nikhil.io

Tons of features but, to me, the coolest things are: easy UI controls, git-friendliness, and reactivity.

Messed with Claude Code over Christmas break and, while quite impressed, was unsure of how people used it to create and manage non-trivial projects.

My initial thoughts: (a) Be explicit and (b) Check the work.

And the answer to my prayers. Activate a ‘multi-clipboard’ with a very simple and memorable ⌘Shiftc

brew install maccy but please get it via Gumroad or the App Store.

Windows 11 is an ad platform and AI shit-showcase masquerading as a serious operating system that serious people are supposed to use to get serious things done. Bookmarking this in case I have to use this infernal piece of software.

It’s all too sad really. I’ve used it since Windows 3.1 and still think Windows 7 was a fantastic OS (used it exclusively for gaming). Looks like I might be good with the Windows 10 Enterprise IOT LTSC version, at least until 2032.

Cached.

And LLMLingua (Microsoft) will compress things for context windows.

I was tickled to try out the Windows 3.11, Windows 95, and Windows 7 ones. Simpler, purer times.

Covers testing/mocking, databases, Redis, performance. For engineers at Stream. Cached.

Obsessive organizer of things and see myself using this daily.

Or maybe I should STFU and just use cURL…

Quite a few of them are designed to confuse and/or furstrate the user into increasing Shareholder Value™ but there are many that are firmly in “confusion of ideas” territory.

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And a classic one at that (OS/2 and BeOS vibes). Amazing. Here’s how they did it. Gatsby!

Plenty of good stuff on there but this totally blew my mind. Consider this custom tag (should be lowercased and contain hyphens. Emojis are allowed!):

<cool-thing shadow>wow</cool-thing>

and this valid CSS:

cool-thing {
    display: flex;

    &[shadow] {
        box-shadow: 1px 1px #0007;
    }

    @media (screen < 480px) {
        flex-direction: column;
    }
}

The only thing missing from my beloved SASS are mixins but I suppose you can achieve that by composing attributes (like shadow above). Super cool.

View the source and the stylesheet. Really nice idea to tinker with. The last time I played with XSLT was in 2001!

Been using the excellent TablePlus for a while but this one seems nice too.

There is the purposeful degradation of the pool but I don’t know how else one would do it without buying more disks for a separate pool entirely. Author helpfully provides a lot of links to places you can back up your stuff to (with prices!)

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That’s a link to the Mahabharata, quite possibly my favorite story ever.

He’s also written and published this amazing book.

Here’s a lovely noise generator, for example.

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Been around since 1996!

Looks lovely. $9.99 on the App Store, one-time purchase, sort of: you purchase up to a year of feature updates.

Good old-school fun. I miss being able to theme OS X. How much fun is this? I hope Apple doesn’t bork whatever makes this work.

Written in Python. Not sure where I’d use them. Reminded me of Charm.

Written in Swift. Last update was in 2020. There’s also WebAMP, whose Skin Gallery puts a smile on my face.

Because The Unarchiver now shows fucking ads.

Yes, I am complaining about a free thing. I have zero problem paying for the application and/or for the ads to go away. We drown in enough shit as it is. Does make me think why I need a separate unarchiver… perhaps for RAR files?

Here’s a demo site (demo:demo). I was able to launch it in under 30 seconds (M2 MacBook Air, 24GiB) against a ~200GiB music library.

UX and beets integration aside, it’s essentially what I tried to build a long while ago. A simple music player (based on Rust/Golang, SQLite, and simple Web APIs) whose UI made sense to normal and reasonable people and not ambitious product managers.

Another, native iOS, app is Manet. Yet another is Finamp. I use Plex and not Jellyfin. There appears to be an official such app for Plex called Plexamp.

Been writing bash scripts for over 15 years now. Learned a lot from this presentation. There’s also this advanced bash scripting guide I’ve referred to for a while now.

I use the excellent Karabiner for my keyboard but this appears to be a more ‘native’ solution. Here’s a copy of the repository.

And it’s a single file! I’ve cached it here. This is a lite version of one of my favorite apps, the excellent (and surprisingly cheap) MonoDraw for macOS.

Lovely little wrappers around child_process, it looks like. I love Bun’s shell-scripting feature and am glad to note that the same elegant (eye of the beholder, leave me alone) syntax is available in Node via zx.

They’re thin and delightful. 600 of them. Found them on this Floating UI component site.

A pretty comprehensive solution! I was looking for this when attempting to learn me some Bun and make a small script that would live-reload a single page (with SASS and Tailwind). And voila: a significantly better solution than the duct tapey thing I came up with 🤣

Found it via this repository.

Very cool. More CLI than UTM. Another is Lima.

Thing I like about projects like these (another example would be LinuxServer) is studying their humongous list of FOSS apps.

You can use System Settings -> Battery -> Battery Health -> Info Icon to toggle this “ML” approach where macOS (and the developers who know more than you about how to care for your Mac) will handle this for you but I’ve never gotten it to work as expected despite docking my laptop repeatedly, and for half the day, over a year.

You can buy it on Gumroad or here’s a download link.

Another is Swinsian which looks like iTunes of yore but doesn’t have dark mode (and, not that this means anything, appears to have no updates since 2018).

Both apps are paid. An Open-Source manager is the Strawberry Music Player

Other things to mix and match include shallots and various bell peppers.

By Noah Veltman who appears to have impeccable gums.

A cannot-believe-this-is-free collection of Physics videos on everything from Classical Mechanics to QM.

Here’s a Github Gist for a CLI option that uses diskutil.

By Julia Evans. I don’t think an average dev will need anything more than what’s on here.

Was paying a bill on the State Farm website and wondered what they used. Comes in serif and slab serif as well.

Lovely. Uses some kind of sharding to intelligently get ‘pages’ of relevance. The WASM size is only ~70kB, compared to SQLite’s WASM’s ~460kB.

By the same author who wrote The Little Go Book

All a typical dev would need to know really.

I love this. There really is nothing (or at least very little) that’s new under the Sun.

Gorgeous. One day.

All these years and I find myself reaching for this reference quite a few times…

If there’s a TL;DR it is the second line: “Don’t put any lines in your vimrc that you don’t understand.”

by DJ Bernstein

Not what you think they are.

Just beautiful.

Via Prof. Frances Pritchett’s site.

I bookmarked this in 2015 and it’s crazy how relevant it continues to be.

Dated but a nice and quick intro a la “DNA for Programmers” or the like.

And a delightful tool I use almost every week for its auto-completion and syntax highlighting,