Hi! I’m Aaron.

The folks at OddBird built the wonderful color contrast checker OddContrast. Unlike the limited WebAIM Contrast Checker, this one allows you to enter in colors in any color format and to optionally limit colors selections by a color gamut. Great for working with oklch colors.

Once Apple gets Apple Intelligence working to the point where it has access to and can process data in your various other applications (like messages, mail, contacts, etc.) there should be an app that provides you a Lumon Wellness session where Siri reads facts to you about your outie. But you need to appreciate each fact equally, or the Wellness session will end.

As I get older, I find it takes more effort to discover new music, but it is always worth the effort. Yesterday it was Creepy Nuts, a Japanese hip-hop duo. Great silly energy.

Note to self: when using the min() and max() functions in CSS, values have to have units. You cannot write something like min(0, calc(400px - 100%)); it has to be min(0px, calc(400px - 100%)).

Today I discovered Hotei and it's a good day. Currently jamming to the "Strangers" album.

Okay, a piece of really poor UX design is driving me mad: in the Apple Music app, I cannot tell, just by looking at it, if the "Favorite" button is showing that I have 'favorited' the song or not. Worse, I think the button has a different appearance depending on whether or not you are in the app or in the control center. It is a little trivial detail in a very big app but it is nettlesome.

It is a useful reminder that the best creative work often occurs as a result of project constraints that initially seem quite limiting. Constraints are guardrails protecting against a lack of focus and a substrate for crystallization of ideas.

If I am using ChatGPT or Google Gemini or GitHub Copilot to get answers to code questions or examples of code – which I always check against documentation before using – am I learning new code techniques in the process? Or do these tools serve as a crutch that will ultimately make me a weaker programmer?

If my website starts to look more and more like Daring Fireball, well... I guess I am probably doing something right.

I was thinking about how the show Severence lives in the shadow cast by David Lynch and Twin Peaks. I hope that the Severance show runners draw some wisdom from the past and choose not to give us all the answers. Let Lumon keep some mysteries. It’s what he would do.

Was reading about CSS text-box (from Friday Front-End) and I can see isolated cases where it would be useful. But my own framework is all about creating a useful baseline grid. Using text-box would seem to make that an impossible goal. I’m not a fan.

Some wisdom I am borrowing to share here: “We live in a society, not an economy.”

Does Storybook really require you to be building an app from some sort of framework? Is there no vanilla HTML/CSS implementation? What an immediate turn-off. I was considering replacing Fractal (which might no longer be maintained?) but hard pass on Storybook.

I am weeping into my black coffee and sobbing over my cherry pie.

I rode a stationary bike this morning for my workout instead of going outside to ride because of snow and salt and wind and sub-freezing temperatures so my hands and feet were nice and toasty but *damn* it sucked. I could use some warmer weather (just a little warmer) or a real solution to frozen toes.

What I want for Christmas is Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool reviewing the new Superman trailer.

Basic driving skills and common courtesy are severely lacking. No one can signal before turning, stay in their lane, park in a single space. No one obeys the speed limit, stop signs, red lights. It’s gotten really bad.

Google Gemini Deep Research and related tools are going to have a significant impact on academia. Hard o say right now if that will be a good or bad thing but our track record with technology is – to be kind – mixed.

Why is it that YouTube video reviews of cycling gear are mostly presented by people in the UK? Does no one in the US care as much? Is all the good cycling gear made for European consumers?

Nice win today at work using spaCy and Flask on macOS to build a quick web app for running named entity recognition.