TRST_Blog

Sculpin is sweet. If I didn't already have thousands of dollars in typefaces I've never used in a project...

It's funny how we weave our digital identity and what tools we integrate into that fabric. I spend all day in Neovim, and it would be a bald faced lie to say that I wasn't constantly shopping around for a better fit; a text editor or IDE that conforms to my current values and priorities. These days it's speed, helpfulness (why thank you, that is the method I was looking for!) and stability.

For the longest time, that's been (Neo)Vim. I look longingly at Emacs pretty much on the back of the amazing Org Mode and Magit packages, but I can never get it to stick. Even with Evil mode, something isn't quite right. Perhaps that "quite rightness" is convention and my head isn't quite attuned to the Emacs way. That may be the reason why I always look in the wrong place, or keep my fingers frozen above the keyboard until my brain can process what it wants to do whenever I make the hop to another editor.

As for VSCode, it's brilliant but my eyes see text and my fingers reach for the movement keys. Unfortunately, all plugins that emulate the Vim bindings (including newer ones that completely embed Neovim inside 😳) run up against their container in some way and my mind throws a fit.

Community isn't something I'd ever thought about when using Neovim. Frankly, development seemed to move faster so that's where I went. But come to think of it, the sheer number of tiny projects, new developments and blog posts have been really helpful. Maybe it's a subconscious fit. Nothing I sought out, but a familiar feeling I recognized.

The take away: better, less wasteful (and arguably less exciting) consumption is the way forward to reducing the severity of climate change. Dream of better insulation, not carbon capture.

I like the way Cloudflare's serverless platform has come together, in contrast to say those offered by Amazon. Hard not to look at this release, think about the capabilities of Workers, KV storage and Durable Objects and not feel as a front end developer that this is the promise of the JAMStack fulfilled. I will admit it is slightly mind bending because it's based on the Service Worker API through "V8 Isolates" (WASM?) rather than containerized V8 instances.

High quality fonts from professional foundries, for free. Great to see access to variable fonts included among their selection. Beautiful stuff.

I have some pretty serious intellectual crush on Patrick after this interview.

Sean C. Davis of XFCE and Xubuntu fame, talking about his next steps focusing on the Elementary OS project. I share a similar passion for Elementary, but It is a bit of shock to see someone of relative renown in this community shift focus to another project.

Necessary reading. I'm looking at my frontmatter for this link, which has survived 4 "flat file" site generators (before static site generators was a term of art, every system that used files instead of a database fell under the umbrella of "flat file") and seeing many properties that could instantly be tidied up.

Necessary reading. I'm looking at my frontmatter for this link, which has survived 4 "flat file" site generators (before static site generators was a term of art, every system that used files instead of a database fell under the umbrella of "flat file") and seeing many properties that could instantly be tidied up.

Not sure why the WebKit team wasn't sold on Google's VP9 based photo and video codecs, whether it was to see if the claims that they really were unencumbered by patent claims, marketing reasons, or something else entirely. Either way, the three main web rendering engines have reached consensus, webp and webm are codecs you should consider for your image asset pipeline... just as successor AV1 based formats have begun to rear their heads 🤣