Blog

ChatGPT just announced a new feature that allows you to upload a photo or other reference and then have it re-render that image in another style. And it will, quite handily, do so in the style of tons of different cartoons and comic book artists. What's interesting to me is that it won't render art in the style of still-living comic book artists, only those that have (sadly) passed on. It will however render things in the style of well-known anime studios whose body of work, and their style, in turn owe to a single (often still living) creator. Bizarre.

Alternative title: How I like to write my JavaScripts: in Java via WebAssembly!

update: Sam Altman just announced official support for MCP!

Want to use Buildpacks with Java 24 and native images?

Hi, Spring fans! You know, a member of the community is working on a sort of framework-y DSL for constructing flows. One of the requirements is to be able to parameterize beans that are managed by Spring. This is a good fit for Spring's scope mechanism.

I use the Synology NAS. It's an appliance that gives you a push-button simple RAID experience with a dedicated web-based console to administer the NAS. I love my Synology. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, I migrated the four-disk RAID 10 array from 5 TB disks to 18 TB disks. Now I have nearly 40 TB of space, striped and redundant. Dope. (Thanks, Synology!)

I've just reinstalled macOS on my Apple MacBook Pro M4 Max. Why did I reinstall macOS? Because I got suckered! I've been riding the macOS system betas for years now—rarely an issue. Before you comment, I'd bet you've had more issues riding mainstream—released—Windows and Linux distro updates than I have riding macOS betas. This time, however, I regret it!

So, my journey with window management on macOS continues!

"In shambles"? Really? I'm so tired of this narrative. No state is perfect, but California is hardly "in shambles."

Happy new year! As the new year begins, I find myself re-assessing my workflow and tools.

I am using Bluesky a lot more now; add me! I'm @starbuxman.joshlong.com. It's a pretty great experience except that there are no really good macOS desktop applications. And, come ot think of it, the native macOS desktop app for X (formerly called Twitter) just got an update a little while back, but it's hard to use and acts more like an iPhone application than a native app. So, I've wanted suitable desktop experiences for both. None found. Took the easy way out and used a feature common to virtually all browsers which lets me turn a page into a standalone desktop app. Here's how you can do the same for these sites or indeed any other site on the internet. I also do this for a Github organization I tend to work a lot on, for LinkedIn (a desktop application for LinkedIn is super cool!), for Claude (though it just got a desktop integration recently...), for my Youtube channel, for GMail, etc.

I was watching a Kevin Powell video on CSS the other day and he mentioned that modern browsers (which, unless you're using Internet Explorer or Safari, is every browser, since they're all "evergreen" these days) supported nested CSS rules. (And strictly speaking Safari is "quasi evergreen," since it gets frequent updates, they're just installed in the operating system's updates, not directly via Safari.) I knew how to use nested CSS rules with preprocessors like Sass/SCSS, but had no idea they were supported natively! NICE!