Hello! from Rick Cogley

Got a Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition, but unfortunately it’s not possible to transfer old Kindle book purchases I made a long time ago in the US, to my main Japan-based Amazon account. The Paperwhite e-ink tech is fantastic, but it’s annoying to have to pay twice. 😤

Been doing the “big tidy” for the past couple of weekends. Today was about changing the sink filter, cleaning the range hood, sprinkling weed killer, and lubing up the rollers and hinges in the house. 🏡🧹

I read this a while back, and it is worth a re-read: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson 📚

I found out I have a library card I can use with Libby, so I took advantage and checked out Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. Kudos to translator Megan Backus, who managed to evoke the right emotions. 📚

If you need a logo designed, consider asking Lucie Baratte, founder of Logology. They have a catalog of ready-made logos, and can design custom ones as well. We love what they did for eSolia’s 25th anniversary refresh! 🥰

I like the Monokai Pro VS Code theme enough to have paid for it, and my eyes are thanking me. Good stuff from Wimer Hazenberg, and you can read about its interesting history here! 👨🏼‍💻

I for one am just glad I could find that one uuid I had forgot about, containing ‘beefcade’. 😂

If you code in JavaScript like so many devs do, join me in signing Ryan Dahl’s open letter to Oracle, to relinquish the JavaScript trademark. Please read and sign (with GitHub) here. 🧐📝

Rawr? Not so sure about the Mozilla rebrand since the Moz://a is so very iconic and the new font (however advanced) just looks like a slab serif? See what it will look like on the JKR landing page for the redesign. 🦖

If you code Typescript with Deno, which you should since its tooling makes life easy, you might take advantage of ‘dvm’ or Deno Version Manager. It allows you to install and track multiple deno versions, and easily switch between. 🤩

Deno 2.1 lets you zip everything up into a single executable, which makes for easy and secure distribution (and far less user support). Ian Bull’s post demos this important feature. 🧁

Deno’s fetch uses a rust library that won’t connect to servers with older TLS or cipher suites, so I worked around it in Lume by pulling a json file using the venerable curl, then manipulating that as I needed. Details in this gist. ⛑️

Struggled today with fetch in a Deno app. The rust lib Deno uses is extra strict about TLS security and would not connect to a REST API. Had to pull the json into a webhook app and fetch from that in Deno. A little detail here. 🤷‍♂️

Today we got a concerning piece of mail, an introduction to a “masseur” who does house calls. It had a power of attorney form, which screamed scam. Do people really stamp and return those!? I imagine the target is elderly folk, who might just do it. 😱

I did myself a favor and subscribed to polypane.app by Kilian Valkhof, which is just an outstanding and multifaceted tool for web dev! 🎛️

Do you know about CUBE CSS, a thoughtful approach to CSS and website design authored by @bell.bz? I think this approach is great because it leverages CSS’s basic nature (and doesn’t fight it), and probably, makes it a little easier to work in a cross-disciplinary team. 👏🏻

Unlearning old, bad CSS habits and replacing them with shiny new ones, with Andy Bell’s Complete CSS course. He said it took a year to produce, and you can tell. It’s outstanding. 🤩

CleanShot is fantastic & featureful screenshot software for Mac, which has the basics, but also annotation, cloud storage, capture history, screen recording, OCR and more. If you share any instructional content, you’ll want to check it out.

Reading about the lovely next-gen programmer font “Monaspace” on GithubNext, also found a cool fork of it, Moralerspace, that merges in Japanese “IBM Plex Sans JP” and a nerd font. Nihongo looks good, and the “nerd” symbols mean tricky Terminal prompts will display as well. 😎

Listening to BSI’s “The Standards Show” today I learned about the British “Kitemark” for service excellence and others. Interesting concept of having triers adhere to multiple British or ISO standards to achieve a given Kitemark scheme. Can any Brits share their thoughts?🪁

Maru the Shiba turned 4 today, how time flies! He got some fresh tennis balls, a Winner Trophy chew toy, his favorite chicken burger (shaped like a 4) and whipped yogurt meal, and lots of love. He never wolfs his food, always carefully inspecting and taking small bites. 🐕🥳

Saw “Samurai Timeslipper” yesterday after reading a review in the paper, and liked it. It’s Showaesque, low budget (eg the actual AD plays an AD, director dons many hats) warmly humorous, takes cues from the best of J cinema. 🥰 www.samutai.net

Went with friend Dave to see the Drum Corps Japan Championship at Carlos Ghohn Memorial Stadium 😅 as he calls it (aka Nissan Stadium), and it was a fantastic long day of great performances. Even the really small corps were excellent, employing creative solutions to their size challenges. 🎼

Bluesky’s “AT Protocol” for identity is cool. I set up my handle as @cogley.jp in one easy step using a TXT record in DNS. Slick! 😎