I’ve been looking into hidutil to potentially replace Karabiner for overriding my capslock behavior. My first attempt, follow instructions similar to this post, was close but unsuccessful. I was able to remap the capslock key, but it wasn’t trigger the key combo I had hoped for – I use cmd+option+ctrl+shift. Caplock wasn’t performing it’s normal function and the key light wasn’t turning on but it also wasn’t triggering my hotkeys. Hopefully I will have something workable after a bit more time with this.
I’ve been working on a Next.js app with a Leaflet map component. Using this combination of technologies has not gone smoothly. I’ve been running into an issue trying to make the Leaflet component render client side. From my understanding, Next.js renders React server-side by default, but this is easy to change with the 'use client' directive. After a bit of work, I was able to get a map component rendering on the page by importing it with

2023-10-18

I spent some time experiementing with Inngest, cloud software for running async jobs, workflows, crons and more. It’s quite similar to Temporal, which I am big advocate for for running durable workflows and gracefully handling failures. There are some drawbacks, but it feels simpler to get started than Temporal and has a most of the same topline capabilities. The main feature deficiencies I noticed in about an hour of research were lack of as granular retry configurations and timeouts and no support for query handlers to inspect the status of a running function/workflow.
Given the following make target .PHONY: my_target my_target: @python scripts/my_script.py $(arg) one can the argument with an argument in the following manner make my_target arg=my_arg I used this approach to run a python script to create the file for this post make til p=make/pass-arg-to-target for the following make target .PHONY: til til: @python scripts/til.py $(p) It’s also possible to prepend the variable p=make/pass-arg-to-target make til
I learned about skhd recently, actually after coming across the yabai project. I’ve been toying with the idea of moving away from Hammerspoon for my hotkey and window management, so I took the opportunity to explore skhd as a possible alternative. Initial setup To get started on macOS, I followed the guide in the project README. First, I installed skhd via brew. brew install koekeishiya/formulae/skhd The instructions say to start the service immediately with
I had a bunch of fun following along with this post with my own Hugo blog to construct a sqlite database of metadata. Building the database indices, I found a mistake I had made years ago in defining a post’s alias, which was a duplicate, so I fixed that. I’ve read a lot of praise of sqlite lately and wanted to get more familiar with the tools and ecosystem and this was a nice way to start to do that.
I used open-interpreter to read an epub file and create a DIY audio book. Open-interpreter suggested that I use the bs4 and ebooklib libraries. It recommended an API to create audio files from text, but I was easily able to switch this out for the free and local alternative, say on macOS. As I worked (let the model write code), it was easier to copy the code to a separate file and make modifications.
Further investigation with Open Interpreter today reaffirmed certain strengths but also revealed a number of weaknesses. The look is excellent at parsing structured data like JSON or CSV, doing analysis with tools like pandas and numpy, and plotting the results with matplotlib. However, it falls short when trying to perform more complex data fetching tasks. It seems to struggle to scrape websites or make use of less common libraries, at least when I tried without providing any additional documentation.
I did some more experimentation with open-interpreter today. The first use case I tried was to create, organize and reorganize files. It didn’t generate interesting content, but it was fluent at writing Python code to organize and rename files. When I prompted it to generate a fake dataset, it installed faker and created a CSV with the columns I requested. When I requested it plot those data points, it installed matplotlib and did so without issue.

2023-09-11

I read quote from a long tweet the other day that made me smile. Writing pure JavaScript is like trying to cut a watermelon with a chainsaw in the dark. It sounds fun and free and quite easy until there’s a roomful of mess to clean up. https://twitter.com/kettanaito/status/1699440414812504443