Latest posts
- Notes from June 2026Jun 30, 2026
Chicago’s weather is pretty lousy most of the year, but when it’s nice, it’s very nice. June blessed the city with dozens of idyllic days. But don’t worry—I still spent most of the time inside on the computer. Things I did I launched my first big project at Ghost: automations! It’s still in beta, but it’s one of the biggest projects I’ve led. If you happen to be a Ghost publisher, please try it ou
- "Sixteenth of a year", a 1.8 KiB art pieceJun 03, 2026
As I write this, we’re about 7 sixteenths through 2026, and it’s about 14 sixteenths through the day. For the sixteenth issue of the Taper online magazine, I split time into sixteenths to think about its passage in a different way. The code, which had to be under 2048 bytes, isn’t terribly complex. It does some date math and uses a Go server for minification. If you want, here’s the unminified sou
- Notes from May 2026May 30, 2026
My blog turned 16 this month! I did nothing to celebrate, but made some little tools and clicked some links about tech ethics. Things from me this month I published four little tools this month: ZIP Shrinker, a web app that shrinks ZIP files with higher compression ratios A command line tool to do (completely offline) translation Open Link in Unloaded Tab, a Firefox extension to open links without
- Make ZIP files smaller with ZIP ShrinkerMay 16, 2026
I built ZIP Shrinker, a little browser tool to shrink ZIP files. It also works with formats that are secretly ZIPs underneath, like EPUB, JAR, and many more. Try it out! How does it work? At a high level, this tool (1) re-compresses every file in the ZIP archive with higher compression (2) removes all metadata (3) removes entries for directories. Re-compressing ZIP files are typically compressed w
- Open Link in Unloaded Tab, a little Firefox extensionMay 13, 2026
In short: I just published Open Link in Unloaded Tab, a little Firefox extension that adds “Open Link in Unloaded Tab” to the right-click context menu. In Firefox, you can unload tabs to save system resources. But there’s no way to open a new tab in the unloaded state…until now! I built a very simple extension that adds a new option to do this. (It even has a cute icon which I paid ~$15 for.) I’ve
- png-cmp: like cmp for PNGsMay 03, 2026
png-cmp is a program I built that checks if two PNGs are visually equivalent. It’s inspired by the cmp command. Here’s how you use it: png-cmp a.png b.png Like cmp, it silently exits if the images are identical, and gives an error if they’re different. Unlike cmp, it checks pixel data, not binary data. PNGs can look the same but be stored differently. For example, png-cmp ignores text metadata.
- Offline command line translation with TranslateGemma + OllamaMay 01, 2026
I wrote a simple script that translates text at the command line, completely offline. Here’s an example of how it works on my computer: echo '¿Cómo estás?' | translate # => How are you? It combines a few tools: TranslateGemma, a special-purpose language model for translation Ollama, a tool for running language models locally Efficient Language Detector, a library that detects the language for a
- Notes from April 2026Apr 30, 2026
After a busy March, April was a little quieter. But don’t worry, I still have a bunch of little links for you to click on. Things I published GitHub’s uptime hasn’t been great recently. Even though I dislike the Microsoft subsidiary, I wrote “In defense of GitHub’s poor uptime”, which argues that it’s not as bad as folks seems to be saying. See this Lobsters thread for some discussion. Published v
- In defense of GitHub's poor uptimeApr 10, 2026
In short: GitHub’s downtime is bad, but uptime numbers can be misleading. It’s not as bad as it looks; more like a D than an F. “Zero nines uptime”? 99.99% uptime, or “four nines”, is a common industry standard. Four nines of uptime is equivalent to 1.008 minutes of downtime per week. GitHub is not meeting that, and it’s frustrating. Even though they’re owned by Microsoft’s, one of the richest com
- Notes from March 2026Mar 31, 2026
March always seems to be my life’s busiest month. Things I wrote and made “The two kinds of error”: in my mind, software errors are divided into two categories: expected and unexpected errors. I finally wrote up this idea I’ve had for a long time. “All tests pass” is a short story about a strange, and sorta sad, experience I had with a coding agent. Inspired by others, I published a disclaimer abo