January 2025

Recently, a friend asked if I knew of a Web Component that generates a QR Code from meaningful HTML. She said that there seemed to be plenty of options for creating QR codes in general, but none that worked by extending already-useful HTML instead of just configuring it all with JavaScript. I couldn't find any either, but thinking through these kinds of patterns is probably what I enjoy most about working on the web, so I thought I'd write up how I'd make one.

scaling WebSockets has proven to be far more complex than we expected. Below are some of the most important lessons we've learned along the way.

PETG is a pretty great material to print 3D models with, but one issue with it is that gluing it can be a bit of a pain. In a recent video by [Cosel] (German language, with English auto-dub) he notes that he found that with many adhesives the adhesion between PETG parts would tend to fail over time, so he set out to do a large test with just about any adhesive he could get his hands on. This included everything from epoxy to wood glue and various adhesives for plastics

Swear in your search request. I know it sounds ridiculous, but the most effective way I've found of it not doing the AI summary is just to add "fucking" go my search.

Look, I’m just going to come out and say it… this Giant USB Button is probably too big! It’s 228.6mm x 228.6mm x 120mm (which is 9″x9″ x 4.725″). The thing is, when someone asks me to build something for them, and it seems interesting, I can’t really say no. And I did say “no” this time, but mainly due to the tight deadline. I said I would need about twice as much time as requested and luckily the client came back with “We can do that!” So I got to work…

WebGL shaders rendered to canvas elements are a great way to add interesting visuals to a website. Unfortunately, unlike HTML, they do not natively integrate with CSS. This post shows a way to work around this limitation and influence WebGL graphics from CSS.

Hooray to Bluesky for releasing its new RSS feeds! Now anyone can now obtain an RSS feed for any Bluesky user. We've taken them for a test drive, and here's what you should know.

Last year, I decided that I was going to build a Commodore 64 from scratch. This is the blog documenting the project.

That was solved recently when I bought an Amiga 1000 on eBay. This is the long-overdue story about how I restored, fixed, and upgraded it and my future plans. If you’re the rabbit hole type, I added as many links and references as I could so you can dive deeper into the Amiga world. I hope you enjoy reading it.

In this article, we'll explore how to build a star rating system using a single HTML and just one JavaScript command.

Undoubtedly, the sloppification of the internet will likely get worse over the next few years. And as such, the returns to curating quality sources of content will only increase. My advice? Use an RSS feed reader, read Twitter lists instead of feeds, and find spaces where real discussion still happens (e.g. LessWrong and Lobsters still both seem slop-free).

At the same time, there should be some humility about the fact that earlier iterations of the chip ban seem to have directly led to DeepSeek’s innovations. Those innovations, moreover, would extend to not just smuggled Nvidia chips or nerfed ones like the H800, but to Huawei’s Ascend chips as well. Indeed, you can very much make the case that the primary outcome of the chip ban is today’s crash in Nvidia’s stock price.

This is a javascript library that can play module music files. It is based on the libopenmpt C/C++ library. To translate libopenmpt into Javascript emscripten was used. Modernized ES6 module version with libopenmpt AudioWorklet backend

Serve mostly static HTML. Use flat JSON storage. Go buildless! Use service workers. Go HTML-first.

Technology is the active human interface with the material world. ... We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe...

People with less knowledge about AI are actually more open to using the technology. We call this difference in adoption propensity the “lower literacy-higher receptivity” link.

Make this Comforting homemade Instant Pot Pho Ga (Pressure Cooker Chicken Pho)! This fragrant Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup warms the heart and nourishes the soul. So easy to make!

Bring your RCBus/RC2014 build into the 90's with true native support for Universal Serial Bus.

I feel like half of my social media feed is composed of AI grifters saying software developers are not going to make it. Combine that sentiment with some economic headwinds and it's easy to feel like we're all screwed. I think that's bullshit. The best days of our industry lie ahead.

Old Commodore 64 BBS graphics are not easy to find. A lot of it was probably never saved, and there’s not really any obvious place for it online either. So I was thrilled to get a whole bunch disk images from Sixx: more than 1,000 PETSCII graphics and animations! I’ve gone through it, removed duplicates, identified artists, etc, and captured it as images and videos. I’m not done yet, but I’m presenting it as is.

Just as Midas discovered that turning everything to gold wasn't always helpful, we'll see that blindly applying cosine similarity to vectors can lead us astray. While embeddings do capture similarities, they often reflect the wrong kind - matching questions to questions rather than questions to answers, or getting distracted by superficial patterns like writing style and typos rather than meaning. This post shows you how to be more intentional about similarity and get better results.

Learn Yjs starts with the basics of Yjs, then covers techniques for handling state in distributed applications. We’ll talk about what a CRDT is, and why you’d want to use one. We’ll get into some of the pitfalls that make collaborative applications difficult and show how you can avoid them. There will be explorable demos and code exercises so you can get a feel for how Yjs really works.

I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.

One issue that JSCut does have is it never seems to add the code to turn on the spindle and turn it off again. This isn’t a big deal but it would be easy for a beginner to miss prior to testing the program. All you have to add at the beginning to turn on the spindle is M03 S1000 and M05 at the end after the tool has retracted for the last time.

Convert your SVG files to CNC cutting paths with this tool.

GrblHAL (formerly GRBL) CNC command sender, autoleveler, g-code editor, digitizer, CAM and swiss army knife for all your CNC needs.

Create a funky synth that is based on a popular circuit called a stepped oscillator (aka an Atari Punk Console).

Project MINI RACK is a guide for miniature rack builds, for compact Homelabs, RF battlestations, and portable network racks. Watch the video announcing this project by clicking the image below:

The more I see of the degradation and commodification of everything around us, the more I feel like wishing Bryan Johnson good luck with his diet of bonemeal and pine-cone rinds, and the constant monitoring of his night-time erections.

Why does nobody care about anything? The world is full of stuff that could be excellent with just 1% more effort. But people don't care.

So in this guide we’ll walk through setting up the tooling and development environment for building and using WebAssembly in Rust, embedding it in a TypeScript project, review how communication between TypeScript and Rust can happen, then finally how you can debug your WebAssembly directly in the browser and/or your favorite IDE. I will use Visual Studio Code as the IDE and Chrome as the browser, but apart from some debugging options, you can reproduce these in your tool of choice.

Meta’s size makes it de facto unkillable, and I’m sure it’ll exist in some form for centuries. But it’s my hope that it will exist in the sense that IBM exists today. Theoretically you know it’s out there, but it’s very hard to grasp the point of it and it feels thoroughly irrelevant. Nobody remembers who started it or why.

The Switch runs an off-the-shelf Nvidia Tegra X1 with 4GB of RAM. It was Nvidias second desktop GPU architecture in a mobile chip, after the Nvidia Tegra K1, containing 256 Maxwell CUDA cores. Announced ten years ago now (On January 5, 2015) it was originally intended for tablets and the automotive industry, before Nintendo picked it up. The Jetson TX1 dev kit was released and it was also present in the somewhat popular and well-known Jetson Nano (though with only half the CUDA cores enabled.) A fully functional (albeit largely proprietary, in traditional Nvidia fashion) Linux4Tegra distribution was shipped, with a working CUDA development environment. CUDA? The compute platform that’s driving the AI revolution ✨? In my Nintendo Switch? Surely you see where I’m going with this.

This publication contains quantity recipes and other information useful to food service personnel to prepare meals in schools participating in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). Recipes are generally in 50 and 100 portion size

I think Bluesky is doing about as good a job as a group of people can do with the design they have and are trying to preserve. But I don't think the global context-collapse firehose works, and I'm not sure it's what users want it either, and if they do, they really seem to want both strong central control to meet their needs but also to not have strong central control be a thing that exists when it doesn't.

This document is a summary of my personal experiences using generative models while programming over the past year. It has not been a passive process. I have intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming to learn about them. The result has been that I now regularly use LLMs while working and I consider their benefits net-positive on my productivity. (My attempts to go back to programming without them are unpleasant.)

[Axiometa] has recently unveiled a simple PCB that will plug into a standard solderless breadboard to provide 3.3 and 5 VDC when connected to a USB-C power supply. The device is going to start a crowdfunding campaign soon if you want to buy a completed one — but with the design files and Bill of Materials already up on GitHub, nothing stops you from spinning up your own version today.

A modern handheld game console with effortless multiplayer. It's fun to play, alone or with friends, and easy to program.

Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you here

Welcome to OpenHands (formerly OpenDevin), a platform for software development agents powered by AI. OpenHands agents can do anything a human developer can: modify code, run commands, browse the web, call APIs, and yes—even copy code snippets from StackOverflow.

PaddleOCR aims to create multilingual, awesome, leading, and practical OCR tools that help users train better models and apply them into practice.

kraken is a turn-key OCR system optimized for historical and non-Latin script material.

PyLaia is a device agnostic, PyTorch based, deep learning toolkit for handwritten document analysis.

Hey there! Ever watched a demo or Revision and thought, I want to try making one of those? Cool!

The fundamental problem is that in using most modern consumer-oriented applications, we lose control of the data we share with those applications. In creating documents, writing emails, or tracking our exercise or other activities, we share data with an application that’s useful for a particular purpose, but also allow the data live in a database controlled by the application’s owner. With the data outside of our control, it can then be restricted, lost, leaked, sold, resold, and exploited. The groups that control these databases accrue most of the benefits, and we accrue most of the costs.

Check your meta tags, icons, and rss feeds

WaveTracker is a free and open source music-making software for Windows. It uses wavetable synthesis and sampling to generate sounds, with endless combinations of effects to warp, modify or distort waves and sounds.

The Beeper consitst of three parts: the hardware, the firmware runnning on the hardware, and software running on my work computer. If my computer screen is unlocked for too long, the Beeper starts beeping and because it is situated away from my desk I must get up to silence it. Mission accomplished: I stopped sitting still.

Twitter’s gone, and now that Trump won again with Musk’s help, it’s gone forever. Let it go.