Thanks to this post on Hacker News, I was reminded of the joy of regex crosswords :-)

Nice to see that the regexcrossword.com site has gained quite a list of puzzles and challenges since the last time I blogged about it.

Also very cool is the RegEx Crossword project of Jimb Esser, which provides a very smooth interface for solving hexagonal regex crosswords in the browser.
I remember solving the original MIT hexagonal regex crossword on paper back in the time.

And in addition there is a built-in editor which allows you to create your own hexagonal regex crosswords.
Thinking of using this to create some fun puzzle for the colleagues at work.

Vim Racer is a fun game to show off your vi skills 🚀
(also insightful to explore the leaderboard and see which commands were used by others)

Catchy memory from the first weekend of ZÜRICH OPENAIR 2024: Armin van Buuren's version of Artemas - I Like the Way You Kiss Me, which is very similar to the Bassjackers Remix 🔊

Artemas - I Like the Way You Kiss Me (Bassjackers Remix)

Added the /reading page to the blog to keep a list of various books I'm currently reading.

It is very bare-bones currently, I expect over time it will grow (both in number of books and also in amount of content, such as ratings, links and commentary).
Might take a while, stay tuned 🤓

Amazing discovery from the recent Paléo Festival: Lucie Antunes

Lucie Antunes - Carnaval

Not seeing any emoji in Chrome on Linux?
The following fixed it for me on Debian.

sudo apt-get install fonts-noto-color-emoji
fc-cache -f -v

Afterwards restart Chrome and enjoy the colorful emoji 🥳

Instead of using AI tools to tear people down, what if we used them to uplift others? Introducing Praise my GitHub profile:

https://praise-me.fly.dev/

Xe Iaso made this cool tool, which creates happiness ❤️

Added the HTML5 Validator GitHub Action to the repo of my blog.
It runs after the Jekyll site generation step (and before the deploy-to-server step) to catch invalid HTML syntax.

It is configured to validate all generated pages, and promptly surfaced some invalid HTML.
This was rather surprising, as I manually did run the validation for the blog pages not too long ago.
Turns out when you have a blog with 20 year old comments, then some of them have HTML from 20 years ago which is no longer valid nowadays 🤷

After a round of fixing old comments, all HTML validaton errors are now gone ✅
And future invalid HTML syntax will be alerted upon before it ends up on the Internet 😎

With Git it is possible to push only certain local commits to a remote repository.
This can be done with the following git push command, which pushes all commits up to commit to the branch remote branch in the remote repo repository:

git push <repository> <commit>:<remote branch>

For example the following pushes all except for the latest local commit to the main branch in the origin remote repo:

git push origin HEAD~1:main

Following up on yesterday's post about the Website Carbon Calculator, I saw that there is also the option to add a Website Carbon Badge.

Quickly this badge was added to the About page.

To make it more accurate and avoid hitting their API every time someone loads the About page, I made some changes to the provided code:

1. Calculate the results for the front page of the blog instead of the page where the badge is displayed (which would be the less significant About page).
2. Call the API to load the JSON file with the CO₂ results only once per week via a cronjob instead of every time someone new visits the About page.
3. Have the script load the cached JSON file from my server instead of directly calling the API.
4. Store the CSS and Javascript required to render the results on my own server instead of using the unpkg.com CDN (also helps with the above custom modifications).