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I have a lot of digital cross-stitch patterns and until recently they were a mess. My “collection” was a series of several hundred PDFs, disorganised and spread across my disk. Recently, I was looking for a pattern and it took me several minutes to find it. I had a brief moment of panic, thinking that I’d lost it, and the website this pattern came from is long since gone. Fortunately it did turn up, but it was clear I had to organise my pattern collection. Some people would use apps like Pattern Keeper or Flosshaven, but I just created another static website on my media drive. This is what it looks like: The patterns are arranged in a masonry layout with a preview thumbnail for each pattern, which is normally the first page of the PDF. If a pattern has multiple files – for example, different files for colour and black-and-white printing – there’s a list of links below the thumbnail. I can also add a source link to where I bought the pattern, if I want to find more patterns by the same author. Internally, it’s structured like my other static websites. The metadata for the patterns is stored in a JavaScript file, and then I have an HTML page which renders that metadata in this visual design. My pattern collection doesn’t change very often, so I’m adding new files by hand. There are no sorting or filtering options, because my collection is small enough that they’re unnecessary. I can scroll through the entire list in less than a minute and find whatever I need. I’d like to start making my own clothes soon, and I expect to copy this design to store clothing patterns. This collection now sits alongside my saved bookmarks, podcasts, TV shows, and more. I can keep all my patterns organised, and I won’t lose them in the depths of my hard drive. Technical tricks There are a couple of technical pieces I’m quite pleased with in this process: Masonry layout. I love the cascading grid style of a masonry layout, and I think they’re great when you have variable-sized content – like my pattern cards. I’ve been using them for over a decade; screenshots of my early web apps show my experiments with David Desandro’s Masonry.js library. Masonry layouts are now a native feature of CSS called “Grid Lanes”, which is simpler and more performant than the JavaScript approach. I’m excited to use these layouts in even more places. Thumbnails of PDFs. Most digital postage patterns are shipped as PDFs, and I’m creating the thumbnail images with my create_thumbnail tool. I had to extend my tool to support PDFs, which turned out to be straightforward with the pdf_oxide crate. I’d not come across Oxide before, but it’s a cross-language library for working with PDFs, and I can imagine using it in future. A coloured stripe for the palette. In the metadata for each project, I have the complete list of DMC thread colours and the pattern dimensions. I have a lookup table that converts DMC thread colours to hex codes, and then I’m able to create a linear gradient in CSS to render a coloured stripe of the pattern colours. Here’s an example from a pattern with four colours: border-bottom: 12px solid transparent; border-image: linear-gradient( to right, #7a451f 0%, #7a451f 25%, #985e33 25%, #985e33 50%, #e4bb8e 50%, #e4bb8e 75%, #361f0e 75%, #361f0e 100% ) 1; Building the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was very quick – I have notes on how I build my media sites, and I’ve done it plenty of times before. I threw together the initial prototype in less than 15 minutes. The longer part was finding all the PDFs scattered across my disk – but now that’s done, and I know exactly where to find my patterns. [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]
I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I like how they fit around other tasks. I press play, lock my phone, and put it down. I’m free to wash the dishes, fold the laundry, or shop for groceries. Unfortunately, more and more information is only published as a video. Technical talks, conference sessions, video essays – they don’t work in an audio-only podcast app. I could convert these videos to MP3 files, but that breaks down the moment a video isn’t pure spoken word. If a speaker says, “Look at this slide” or holds up a diagram, an audio-only file leaves me stranded. I don’t want to give up the podcast player I like, nor stare at a screen for an hour – but I do want the information in these videos. To solve this, I’m abusing my podcast player’s chapter support. This gives me the best of both worlds: I can listen to a video as audio-first, and glance at my lock screen if I need a moment of visual context. The idea: Chapters every few seconds MP3 files can have ID3 metadata, and ID3 metadata can include chapters. A chapter covers a particular time range, and it can have an associated title, description, and cover art. My podcast app of choice is Overcast, which can’t play videos, but it does have robust chapter support. I can jump between chapters, navigate a table of contents, and see per-chapter cover art. To get videos into Overcast, I’m creating MP3 files with a new chapter every few seconds, and the per-chapter cover art is a corresponding frame from the video. As I play the file, I get a slow, stop-motion-like rendition of the original video. If my phone is locked, I can glance at my lock screen and see the current frame in the Now Playing screen. Overcast is developed by Marco Arment, and I got this idea from Forecast, his app for adding chapters to podcasts. In particular, I was struck by its ability to create chapters that don’t display in the chapter list – ideal if I don’t want a table of contents with hundreds of entries. As I was developing my script, I compared my output to the output from Forecast to ensure I was creating the chapters correctly. The code: FFmpeg and Mutagen There are three steps in this process: Convert a video file to an MP3 Extract images from the video at a fixed interval Insert the images as hidden chapters in the MP3 file Let’s go through each in turn. 1. Convert a video file to an MP3 Converting a video file to an MP3 is a single FFmpeg command: ffmpeg -i video.mp4 audio.mp3 This is consistently the slowest step of the process, and I do wonder if I could use different settings or an alternative encoder to make it go faster – but it’s not slow enough to be worth further investigation. 2. Extract images from the video at a fixed interval Extracting images from a video needs a more complicated FFmpeg command: ffmpeg -i video.mp4 \ -vf 'fps=1/5,scale=iw*sar:ih,scale=min(iw\,945):min(ih\,945):force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease' \ thumbnail_%04d.jpg This extracts an image every 5 seconds, downscales any image larger than 945 pixels square (while preserving the original aspect ratio), and saves the results as sequentially numbered JPEG images (thumbnail_0001.png, thumbnail_0002.png, and so on). The key is the -vf flag, which defines two FFmpeg filters: The fps filter selects one frame every 5 seconds (fps=1/5). The first scale filter scales the width based on the sample aspect ratio (scale=iw*sar:ih). Without this filter, frames can be stretched and distorted. The second scale filter scales the input video, preserving the original aspect ratio (force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease), and ensuring the output images fit within 945×945px or the size of the input video, whichever is smaller. My limit is 945 pixels because that’s the largest size that cover art is shown on my iPhone. This filter still isn’t completely correct – it sometimes creates images from portrait videos that are smaller than I’m expecting – but it’s good enough. These are only thumbnails for glancing at, and if I want to change it later, I can always do the image resizing outside FFmpeg. 3. Insert the images as hidden chapters in the MP3 file Inserting the chapters into the MP3 file is more complicated. Although FFmpeg has basic support for ID3 metadata, as far as I know, it can’t insert chapters with per-chapter artwork. Instead, I’m going to reach for Python and the Mutagen library. Here’s the code to add a chapter to an MP3 file: from mutagen.id3 import APIC, CHAP, ID3, PictureType audio = ID3("audio.mp3") with open("thumbnail_0001.jpg", "rb") as f: img_data = f.read() image_frame = APIC(mime="image/jpeg", type=PictureType.OTHER, data=img_data) chapter_frame = CHAP( element_id="chp1", start_time=0, end_time=5 * 1000, sub_frames=[image_frame] ) audio.add(chapter_frame) audio.save() This creates a single chapter that lasts the first 5 seconds (0 to 5000 milliseconds), and the per-chapter cover art is thumbnail_0001.jpg. If we ran this in a loop, we could add images for every 5 second slice of the original video. This code is inserting two frames into the ID3 metadata: The CHAP (chapter) frame contains the timing information, and it can have subframes for metadata like title, chapter art, or associated URL. The APIC (attached picture) subframe contains information about a picture, which can either be a blob of image data or a URL to an image on the web. Normally, you’d also insert a CTOC frame which defines a table of contents, but I don’t want a TOC with hundreds of 5-second chapters, so I’m deliberately not doing this here. This is allowed by the ID3 spec – you’re not required to insert a CTOC frame if you’re using chapters, and you can have chapters that aren’t listed in your table of contents. To work out which frames I needed, I used Forecast to create some chapters by hand, and I inspected their frames. In particular, loading an MP3 and calling Mutagen’s pprint() method shows a human-readable list of frames, and then I could drill into the individual fields: from mutagen.id3 import ID3 audio = ID3("audio.mp3") print(audio.pprint()) I wrapped all this code in a project called glancecast, which allows you to convert a video file with a single command, with optional flags to set the frame length and chapter art size: $ python3 glancecast.py interesting_talk.mp4 interesting_talk.mp3 The process takes a minute or so to complete, most of which is spent transcoding the video file to MP3. The resulting MP3s are usually 40 to 50 MB in size, which is very reasonable. The outcome: How it looks in practice Here’s what one of these “glanceable” podcasts looks like in Overcast and on my lock screen: Maggie Appleton presented this talk over two years ago and it’s been on my “talks to watch” list ever since. Once I put it in Overcast? I listened to it in less than a day. It’s not a lot of extra information, but enough that I can quickly glance down and get the gist of what a speaker is saying. Both views update with a new frame every few seconds, or I can put my phone in my pocket and ignore the screen. I’ve used this approach for half a dozen videos so far, and I’m happy with the results. I expect to keep using it, because I have a long queue of videos I’ve been meaning to watch. If you’d like to try this, check out glancecast for the full code and instructions. [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]
I wrote a post for the Tailscale blog about a long-running series of corruption incidents, and how they eventually led us to find an SQLite bug that predates my entire programming career. I’m incredibly proud of this, both the work and the blog post. Before Tailscale, I was coming from smaller teams where I didn’t get to tackle problems of this scale or complexity. This was exactly the sort of tricky, deep technical challenge I wanted to be part of (though I’d rather it hadn’t been quite so stressful)! I’m glad I got to play a small part in these incidents, and I learnt so much from the more experienced engineers I worked with. I never want to hear the words “SQLite corruption” again, but if I do, I’d want to have Tailscalars at my side. Writing the blog post has a blast, too. The piece transformed from a rough draft into a solid, engaging piece of writing, thanks to thoughtful feedback from many people at Tailscale. Most of my writing is self-edited, and it’s always a pleasure to work with a dedicated editor. Please check out the blog post if you haven’t read it already – I think it’s a fascinating technical story, and one readers of this site are bound to enjoy. [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]
Yesterday at work, a customer spotted a typo in our UI: “you can use the use the Tailscale CLI”. After the typo was fixed, I wanted to find other cases of accidentally repeated words or phrases. I used two regular expressions to search every codebase for unnecessary repetition. The first regex finds repeated words: \b([A-Za-z]+) \1\b Backfill product data from from Stripe Learn more about about inviting users Argument must be be one of host name, IP set name, IP prefix, or IP There’s a capturing group for a single word made up of letters ([A-Za-z]+), a space, then a backreference to the group. That expression is surrounded by word boundary assertions \b, which check that I’m at the start/end of a word – this avoids finding repeated character sequyences that within longer words, like “with the reason”. The second regex finds repeated phrases: \b([A-Za-z]+ [A-Za-z]+) \1\b Follow the steps in the in the "How to" section Log in to in to your account To configure federated identities federated identities using the Go SDK I’ve changed the capturing group, so now it looks for two words separated by a space. Sometimes repetition is useful, like when I really really went to emphasise a point, but often it’s just a typo. Cleaning up these mistakes has been a fun Friday cleanup task. [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]
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It's time for a dev blogger's favorite topic: blogging about my new blogging setup. After migrating my blog from Hexo to Eleventy, building a photography website and creating a personal one-pager, it was time to find a new digital home for all my projects. If you notice any issue after the migration, please let me know. I redirect the RSS feed to the new domain, but you might want to update the feed URL in your reader. Motivation I've been maintaining three different websites under two different names: a mostly developer-oriented blog, a photography portfolio and a one-pager gluing everything together. When I started blogging about my sabbatical journey, I was thinking about making yet another page to create a clear separation. I've decided to do the opposite and merge all my websites into one instead. As I further reduce my dependency on social media and third-party services, it has become even more important to have my own space and practice POSSE. Every decision I've made was driven by two main goals: simplicity and personality. Setup I've stopped chasing the latest and greatest. I want to keep the setup as clean as possible, which means pulling fewer dependencies. Every package adds complexity and maintainability costs, so I've only added what was necessary — no more Gulp, Sass or Tailwind. Instead of taking one of my existing websites as a starting point, I created this project from scratch. I reused some of my previous code, but I didn't want to take over any technical debt (especially with the advancements in CSS). The foundation of this website hasn't changed: Eleventy (Build Awesome). It covers the fundamentals of a static site and offers a great level of customization. I've made my project more and less dependent on Eleventy at the same time: I replaced Gulp as my build pipeline with pure Eleventy processing. I replaced most shortcodes with Markdown alternatives (and markdown-it plugins), which are better supported by editors like Obsidian. I've also replaced the Nunjucks template engine with Liquid, which comes with a few trade-offs. The main reason was to avoid creating a new collection for every set of posts I render. With Liquid, you can apply array functions like filtering or sorting in the template itself: {% assign drafts = collections.all | where: "data.isDraft" | reverse %} {% for draft in drafts %} … {% endfor %} Another advantage is having date formatting included, so I don't need another library or custom code. You can even set a default date format, so you don't have to provide it each time. What I don't like is the verbosity of the template language, although I've gotten used to it by now. Nunjucks: {{ "/tags/" + tag + "/" }} {{ modified or created or date }} {% set perspectives = ["dev", "photography", "life"] %} Liquid: {{ "/tags/" | append: tag | append: "/" }} {{ modified | default: created | default: date }} {% assign perspectives = "dev, photography, life" | split: ", " %} After migrating my existing content, I've noticed the build taking way too long, both in the dev server and the production build. I've found out that the Eleventy template cache is turned off for Liquid by default. This was useful during development, but when updating actual content, it caused every template and partial to be constantly recalculated. After turning the cache on, this issue was resolved: eleventyConfig.setLiquidOptions({ cache: true }); Check the colophon for the full tech stack overview. Perspectives The main challenge was finding a way to separate and present my main personas. The Venn diagram intersection of people interested in software development, photography and my personal life is probably small. I could use tags, but they don't offer the level of personalization I was looking for. Most personal blogs separate the content by post type (blog post, note, photo), but this doesn't fit my use case. Instead, I've decided to structure my website around three perspectives, a term I have borrowed from the Eclipse IDE. Each perspective comes with its own avatar, tagline and bio. If someone is interested in everything I share (hi Mom!), they can still view all my posts. Design Since building my photography website, I've made many changes, but I never got around to share an update. The biggest change was the design, which I have used as a blueprint for the new website. I've decided to mimic a social timeline/feed, which most people are familiar with. At the same time, it should be clear that it's a personal website and not yet another walled garden. Typography is an important part of every design. The first step is to choose between a system font stack and a custom font, which comes with the usual performance vs. personality trade-offs. I've decided to go with a uniform look across all devices. I've settled on Source Sans 3 for copy text and Hack for code. Another big change was introducing a sidebar. I always felt like the empty horizontal space was "wasted" on a desktop device, but getting the sidebar UX right is challenging. I'm happy with the result, especially with the last two panels adding a personal touch to the design. Images I've made several changes to the handling of image files. To make them compatible with Markdown editors, I had to replace my custom picture shortcode. The official Eleventy image plugin is a popular choice, but it violates my simplicity goal and doesn't support everything I needed. I've decided to go with a plain Markdown image markup and a single image file (no format fallback or 2x version for retina displays). Additionally, I wrote a markdown-it plugin to turn the optional title parameter into a caption. As for the file format, both WebP and AVIF have excellent browser support. For each image, I select the format based on the quality and file size. For my photos, I'm using WebP for the timeline thumbnails and JPG for the full-size version. Theme picker There have been some recent discussions about dark mode toggles, and I considered going for a light/dark solution based on the user's OS preference. Driven by the personality goal, I knew I had to add at least one more theme, so a proper theme picker was necessary. Similar to navigation, people like to hide the theme selection on mobile devices behind a burger menu or a dropdown. I prefer the solution by Sarah L. Fossheim, where all available themes are displayed above the page footer. A friend was scrolling through my new website, and their first question was "Why is the theme picker in the footer?". This tells me the solution was a good idea — I don't think he would have noticed a typical theme button in the header. The implementation follows standard practices: Use the light or dark theme as default based on the user's OS or browser preference. Store a selected theme in the local storage and use it as the single source of truth. Prevent a flash of inaccurate color theme. Make the theme play nicely with bfcache. I might have slightly gone overboard with my third theme, but the nostalgia kept me adding more and more features. Enjoy going back to the 90s: Feeds As browser vendors decided to remove XSLT support, I didn't bother to style my feed. Instead, I've created a new web feeds page, listing all available feeds and a short explanation. I provide one feed for every perspective and one with all my posts combined. I once offered tag-based RSS feeds. This was useful for my sabbatical, but even there I had only a single subscriber. Now, all tag feeds redirect to their main perspective feed. I've also dropped the JSON feed, despite having at least 16 subscribers. Given that every web feed reader supports Atom feeds, I don't see the value of providing a JSON alternative. A JSON feed doesn't add much complexity, but handling different media types (post, photo) and properly escaping the content is one more thing to implement and maintain. Quality assurance I've put a lot of effort into my new digital home, and I want to make sure it stays in good shape. I've included several tools, most running automatically as part of the CI pipeline: eleventyDataSchema — lint Eleventy data values like titles or dates markdownlint — format/lint Markdown files Vale — lint content (grammar, writing style, formatting) Lychee — find broken links (internal and external) Evaluatory — check accessibility and validate HTML Oxlint — lint JavaScript files Eleventy linters are another option to analyze a template's output, but I haven't found a use case for it yet. Not everything can be automated, so I also did the following manually: Test with Chrome, Firefox and Safari Test with Polypane Test with Google Lighthouse Test with a screen reader Test with JavaScript disabled Test with CSS disabled Test at 200% zoom Test with a bigger browser font size Test with custom fonts disabled Test with delayed assets Performance It's difficult to compare the performance of two separate websites with that of a combined one. Some parts got worse, e.g. bigger font files and more CSS. At the same time, I've noticed that gzip compression was turned off for anything but HTML for a few years now (I must have missed it when upgrading nginx) 🙈. One improvement was to implement on-demand assets. For example, the lite-youtube-embed CSS and JavaScript is only loaded if a <lite-youtube> element is present on the page. As before, JavaScript is fully optional (except for interactive demos in individual posts). I've been using a mix of <noscript> and CSS to hide elements that require JS (like the theme picker). I don't like the user experience of pagination, so I avoided it for years. But now that I have almost 300 posts, I've decided to finally add it. I display 30 posts per page, with images further down still being lazy-loaded for better performance. I haven't applied pagination to tag pages, as that's more complex with Eleventy. Bits and pieces Here are some other noteworthy changes: I've removed post-specific social share images and use a single WebP Open Graph image instead. I've dropped JSON-LD. Open Graph and microformats are sufficient. "Naming is hard" is a common expression in software development, but it also applies to photograph titles. I've decided to use a counter as the title, e.g. #0100. Sometimes I do come up with a title that I love, like the Castle in the Sky, so I might mention it in the description. On a photo page, you can now open the previous/next photo using the left/right arrow keys (in addition to the existing navigation buttons). It's now possible to filter photos by date, gear, or location. Check the explore page for an overview. I've learned about and used some experimental CSS features (with progressive enhancement), like scroll-triggered animations or squircle corners. I've added an AI statement on my LLM usage. I finally have a proper about page. Cool URIs don't change, but it's inevitable when moving to a new domain. All my previous URLs are redirected, except for some assets that are no longer used. I will keep the old domain, so the redirects will continue to work for a foreseeable future. I've kept my previous Easter egg and added a few more. Have a happy hunt! 🕵️♂️ Inspiration I visited hundreds of personal websites looking for inspiration. Here are a few that I kept coming back to: Emma Goto. I love Emma's approach to presenting the variety of her interests, even though I went a different route. Brennan Kenneth Brown. This website has so much to offer. It's a great example of what the open web looks like. Rex Barrett. The sentence "Collecting hobbies is my hobby." hit home — so much that I had to steal borrow it for my short life bio. Conclusion This project was mostly about merging the content of two websites into one. I knew this would take a considerable amount of time, but I still greatly underestimated the effort. In the end, it was all about the journey, not the destination. I loved fine-tuning the design and tweaking little details that probably no one will ever notice. I still have many more ideas left in my backlog. How do you like my new digital home? If you have an opinion, let me know! Reply via email
New electronica album by Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan
It’s four years since I bought a printer. I thought I would provide an update on running costs, print sales, and profit. I’m happy to be completely transparent about all this as I know it can be difficult to figure this out if you are thinking of creating your own printing business. January 11th 2026, 11:30am All the photos here are work shot in the last twelve months. Year Four Investment? Nothing other than consumables this year. I did purchase a high-spec film scanner last year, detailed here, but don’t consider that as part of this. The scanner has paid for itself several times over, and it may become a factor in future years (see below). Income Income is made up of sales through a local gallery that I am part of, along with web sales: 5,940.- CHF - sales through the gallery 80.- CHF - sales through web shop = 6,020.- CHF total income Total income is down about 50% compared to 2025. Costs I had to purchase consumables (paper and ink), at a total of 957.- CHF. That cost is included in the total here under the “print consumables” category. January 11th 2026, 3:30pm Rental cost of space in the gallery was reduced due to having overpayments of rent and my loan to the gallery, from the previous year(s), paid back to me. -1,500.- CHF - rental cost of space in the gallery -957.- CHF - print consumables (paper, ink) -1,138.- CHF - framing/mounting/postage -1,135.- CHF - commission to the gallery -300.- CHF - web shop subscription 0.- CHF - stripe / paypal fees 0.- CHF - advertising (none this year) = -5,030.- CHF total costs Total costs are down by about 60% compared to 2025. Total Profit 6,020.- CHF total income -5,030.- CHF total costs = 990.- CHF total profit A Quiet Year? Actually an average year. The previous couple of years were outliers, due to large orders, so really I’m back to normal in terms of sales. The key factors in managing to generate a [small] profit this year were: 1) no longer having to pay back the loan used to finance the printer, and 2) reduced rental cost of space in the gallery due to a previous loan to it being repaid. Also having to spend almost 1,000.- CHF on ink this year ate into profit. This is probably a “once every three years” cost given the rate I print at. The principal cost is rental of space in the gallery - in a normal year this would be 3,000.- CHF. Essentially this means, given the material cost of printing and framing/mounting and commission to the gallery, I need to make about 5,500.- CHF of sales to break even. Solar Eclipse, August 12th 2026 That’s a grind. However I did receive two substantial orders at the end of October, which haven’t made it in to this year’s figures and should boost next year’s. Maybe even a good sign for the year to come? At least now the original investment loan is repaid, the printing costs cover themselves in most years. I may look at offering scanning services now that I have a high-spec film scanner, which could become a scan + print service. More thoughts about that next time.
