I found that esbuild can un-nest the selectors, so I added this to my deployment script so that my CSS works for more people. (I chose the “chrome90” target extremely arbitrarily)

find . -name '*.css'
     -exec esbuild {} --target=chrome90 --outfile={} \;

I like that it’s still optional so that I don’t have to run it in development, and if esbuild stops existing, my site will still mostly work!

I went to the author’s site and I saw that he makes all of his books (Automate the Boring Stuff with Python and more) available for free at https://inventwithpython.com/. I’d heard of his books many times before but I didn’t realize that he made them available on his site like that!

I’m Al Sweigart, and I write books to teach beginners to code. I put them online for free because programming is too valuable and needs to be accessible to all.

I always think it’s so cool when authors do that, another example is Mark Dominus’s Higher Order Perl

• Adam Johnson’s django-upgrade to automatically upgrade Django project code, as well as his what’s new in Django posts
• Django’s official release notes, specifically the section on backwards incompatible changes
• Django’s list of LTS releases

It feels so much easier to just write the <li> tag at the beginning (as if it’s a bullet point) without worrying about the </li>.

My HTML linter doesn’t like it, but my HTML linter doesn’t like a lot of things and often I think I should just turn it off.

It has a lot of great links to other perspectives on alt text, and it closes with:

Writing alternative text is not a technical exercise (at least, not beyond basic WCAG conformance); it is copywriting tailored to your audience and constraints

I haven’t really adopted it yet but I like the idea, so I’m putting it here so that I can look it up when I inevitably forget “hey, what was that new jq alternative again?”

.cal-link {
  right: -18px;
  top: -6px;
  @media (max-width: 800px) {
    right: 0;
    top: -4px;
  }
}

Here’s the caniuse page for more on browser support.

MDN says there are some limitations around using it with pseudo-elements like ::before though.

I’ve honestly still never found a use for fzf myself (other than fzf.vim which is amazing) but I just learned that you can use it to review a git commit like this and I thought that was really cool. You can scroll up and down through the files on the left and it’ll display the diff on the right:

#!/bin/bash
commit=${1:-HEAD}
git show --stat=120 --format="" "$commit" | \
           grep '|' | \
           fzf --ansi \
               --disabled \
               --bind 'j:down,k:up,q:abort' \
               --preview="echo {} | sed 's/ *|.*//' | xargs -I% git show --color=always $commit -- %" \
               --preview-window=right:60%

You can also use fzf as a sort of “jq playground” like this:

#!/bin/bash

printf '' | fzf --print-query \
  --preview "jq -C {q} '$1' 2>&1" \
  --preview-window=up:80%

I think it’s really cool that you can use fzf (which is theoretically a search tool) to implement lots of UIs that aren’t doing search at all, like these two!

strace tips for better debugging also has some other strace tips I didn’t know, like that you can use it to inject failures

<style>
<span class="tooltip" data-tooltip="this is a tooltip!">Hover over me!</span>
.tooltip:hover:after{
  content: attr(data-tooltip); /* <-- this part! */
  background: #333;
  color: white;
  padding: 4px;
</style>

Here’s the preview:

Hover over me!

I wanted to keep this example small but In real life I’d use position: and transform: to move the tooltip somewhere else.

But what I never thought about until Kamal mentioned it to me yesterday was that you can technically put any string in your environment, it doesn’t have to have an equals sign.

Here’s a C program that does that and runs env:

#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    char *weird_env[] = {
        "NAME=value",
        "banana",
        NULL
    };
   char *argv[] = {"/usr/bin/env", NULL};
   execve("/usr/bin/env", argv, weird_env);
}

It prints out

NAME=value
banana

I don’t think this has any real practical implications. If you run a shell like bash with this “banana” variable it’ll just ignore it.

1. if the application (like less) enables the alternate screen buffer, then scroll events are ESC O A or ESC O B (like pressing the up and down keys)
2. if mouse reporting is on, scroll events are reported to the program like other mouse events, as button press 4/5, with the coordinates of where your mouse was included

(as well as the default where your terminal emulator will just scroll the terminal window without telling the program that you’re scrolling)

This makes sense in retrospect because:

a) I’ve noticed that some TUI programs (like lazygit) have multiple areas and you can scroll each area independently with the mouse, which “feels’ like it would have to use mouse reporting” (and it does) a) it felt weird to me that less would support mouse reporting and indeed it doesn’t

I don’t think this is that useful in practice but it’s kind of interesting that sometimes the scroll wheel is just another way to press arrow keys really fast and sometimes it acts more like a GUI scroll wheel.

For example, if I run tty and get /dev/pts/0, I can then go to a different terminal tab, run echo blah > /dev/pts/0, and than blah will show up in the original terminal tab.

1. strace’s official logo is an adorable ostrich
2. If you pass --tips to strace, it’ll give you an ASCII-art ostrich with a speech bubble with an strace tip, like this: (via jade)

  ______________________________________________         ____  
 | You can use -o|COMMAND to redirect strace's  |      |-. .-.|
 | output to COMMAND.  This may be useful       \      (_@)(_@)
 | in cases when there is a redirection          \     .---_  \
 | in place for the traced program.  Don't       _\   /..   \_/
 | forget to escape the pipe character, though, /     |__.-^ /
 | as it is usually interpreted by the shell.   |         }  | 
 \______________________________________________/        |   [ 

• go to http://192.168.1.xxx to see the monitor output (and interact with it as if I had a keyboard plugged into the server)
• store a bunch of ISOs on the device and pick which one I want to mount as a USB drive

I got this NanoKVM device on Aliexpress for $80 and it seems to do what it advertises!

The CPU is quite slow so scping ISOs to it seems limited by the CPU speed, I can only scp at 5MB/s.

It has art for an incredible number of emoji combinations and it’s built into Gboard on Android.

• Installing libraries with pip install --user on Debian will override the dependencies of system Python packages
• But this isn’t true with Homebrew or (I believe) Fedora

(I wrote a a quick gist about my explorations here but Python packaging is a complicated enough topic that I didn’t want to expand it into a whole blog post, it gave me a lot of appreciation for the folks working on this)

When I found the workaround I posted something like “PDFs are weird” on Mastodon and shockingly someone replied with this incredible deep dive by Leah Neukirchen that explains exactly why this problem happened (even though I didn’t mention ANY specifics about my problem at all): 50 blank pages, or: black-box debugging of PDF rendering in printers

• instead of find . -name '*.md' I can just do ls **.md
• instead of find . -type d -name ‘*blah*’, I can just ls -d **blah*/

A couple of notes:

• apparently you can do this in zsh or bash (with bash’s extended globbing) too, though it might be **/*.md instead of **.md
• as usual globs don’t include dotfiles so it’s not exactly the same as running find

Learned this from this page from 2004 on shells which mentioned offhand that “under zsh, [globbing] is so powerful, it almost makes find redundant.”

while True:
    print("hello")
    sleep(1)

• In 4 of the languages (Python, Ruby, C, Perl) nothing at at all gets printed (because they buffer the output when stdout isn’t a TTY, the buffer size is probably 4k or something)
• in the others (Go, C++, JS, Rust, Java, Lua, bash) you see “hello” printed out once per second. PHP is in this category too.

I knew there was some variation here I didn’t have a list of which languages did which and now I do. (If you want to not buffer the output you can flush stdout)

Here’s the code I ran to test this