It’s kinda odd being able to remember what things were like before Docker appeared. Docker is the software developer’s take on creating a Linux distribution. It’s useful, but the indirection of containers and pinning can be deadly. Avoiding unnecessary indirection is advantageous.

My isp deprecated its email services recently. I’ve heard that unfortunately many people learned the hard way what a spof really entails. My isp’s recommendation? Create a free gmail.com or mail.com account, but “free” is a nebulous term…

It’s quiet now, but the “One Thing Well” blog is where I discovered most of the programs I use today. I got my first personal computer roughly about two years before that blog started.

Check out this really nice approach to rendering fully static LaTeX with hugo by caching remote fetches from a quick and simple KaTeX API. Really clever — glad to see that someone tried it. Custom output formats and remote fetching at compile time are two very important features.

If you’re not familiar with deno, try out the api with the command deno run.

$ deno run --allow-net main.ts
Listening on http://localhost:8000

I’m just now realizing that there might be a schism within the Nix/NixOS ecosystem/community on old versus new interfaces. If that’s remotely true, then somewhere, a great holy war is at play. Here’s an article summary of the old versus the new interface that I stumbled upon recently.

Don’t believe everything people say — users secretly love ads, clickbait and top 10 lists. Data tells no fables. So if you need something to be noticed, any of the above will do. If you need to keep a low profile, do the opposite — simple really :-)

If reader mode fully takes off, then there’s no need to worry about styles in specific situations (articles). Offer some bare minimum semantic HTML and you’re good. Firefox’s reader mode wins hands down right now. Content before context.

Flexbox as a base layout is convenient but tricky due to CLS or “jank”. If the dimensions of the base flex container(s) are ambiguous, then the browser constantly recomputes the dimensions as HTML streams in.

My favorite trick is to give the browser dimension hints and avoid computational properties like flex. Set as many dimensions (width/height) as possible unambiguously. My Internet speed is sufficiently slow enough that I can see layout shifts in many sites, including my own (this micro blog).

Every so often I stumble upon really interesting YouTube channels. It doesn’t take very long though for all of them to go “poof” ..and gone.

Speaking of mmorpgs — this channel revisits old mmorpgs in current year. It’s mind blowing that many of them are still going, and that people still play them. I can’t even remember the last time I played a game, let alone a mmorpg.