Started the weekend dropping the boy off at the golf this morning and then doing a CostCo run. Currently pondering my next move with a brew.
Used this JSON sorter to finally tame my rather large VS Code config for work. I can now find related settings once again.
I’m seriously considering getting a cheap laptop to give Omarchy a try.
I can’t see myself using anything else other than an iPhone as a smartphone. However, I’m open to seeking an alternative to the MacBook as my main web development laptop.
I think I’ve managed to get my note banners working so that you can invert them. Going to come back to the changes tomorrow and review them.
Basic Apple Guy’s doing another round of gradients for September. I’ve been using Basic Apply Guy’s wallpapers for a couple of years now. Couple that with the wallpapers posted on r/wallpaper and that’s pretty much my two sources for wallpaper.
Now that Typepad is shutting down, I’m wondering if and where Nicholas Bate will relocate his blog. Nicholas Bate’s blog was one of the first blogs I remember following on Google Reader. It would be a shame to lose it.
Dave Winer, with a preference for ChatGPT, I would also love to see implemented.
I want a ChatGPT pref that lets me turn off human impersonation. I want it to behave like a search engine. I ask questions, it answers. Period.
Generating note banners with Ruby
I created some banner images of my own for Apple Notes and Bear this morning, like the ones you can use with the Forever Notes system. Unlike the ones you can download from the resources page, though, mine are a bit more customisable and generate a different set of mountains each time.
I quite like the end result of these.
The other nice thing about them is that the fill colour can be transparent. So in Bear, when you switch to a dark theme, the dark colour comes through the banner. It doesn’t look so great with the light themes, but I barely use them anyway.
Currently, I have two scripts, one for generating a transparent banner and one that generates a banner using a set of colours.
I plan on adding a few more over the next few months. Clouds, hills, snowflakes and skyscrapers could all be generated with random patterns and follow the same convention. I won’t be running a web server to allow others to generate these easily. Generating images consumes more energy than a typical web request, so in the meantime, you’ll need to download the scripts and generate them yourself.
Source code is available on SourceHut.
I’m definitely curious about Omarchy.
Learning with React and single-page HTML applications
As part of my plan to learn React, I’ve been building single-page HTML applications that use local storage to persist any information between sessions. As a start, I built a roulette wheel for our team at work to determine who goes first during stand-up each morning.
I have since moved on and created applications for a technical log, a start page, and I have a few other ideas brewing. The persistence to local storage in the browser is common between all the applications, but I’m trying to build different ways to interact with these applications so that I can learn more about React.
Next week, I hope to develop a replacement for the Excel spreadsheet we use to track our OKR goals at work. The Excel spreadsheet is functional and certainly doesn’t win any prizes for looks. I thought this would be a good learning project to tackle in React, as the formulas we use would enable the page to be more dynamic.