Hello! from Rick Cogley

Congrats to Aoyama Gakuin for their incredible run of the Hakone Ekiden in 10:40:20, a new record. 2nd Komazawa 2:50 back, 3rd Kokugakuin 9:29 back, edging Waseda! 🏃🏼‍♂️

Happy New Year one and all. Hope it’s a good one for you! In Japan, we have osechi like in these photos. 🎍🇯🇵

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. 🤩