A very hidden way to change the fonts of the whole IDE, not only of the editor. Oracle SQL Developer: changing the IDE fonts Oracle SQLDeveloper provides a dialog window to change the editor within…

A few months ago, my Apple Watch strap broke and I stopped using it for a while. I went on a quest to find a suitable wearable fitness tracker and settled on Google’s Fitbit Air. My requirements…

Mine Print Hash 2026-35

I've always appreciated Stephen King's advice on writing. So much so that I once bought a jacket with a tiger on the back because he suggested that it was a good way to build confidence as a writer1…

Self-hosted EPUB library backed by object storage, no database.

Let’s get around to actually making a Tamiya kit. A perfect candidate is this R32 Nissan Skyline that I found at a local hobby shop! Through only a little bit of struggle – mostly my fault – I still…

AI model companies buy wholesale electricity by the megawatt and resell it as cognitive work. The unit economics of turning power into intelligence.

Jargon is now available for iPhone and iPad on the App Store . Jargon began as my offline reader for the Jargon File, the dictionary of early hacker language and culture. After releasing the Android…

C2K is now available on the App Store . C2K began as the running app I wanted for Android: free, open source, and private. After releasing it through F-Droid and Google Play , I built a native Swift…

Build a Node-based Flue agent that researches a topic and writes a technical blog post using reusable voice skills, unslop guidance, and a Tavily research tool.

Modern Web Guidance is a set of skills from the Chrome and Edge teams that feeds expert-written platform guidance straight into your coding agent, with Baseline compatibility data baked in. It's…

A practical look at what a megawatt of power is worth and the factors that shape its value.

Tia would have turned 16 this year. Another marker that wouldn't come to be. After Tia was lost and born to stillbirth on 31 August 2010, we quickly had a slew of firsts. The first Christmas without…

It whispers to me like the Green Goblin mask. It says... "Pikachu... Pika pika." Which I think translates to either "Drink from me, Gadda" or "oh god i'm a disembodied head" Farmhands pledging $1 or…

Believe that all of the things you want to do are possible. All of your goals and dreams are right around the corner. Right now, I can not help but smile. Dreams that seem so outlandish are suddenly…

This city is not made for running within it. So many traffic lights, and such narrow pedestrian lanes. I don't much the incline, or otherwise I'd complain about that too. 😄 Stat Value Distance 1.91…

As of last week, I’ve been working at Fat Zebra for 5 years. (To celebrate, I caught up with my cardiologist.) In about a year and a half, it’ll be double the amount of time that I’ve worked anywhere…

I recently put a name to a kind of product design I care about: functional elegance.

Drafted by Claude Code from an analysis I directed and reviewed.

In my previous post I argued that the human code review has become the bottleneck in our software delivery process, and that most of what a review used to buy us no longer fits in a diff. But if we…

LLMs look brilliant in a greenfield repo and mediocre in a legacy one. The difference is the codebase. The fix is to invest in it directly: split strategic from tactical work, keep the strategic…

Akha Ama Coffeee is a cozy cafe specialising in beans from Thailand. This is quite the niche - I don't think I have ever seen Thailand beans in Japan. As it turns out, Akha Ama is originally a cafe…

Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton University Press, 2009). In my ongoing attempt to “try on” views of the world, philosphies, or mental…

Heng asked his supervisor whether he could buy a house in central London. The answer was no. In that moment, something clicked. Heng works on fuel cells: fuel goes in, electricity comes out, and over…

I spent years arguing against utility classes. Here is what made me change my mind about Tailwind CSS — and where I still think it hurts.

Players of TOCA Race Driver 3 have a complaint about lap 1, turn 1. The other cars commit to the apex and arrive anyway. A typical report: “The AI of TOCA Race Driver 3 is very aggressive? I can’t…

Photo by Phil Desforges Alt text is vast and varied. There’s no way to make it perfect, but there are plenty of things we can do better. Let me show you what I know about that. Buckle up — there’s a…

Having a beautiful staircase leading up to a platform and raised garden requires an equally beautiful railing to prevent minifigures from falling and hitting their heads. 🤕 The following post…

Naming Things by Tom Benner a tiny but neat book about the naming of identifies in code (variables, classes, methods, so not packages or libraries). It had entered my to-read list a few years ago,…

Disclosure: this research was conducted using an ANY.RUN account provided as part of a collaboration. All analysis and conclusions are my own. I did not execute the malware locally. Local work was…

An Introduction to File Formats and ImHex by Reverse Engineering FEZ's Save File Format

Mike Driscoll invited me onto The Python Show to talk about the Python Developer Tooling Handbook. We covered how I got into Python, why I built the handbook, the current type checker race,…

https://www.learnwithgurpreet.com/ I recently came across Mole , a simple open-source CLI tool for macOS, and found it surprisingly useful. It brings together a few things I normally need separate…

Tobari gives my AI coding agents deterministic evidence for finding and consolidating overlapping Go tests.

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” Edward Abbey The modern world is built on a system in which we must “progress” in order to survive. The issue is that we never ask…

A prompt is for communicating an idea to an LLM. If you tell your idea to an AI agent and ask it to write down in its own words, say, a “skill” document which is meant to be a reusable…

Twenty-three posts, roughly 19,000 words, and one broken writing dry spell – Blaugust 2026 is done for me.

Because starting is easy and finishing is hard.

Jugulans is now developed on Chicken Scheme 6 After upgrading from Chicken Scheme 5 to Chicken Scheme 6 I am now developing jugulans on Chicken Scheme 6. This required only a minor change. jugulans…

The workspace — it’s called Metis now — needs a teacher: the big always-on model that plans and reviews for the smaller ones. I’m not picking it by vibes. Five big open models, one…

Observations on when its okay and not okay to AI-generate content

What does a great mentor actually give you? (Not their topic.)

Finally getting this blogpost out as I procrastinate on packing for a weekend-long trip Now chipping away at: Another blog post about TYVNJ2 games that I enjoyed (it is currently 43 games long) Now…

I talked about sandboxing my agents with [`nono`](https://nono.sh) in the last blog post already (check it out here: [Use `nono` AI agent sandboxes in Zed Agent…

A visit to the Lake District would not be complete without at least one walk to the top of a big hill. What with spouse and I not being regular users of shanks pony least of all up mountains I asked…

Image search on one client site ran at 64% of web's impressions and 11% of its clicks, and no tool in the stack could see it. The new GSC MCP update ships 8 free image SEO tools that read that…

In Consider Phlebas, we learn about a band of humanoid pirates: Tzbalik Odraye roomed with Rava Gamdol, who looked as though he came from the same place as Yalson, judging from his skin and light…

A `pre-receive` hook that checks out the incoming tree, runs a real check against it, and rejects the push at the transport layer if it fails, before a single ref is updated.