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A surreal, colorful collage of musical instruments, notes, and music symbols.

Using Claude to create a playlist for Exploding Kittens

| In Miscellaneous
| 1 minute read

What happened was that last weekend, my family and I played Exploding Kittens: Good vs. Evil, which we were recently gifted. What a fun game! A random idea struck me: why not ask Claude to put together a playlist for us?

Hi Claude, we‘re about to play a few rounds of Exploding Kittens (“Good vs. Ev…

A black and tan dachshund named Elvis sitting on wooden flooring, wearing a pink bandana with watermelon print. He has soulful dark eyes, floppy ears, and is looking directly at the camera with an alert, friendly expression.

Welcome Elvis to this blog!

| In General
| 8 minute read

Over the last few days, I’ve been working on putting Elvis, our Dachshund, onto this blog’s banner. The goal was to create a smooth animation where Elvis appears by rising from the bottom of the banner, then leans his paws over the border—adding some personality to the site while exploring modern web animation techniques.

Abstract, wave-like structures, like sand dunes, from blue-green to yellow.

Introducing: Office hours!

| In General
| 2 minute read

What are office hours? Office hours have their roots in academia, where professors would publish certain hours at specific days of the week where students could simply come in and ask questions. It’s an easy way to meet without the back and forth of finding a date/time that works. Why office hours? …

A dreamy, ethereal landscape with soft pink and purple clouds in a pastel sky. Flowing sine waves made of code characters weave through the scene in translucent ribbons of light, creating gentle wave patterns. Several colorful butterflies - including blue, purple, and pink ones - flutter gracefully across the composition. The overall mood is serene and fantastical, blending programming elements with natural beauty.

Animating SVG with plain JavaScript and CSS

| In Tech
| 5 minute read

Refactoring my banner into SVG was only the beginning: the next step was animation. I continued with the “AI as a teacher” model and asked Claude to explain to me concepts like IIFE, how the browser’s DOM processes SVG elements, which SVG properties are GPU-accelerated and other CSS performance conc…

Abstract digital landscape with flowing wave-like forms in vibrant magenta, purple, and cyan colors, overlaid with glowing geometric patterns and data visualization elements against a starry black background.

This time I coded it myself: using AI as a teacher

| In Tech
| 7 minute read

If you’re a returning visitor, you might notice the header image on this blog looks more sharp and crisp—that’s because it is! ✨ After creating my own URL shortener, I wanted to modernize my header image. I built it back then in 2022 using p5.js, but the resolution wasn’t great. Now I wanted a more …

Abstract network visualization with glowing golden nodes connected by luminous lines against a deep blue background, representing interconnected systems and data flow.

Adding Webmention support

| In Blogging
| 4 minute read

This weekend, I added Webmention support to this blog. What is it? From the Webmention W3C recommendation:

Webmention is a simple way to notify any URL when you mention it on your site. From the receiver’s perspective, it’s a way to request notifications when other sites mention it.

Think of it as…

Close-up of an intricate mechanical watch movement with golden gears, springs, and components illuminated by warm ambient lighting.

Introducing the now page

| In Blogging
| 1 minute read

As of today, this blog has a “now page”. What is a “now page”? It’s a really good idea by Derek Sivers. From nownownow.com:

a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life.

Back then in the good old days of Unix, we called it a .plan file. Today, it’s not easy to f…

Surreal landscape with bonsai-like trees growing on small floating islands in calm water, their reflections creating perfect mirror images below. Translucent soap bubbles float through a soft pink and purple sunset sky, with distant mountains silhouetted in the background.

Adding responsive and efficient images to your blog

| In Blogging
| 6 minute read

It’s been a while since I was up to date on image formats for the web. Back then in the 90s, I actually read the original JPEG paper in order to understand how it worked, because I was preparing a presentation to my study group on the MPEG paper and needed to understand how I-frames were encoded. At…

Whimsical steampunk factory scene with cartoon workers operating brass machinery among clouds and stars.

The IndieWeb is like the good old Blogosphere

| In Blogging
| 3 minute read

While refactoring my blog, I discovered the IndieWeb community. From the website:

We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning…

Abstract, wave-like structures, like sand dunes, from blue-green to yellow.

Zed does Agents now

| In Tech
| 4 minute read

About two weeks ago, Zed, my favourite code editor, introduced agentic coding, replacing its previous assistant panel on the right of its UI. A blog post walks through the way agents work in Zed now. The documentation now has an Agent Panel section. I’ve used it a bit for tweaking some stuff around …