Hello world! I am refining my approach to how these posts are structured. I think I will usually start with a quick collection of links that don’t warrant much in the way of notes or context before diving into a few sections of things I am compelled to write a bit more about.

🌟 This Week’s Links

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The coolest things I found this week!

• Hero Patterns - A collection of repeatable SVG background patterns for you to use on your web projects.
  • Ooh, these are very nice! I used the Piano Man pattern in a Web project that I’ll aim to publish soon. TODO Related: the Hanon exercises for pianists are online.
• Gadgetbridge - Gadgetbridge is a free and open source Android application that allows you to pair and manage various gadgets such as smart watches, bands, headphones, and more without the need for the vendor application. So in short, you can use Gadgetbridge instead of relying on your gadget’s own proprietary app.
  • I have not used Gadgetbridge yet but it’s on my TODO list!

• Old Website of the Day
• Floodgap Public Gopher Proxy – I have not tested this but I am very happy that things like this are of interest.

• Deploy an HPC cluster with Slurm – I was chatting with a friend over breakfast about deploying Slurm via GCP. I found this tutorial afterwards and am happy to know this exists!

• The web isn’t URL-shaped anymore

• Chatbots Can Go Into a Delusional Spiral. Here’s How It Happens.

🚀 Replacing textmoji[.]app

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I built textmoji.brie.dev with Claude to replace textmoji.app (built by Postlight).

Earlier this year, textmoji.app stopped offering the app I knew and loved. I was just annoyed enough without it that I made an alternative. The site I built works slightly differently by design. I wrote about it a bit on Mastodon: “✨ Does anyone else really miss textmoji\[.\]app?”. The archival copy of the Textmoji introduction post from Postlight has more context about what I was recreating if you weren’t familiar with the original.

OpenGraph Image Tools

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I found myself spending a lot of time on OpenGraph (OG) stuff this week! For the benefit of you and of future me, here’s a curated selection of the best OpenGraph-related tools I found:

• Free OG Image Generator
• OG Image Generator
• opengraph.design
• opengraph.xyz

GPX

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I work with GPX files often enough to be broadly familiar with the format. I spent a bit of time this week digging into the format a bit. The coolest things I found during that exercise was the. Open Source Routing Machine. I was reminded of XKCD #2347:

Scraping mailman archives

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Scraping Mailman mailing list archives is on my long-term list of projects of interest. There’s so much stuff saved in various mailman archives – and these Mailman servers are not guaranteed to be online forever. I like looking through archive scrapers to refine my wishlist feature set as I decide when and whether I’ll tackle this project idea. The closest thing in this space that is actively maintained is HyperKitty.

• Mailman Archive Scraper – generates an RSS feed! (and the related blog post).
• Mailman Downloader – parses to mbox
• Scraping GNU Mailman Pipermail Email List Archives

🌊 Avast!

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A good reminder for us all: Who’s a blog for?

Fair winds and following seas as you surf the Web.