Vision Pro
I don’t think anyone will seriously dispute Apple’s claim that their newly unveiled (but unreleased) Vision Pro headset is “the most technologically advanced consumer product ever released”. (I’m...
View ArticleLow-Hanging Fruit
One of the things I find constantly grating about living in Europe is the low standard of web-development. Perhaps it’s a symptom of having to waste development effort on ridiculous EU-specific...
View Articlexinjs
For some reason I’ve had a nagging urge to build a nice timezone selector ever since I started working on a calendaring system for a previous startup and we needed a timezone selector (in the end we...
View ArticleunreMarkable
I’ve been a remarkAble 2 user—on and off, mostly off—for a couple of years now. All the things that made an initial favorable impression are true, and the product has actually gotten a little better in...
View ArticleHow to find out which version of Java you’re running on macOS
As far as I can tell, when I google this question I get answers that are years out of date, and stupid. No-one who uses java wants to launch the System Preferences control panel even if there were a...
View ArticleOn the benefits of type-checking…
I’ve been writing a lot of code, both front-end and back-end, for my current project, and lately I’ve had to do a lot of data-munging—processing legacy data from a badly designed PostgreSQL database...
View ArticleCrawling the Web like it’s 1999
(In which I compare serving web apps to running a burger chain.) This is a long post. If you just want to know how to very simply get your dynamically-rendered pages indexed properly by Google (et al),...
View ArticleBrave vs. Arc
I decided to revisit two of the more interesting Chromium-based browsers, Brave—the privacy first browser that I was somehow convinced was based on Gecko and not Chromium—and The Browser Company’s Arc...
View Articlexinjs-ui 0.4.0’s graphical table filter
The main reason xinjs-ui exists is that I wanted to have a really good table component I could just plug into projects. It would be easier to just use something off the shelf, but virtual table...
View Articlenova vs code
Can an indie software company compete with a free product from Microsoft that seemingly everyone, myself included, uses… as well as other well-regarded indy products such as Sublime and BBEdit? I’m a...
View Articlenova vs code pt2: snippets
Note: this is a continuation of my earlier consideration of Nova. It seems that the recurring theme of Nova is that if a feature of Visual Studio Code or TextMate is sufficiently important, it (a) has...
View ArticleSensible Gun Laws
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything overtly political, but I just listened to the third and fourth episodes of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest series of his podcast, Revisionist History. Even though...
View ArticleA Fire Upon the Deep, Revisited
(This is an AI-generated image linked in a reddit thread talking about generating this image using AI, so I don’t feel too guilty using it.) I recently discovered I had collected a lot of credits in...
View ArticleNova… reconsidered
I’ve been using Panic Nova pretty solidly for over two months now. I’ve been using it for both my personal work and for my “day job”, and today I got sufficiently frustrated with it to switch back to...
View Article2kW
I remember some time ago that an environmentalist group in Switzerland had calculated that if we were all going to live sustainably at similar standard of living (i.e. not burning A/C in McMansions in...
View ArticleMeta Quest 3—First Reactions
It occurred to me that there’s no real way to develop for mixed reality without a mixed reality headset. The idea of trying to build a Vision Pro app that’s more than just an iOS / macOS app floating...
View ArticleMeta Quest 3—Part Two
Text Entry 😒😕😱🤷♂️… There are at least five ways to enter text on the Quest 3 (also the Quest 2). In rough terms these options are bearable, awful, awful but in a whole new way I had never previously...
View ArticleMeta Quest 3—Part 3
Browser Performance The CPU of the Quest 3 is supposedly about twice as fast as the Quest 2’s and it definitely shows in the performance of the browser. WebGL-powered widgets like map box and...
View ArticleMeta Quest 3—The Ugly and the Awesome
I was prompted to write this post by major frustrations in dealing with the Quest 3. The sad thing is these frustrations are part of something I accomplished using the Quest 3 that I really wanted to...
View ArticleCSS is great… but it’s often not obvious
The “front-end” is fundamentally driven by three core languages: HTML, Javascript, and CSS. Each of them is absolutely fantastic in its own way but also has a lot of baggage. The thing about baggage,...
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