This is pretty nice. I had some old Delphi games made more than 20 years ago that I wanted to get running again. They’re not very good games, but they were ones I spent a lot of time on in the past, and I wanted to make sure they were preserved in some way. In the past I would try to get them running in an emulator, with limited success. My ultimate goal is to get them running in the browser so they would survive any more platform changes.
I’m moving markdown files from an Obsidian vault to a private Hugo site, and I needed something that did text transformations. And these were text transformations that would’ve been… well, not difficult to automate, but annoying to automate. The transformations themselves would be easy, it’s just knowing where to apply them. Context is important, and I was not confident that a simple pattern matcher would’ve picked up or applied the transformations correctly.
Significant design updates have been made to the blog, including a new search page, an improved archives layout, and the reintroduction of backlinks and paging features. Continue
reading →
Proponents of server-side rendering question whether a well-defined API can also work effectively with server-side templates, suggesting an approach where Go handlers serve both needs without requiring actual server round-trips. Continue
reading →
Stripe’s documentation lacks clarity on the basic concepts and calculations related to invoicing, leaving users confused about how key fields like amount_due and ending_balance are determined. Continue
reading →
A few weeks ago, I vibe-coded a web-app called Weatherpatch. This is an app that is designed to receive email newsletters and produce them as an RSS feeds: basically what Feedbin does, but without needing to use Feedbin. The app was vibe-coded with Opus, and while functional, it is hardly an example of good design (unless you’re a fan of Cubism). To wit:
Yeah, Opus just threw the feed management controls all over the place. And I tolerated it for a time. I was more interested in having something functional, rather than pretty. But the thing about a bad UI is that it makes using the app feel bad. Sure I’m not in there managing feeds, but I would like to go in there are copy-paste the email address when setting a new one up.
The author reflects on a flexible timestamp input feature they developed, recognizing its limited applicability and the challenge of making it user-friendly while contemplating its potential value in user-focused systems. Continue
reading →
I was asked to make a couple of diagrams for the purpose of showcasing a database design. These diagrams were mainly used to show the relationship between entities, so I chose to use TLDraw for this. But there was a need to add some example rows, which TLDraw does not make easy. Furthermore, there was a bit of a push to get this done quickly, as these were to be shown to various stakeholders the next day.
Blogger reflects on their personal preferences and habits related to blogging and outdoor activities while questioning their archetype. Continue
reading →
Troubleshooting SSH issues with a private key revealed that an outdated client and a missing trailing newline caused connection problems in a CI/CD workflow. Continue
reading →
Group DMs in Slack can lead to disorganized conversations that would be better suited for temporary channels that allow users to engage more selectively. Continue
reading →
Work has begun on the game’s meta elements, focusing on essential mechanics like menu screens, despite the unexciting and obligatory nature of the tasks involved. Also some details on how to define custom classes in GDScript. Continue
reading →
Using Cobra for CLI apps is more efficient and organized when each command is wrapped in its own function, improving clarity and maintainability compared to the documented approach. Continue
reading →
Exploring the idea of a guard statement in Go reveals significant challenges and limitations compared to its implementation in Swift. Spoilers: it probably wouldn’t work. Continue
reading →
A few updates of some other projects I worked on recently.
Webtools saw some love as I needed some tooling made to make the icon easy to include in the Well Read Flutter project itself. Android expects the logo of a specific size, so I “commissioned” an Android Icon Resizer, which will take one or more PNG files, resize them to what Android expects, and prepare them in a ZIP that could be extracted at the route of the res/mipmap directory. It will also produce a small preview of the icon, rendering it in a circle so you can see how it looks on the device. It’s background savvy, layering the icon over the PNG with “background” in the filename.
My current craving of vibe-coding various tools I need to do my job continues, with an attempt to build a REST/gRPC test client.
This is motivated by my distaste with all the other clients I’ve tried. There’ve been a few, and I’ve been unhappy with each one. For one thing, they seem more heavyweight than my needs. I don’t know if this is just how they’re implemented, or it’s because the realm of HTTP request testing is complicated (It’s probably a bit of both).
Some more work on Weiro. Much of it is pretty mundane, mainly to get it to feature parity with other CMS’s out there. Yes, I know the existence of those other CMS’s make the entire project pointless. Doubly so when you consider that much of what I’m going to talk about was largely done by coding agents. It made me wonder whether it was worth writing this update at all. Well, it’s drafted up already so I may as well finish it off. At least one thing will get finished.
Okay, enough wallowing in my self-doubt. What was added? Well, categories are now a thing. These can be defined in a new categories section and consist of a label, a slug, and a description. Going to /categories/<slug> will list all the posts with that category. Posts can be in zero or more categories, which can be selected from the edit post screen. Pretty simple stuff.
The Categories section, where the user can manage categories.Editing a category.Selecting categories from within the edit post screen.The categories page as it appears on the published site.The single category page.
Another small thing added was pages. This allows the user to define “slash” pages, with the option of appearing in the nav bar, and can also be used to replace the home page, by setting the slug to / (the posts are still available at /posts). I do need to spend some more time figuring out how to organise the nav bar as I would also like to include things like redirects. I thinking of making that an extension of the pages model, but I’m not sure.
List of pages of a site.Editing a page. There’s only a single page type at the moment.
Those two features were mainly done with the help of Claude Code, but I did build some stuff manually. The largest addition was the ability to do some edits on uploaded images. I’ve never been a fan of how Apple produces the shadows around windows: the margins are just too large. So I added a way to do this within Weiro itself.
The edit upload feature.
It’s pretty simple. Just imagine the filter section from any image editor, then remove all the other features of that editor. Yeah, it’s that simple. There’s no cropping, rotating, or anything else of that nature: just a bunch of “processors” that you can add to the image, with the sole one being a drop shadow.
This is actually done server side using a simple file-based approach. When opening an image upload to edit, you spawn a session. Each session has a JSON file maintaining the processors, plus a series of cached image files of all the intermediate steps along the processing chain. When a new processor is added, a hash is computed with the processor’s properties, and if they change, the cached image will be regenerated. The processor includes the hash of the previous step too, so that if processors further up the chain are modified or remove, they will force a recompute of subsequent images. The user is then served the last image in the chain.
This differs from the image processor in Blogging Tools, which performed the transformations within the browser itself. The motivation there was to avoid the need of a slow upload of the image, but it came with the performance cost associated with doing the processing within the browser itself. WASM might be fast, but it’s not that fast[^fast]. Since the upload in Weiro is already uploaded, I figured it would be quicker to just do the image processing server side. My hope is that the computing power the server has access to would offset the time it takes to download the image. So far this seems to be the case.
Finally, I did some minor work around the UI, adding a site chooser and a much needed way to open the published site from the admin section.
So this project is still coming along, surprisingly. It’s probably the furthest I’ve got in a blogging CMS that I actually want to use. I do have a large list of things I want to add to it, and I certainly need to do something with the design of the actual site. It’s all a question of whether I’m interested in spending time on it.
[^fast]: Although to be fair, I think the slow down comes from encoding the processed image as a data URI and setting it as the source of an img tag.
After nearly a decade of daily use, new ear padding was successfully replaced on Sennheiser HD 280 Pro headphones, despite challenges during the process. Continue
reading →
