I’m pretty stoked that this very blog was added to Kagi’s Small Web initiative.

As a result, traffic from Kagi went up many folds since then!

The other day, I stumbled upon the GNOME-only app Hieroglyphic, that finds LaTeX and typst symbols when you draw them on a canvas.

So, I set out to port it to macOS and I can happily report that I succeeded. There’s a PR open to contribute everything back, but in the meantime, grab it from my GitHub fork!

Since having a notch on my MacBook, I cannot fit all the icons in my menu bar.

I’ve tried heaps of apps to make it work: Bartender, Ice/Thaw, and Hidden, but they all had subtle bugs.

Turns out, there’s an easy way to avoid using these apps by shrinking the spacing and padding of the menu bar items, and now I don’t need any of these apps!

From the terminal, type

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 2
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 2
killall ControlCenter

(You can play around with -int 2 and see what works best for you!).

To undo and go back to normal, type

defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing
defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding
killall ControlCenter

It’s a bit crammed, but it’s bug-free.

LiteLLM was recently victim of a supply-chain exploit, where an attacker was able to run arbitrary code on infected machines.

In the aftermath, I saw how uv provides a safety setting for this, and it would be good practice to add this to your pyproject.toml

[tool.uv]
exclude-newer = "1 week"

or uv.toml:

exclude-newer = "1 week"

The docs provide multiple options to protect yourself.

I added this blog to minifeed

Minifeed is a nifty website by Rakhim Davletkaliyev, who added this blog there today.

The tagline for Minifeed is:

Minifeed is a curated blog reader and search engine. We collect humans-written blogs to make them discoverable and searchable.

You can create an account, but search works without logging in.

More on the impact of AI coding, and the Jony Ive-designed Ferrari interior.

Killer quote by John Siracusa on the (possible) existential dread programmers are experiencing because of tools as Claude Code:

The skills that I’m most proud of are not the skills that involve me typing particular API calls.

That whole part (53’ in) is worth a listen.

Recently, Michael Lopp wrote I Hate Fish in which he outlined his approach to getting work done.

The simplicity to remember when to do what resembles how I use Things (which he also uses) in combination with Mailmate and Keyboard Maestro:

• When an email requires follow-up, I hit ⌃ ⌥ ⇧ ⌘ R and I type in how many days I want to be reminded.

  

• The subject is then copied and becomes the title of the item. A clickable link to the email is added as a note.

  

• That’s it. On the day I have to follow-up, the item will pop up in my Things list.

The system also works when I just replied to an email, and I want to be reminded if there has been a follow-up or not.

The core of the system relies on this Keyboard Maestro macro

All the heavy lifting is done by this bit of JS:

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let addDays = (days) => {
    let d = new Date();
    d.setDate(d.getDate() + days);
    return d.toISOString().split('T')[0];
};

function createThingsTodo(name, activationDate, notes) {
    let url = "things:///add?";
    let params = [];
    
    if (name) params.push("title=" + encodeURIComponent(String(name)));
    if (activationDate) params.push("when=" + String(activationDate));
    if (notes) params.push("notes=" + encodeURIComponent(String(notes)));
    url += params.join("&");
    
    let app = Application.currentApplication();
    app.includeStandardAdditions = true;
    app.openLocation(url);
}

let d = parseInt(kmvar.Days, 10);

let mailmate = Application("Mailmate");

let message = mailmate.messages[0];
let name = message.name();
let URL = message.messageUrl();
// Usage examples
createThingsTodo(name, addDays(d), URL);

Some notes:

• Line 7: I didn’t use the Things JXA API but its URL scheme as activationDate (line 12) is somehow not supported there 🤪.
• Line 21: This is how you fetch the Days variable from the modal.
• Line 25: It’s important to invoke the script with a message selected.

You can download the macro here.

Slack’s /feed command is really useful; it allows you to subscribe to an XML feed and receive updates in any channel.

However, it doesn’t always work as expected, and when it fails, there’s no way to find out why.

Recently, I added an Atom feed to an announcement channel, but the posts weren’t coming through. I initially thought the /feed functionality might be incompatible with announcement channels, but I was wrong.

After contacting support, they told me:

Great, I thought. Since I controlled the Atom feed, I figured I could just wrap every entry in an <item> tag. However, the Atom standard expects items to be wrapped in <entry> instead. The spec says feeds should be like:

<feed>
  <entry>
    <title>Post Title</title>
    <published>2025-01-24T10:00:00Z</published>
  </entry>
</feed>

Essentially, Slack’s requirements and the Atom spec are incompatible.

In the end, since I was able to rewrite the feed, I simply switched it to RSS to get everything working.

Transform your favorite cities into beautiful, minimalist designs.

I stumbled upon this beautiful utility to create minimalist posters of the (water)ways of a city.

If you have uv, getting started is really easy:

git clone https://github.com/originalankur/maptoposter  
uv venv --python 3.14.2
source .venv/bin/activate
uv pip install -r requirements.txt
python create_map_poster.py -c "Padua" -C "Italy" -t forest -d 4000

The last command will take a bit of time the first time, as it needs to download quite some data, but the results are beautiful:

Today, I asked a simple question to Microsoft Copilot in Excel:

Copilot then reasoned for 42 seconds and then proclaimed:

Only, nothing changed in the Excel sheet.

So, I replied:

It got me, it thought:

After some thinking, it came up with a brilliant solution:

I thought: let’s make it easy for it:

Reply:

Only, everything was empty.

Hallucinations, anyone?

Option A! It “reasoned” (I have to use scary quotes now) for 5 seconds and then:

I’m starting to get annoyed, because there’s no summary in the file:

It starts to understand me, now.

So, of course I reuploaded the file and then Copilot “reasoned” again for 9 seconds

All these emojis make me helpful! But there’s still no Summary in the sheet

At this point, the model was puzzled, and it reasoned again for 11 seconds.

No shit I’m right. Anyway, the Excel still didn’t have the Summary tab. I uploaded it to Claude and it got it right the first time.

What a horrible experience.

Icing on the Cake

OK, let’s share the prompt then! Let’s click on the 3 small dots at the end of the conversation:

A dialog opens up

OK, then link has been created and copied! Only, nothing has been copied.

No worries, there’s a Manage Access button:

🤦🏻