Strange New Logic
Spoilers ahead… I was a huge fan of Star Trek from the first time I saw it. In early 1970s Australia, the only SF we got regularly was Dr. Who (which I also loved) and sporadic episodes of Star Trek…
A Few Front-End Tricks
Over the years I’ve picked up some tricks that never seem to get old and I thought I’d share some of them. Centering (CSS) It’s still stupidly hard to center things inside other things in HTML. (Even with flex it…
Why has 3d printing progressed so slowly?
3d "sintered metal" printed weasel from 2013 propped up on a pencil (for scale) and next to a plastic SLA print I made in 2021.
The ShadowDOM is Optional
(…and you probably don’t need to use it.) You wouldn’t know it to read about custom-elements (a.k.a. web-components) but while the shadowDOM is undoubtedly useful, it is also optional. This is lucky because the shadowDOM adds a lot of overhead…
Default Folder X
tldr; if you use a Mac as more than a glorified Chromebook, buy Default Folder X. As I was tediously navigating folders in an “Open…” dialog today, it struck me that I was doing something stupid and unnecessary. Whatever happened…
Review: Tracers in the Dark
One of my favorite new podcasts is Story of the Week by Joel Stein, which is a good humored interview of whoever wrote Joel Stein’s favorite piece of long form journalism that week (well, presumably the favorite piece whose writer…
Air Crash Investigation: When Usability Failures Kill People
I don’t know how to fly a plane, although like any gamer I’ve played with flight simulators, so I speak from a position of profound ignorance. I do know from speaking to people who are pilots that the single most…
Shining Girls
Warning: spoilers. Like most of my reviews, this is anything but timely. I just finished Shining Girls, an Apple TV+ show I would never have watched had it not gotten a strong recommendation from my girlfriend. Warning, this may get…
bun
For the last few months I’ve been using a new would-be node.js replacement called bun. (Yes, it’s hard to google because bun is not a unique word.) As of writing, bun has just turned v0.5.0. It’s not ready for production,…
new Function considered harmful, or when is a closure not a closure?
I had an extended chat recently with friend and former colleague on the subject of safely rendering outside HTML with javascript in it on a server (basically for purposes of screen capture) and how to prevent the code in the…