2023 Week 8 in Review

"The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the Axe, for the Axe was clever and convinced the Trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them."
— Turkish Proverb

February has been a surprisingly busy month! I didn't get half the writing I wanted to get done however I did write two (as yet unpublished) #11ty plugins, one for automated font subsetting and the other for adding Obsidian style wikilinks, backlinks and embeds.

This week I rediscovered the Mighty Car Mods YouTube channel with their Worlds Fastest Midget series; I never stopped liking their content but YouTube in its infinite wizdom stopped promoting them to me. Since I started skipping the homepage and only intentionally visiting my subscribed feed I have begun rediscovering channels I hadn't watched in years!

Continuing onward from last week's implementation of font subsetting, this week I rewrote my #WikiLinks implementation into a new Eleventy.js Interlink Plugin. This was made possible thanks to several additions to v2 of #11ty: the as yet undocumented RenderManager class that exposes the eleventy.js template engine for arbitrary programmatic use and the amendLibrary method that has been recently added to the Configuration API.

I'll be tidying this up and publishing it at some point in March.

Joke of the week

Question What did one plate whisper to the other plate?
Answer Dinner is on me.

Notable Articles Read

• Michal Warda: Self hosting in 2023
• Wentin's Newsletter Don’t Sell Your Indie Business to Digital Ocean!

Notable Videos Watched

• Behind The Mistakes: The Hellcorder; World's First Recorder Based Guitar Amplifier, spoiler: it doesn't sound very good at the moment but is a technical feat in and of itself!
• Usagi Electric Playing a Game on a MC14500 1-bit Single Board Computer!, a very nice introduction into the MC14500B 1-bit Industrial Control Unit. I was aware of Intels 4-bit 4004 and this video had me interested enough to look for more esoteric processors^[1]
• Sebastian Lague: Coding Adventure: Hydraulic Erosion, back in my 2022, Weeks 40 to 42 in Review I described going down a very deep rabbit hole in regard to Soil Machine. In Sebastian's video he describes in visual detail how to program Hydraulic Erosion, and it's inspired me to look more into this

Cool things from around the internet

• Tardis and Timelord for Macintosh: Time synchronisation over AppleTalk
• MacIPRpi gives you a MacIP gateway out of the box on a Raspberry Pi thanks to the Linux port of macipgw done by Stefan Bethke