Lots of snow today. I went to take Duncan for a walk at the park, but they were closed, with the lots blocked off.
Continue reading post "#4751"Toby's Log
CSS: Pixelated images filter
I recently made a console theme for my website. Photos left unmodified looked too clean and fancy to fit in with the theme. I played with the saturation and contrast functions of the CSS filter property, which gave okay results, but not enough. I thought a pixelated look fit in, and decided to see if it would be possible with pure CSS, something like pixel art or perhaps sixel on a low resolution terminal. This Stack Overflow answer led me to the solution of using an SVG filter through a url() value of the filter property.
CSS: Repeating character borders
Since adding a theme switcher to my site, I’ve created several new simple themes, including a console theme. It is meant to look somewhat like a command line console / terminal. For this theme, regular borders didn’t fit in. I wanted something with repeated characters, looking more like some terminal application output or Markdown would have. Looking for doing this with pure CSS, a Stack Overflow answer helped me come up with a solution.
There is no way with the CSS content or the like to just have a character repeat to fill a given width or height. So the solution has us manually repeat the character in the content of a pseudo element enough times to handle our largest likely container. We position absolutely and use overflow: hidden to prevent our content from expanding our container and to cut it off at the appropriate length. With alignment and padding, we can then have repeating characters that line up properly in a monospace font grid.
Do not feed evil, or it will surely grow.
Impreza brake calipers, suspension, money
It is perhaps deferred maintenance, but I had to put $2000 into my car (2013 Subaru Impreza). At this point that may just be around the value of the car itself. Brakes, suspension, and oil change. I’ve been wanting to get a new car, but that amount of money is going to make me want to keep this for at least another year to make it worth it. But I was somewhat forced into it by loss of most braking power.
Continue reading post "Impreza brake calipers, suspension, money"The end of last week proved to be somewhat troublesome for me, with extra work and annoying problems…
Continue reading post "#4723"Vim: Netrw SFTP error
I was annoyed by a problem that cropped up in the latest version of MacVim when using SFTP with the included Netrw plugin. It showed an error every time I opened a directory. So I filed a bug and helped get it fixed. I spent a fair amount of time looking for the exact commit in the Netrw code where the problem started. I then filed a GitHub issue about it with that information. It got fixed in like an hour, at least in the repo. Still waiting for it to make it to MacVim.
Continue reading post "Vim: Netrw SFTP error"Proposal: *daily
I propose that, for any word that ends with the suffix “day”, the suffix can be replaced with “daily”. The new word shall be equivalent to putting the word “every” before that word. For example, “Mondaily” means every Monday, “Tuesdaily” means every Tuesday, etc. Seems a useful shortcut to discuss these. For example, “Fridaily I go into the office” seems a little quicker and simpler sounding than “Every Friday I go into the office”.
Continue reading post "Proposal: *daily"Project: Website theme switcher
I finally made a theme switcher for my website. Ever since I saw the CSS Zen Garden, I loved the idea of using the same markup with completely different appearances. This led to a desire to have multiple themes and an ability to switch them on my own site. Early on I didn’t have the ability, and later I didn’t have the energy or time, or decide on the way I wanted to do it. There are performance and complexity considerations, as well as needing to make decent themes other than the default one. My eventual desire to have a static-friendly site complicated the performance aspect as well.
Some browsers have a built in way to change to alternate stylesheets, but they stupidly download all of them even when they’re not being used. I’m not doing that. So JS or a server-side cookie solution are needed, and the latter won’t work for static sites. I try to minimize the JS on my site and didn’t want something heavy or complex, especially if it were loading before page render.
Recently, I had the energy and decided on a simple, lightweight JS way to do it. I decided to start it even without real alternative themes.
Continue reading post "Project: Website theme switcher"Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. Mine was good, good food and lots of people at Cousin Paul’s. I made pecan tassies this time for ease of timing. They turned out a little weird and crumbly, and I did get a request for the cheesecake I made last year. The most interesting thing about this Thanksgiving, though, was the snow.
Continue reading post "#4705"