into a workshop.
Keyboards are gross, part 4.
We outgrew the single serving space I originally planned for, who’d have thunk it.
This came in because the trackpad had stopped clicking…