SuperGeekery: A blog probably of interest only to nerds by John F Morton.

When I first start­ed in adver­tis­ing, I worked with an art buy­er and pro­duc­er named Karen Meenaghan at Ammi­rati & Puris. (I loved hang­ing out in her office.) She intro­duced me to an idea that has stayed with me ever since: Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick any two. It was framed as a fun­da­men­tal con­straint of the uni­verse. It wasn’t advice. It was more like the laws of physics. If some­thing was good and fast,… + read on

I recent­ly pub­lished a new plu­g­in for Craft CMS called Login Lock­down. It mon­i­tors login attempts on your Craft CMS site and, if failed login attempts sur­pass a thresh­old you define, the login process from that IP address is locked down for a spec­i­fied amount of time. You can con­fig­ure the plu­g­in to noti­fy you about lock­outs (via email and/​or Pushover noti­fi­ca­tions) or let the sys­tem run silent­ly on its own. The con­trol pan­el… + read on

This post will show you how the search page on this site works and how you can build the same thing your­self in Craft CMS. What makes the search page inter­est­ing enough for a long blog post? The short answer is that it func­tions like the search you’d expect to be built with a big fron­tend frame­work like React, Vue, or Svelte. Instead, it’s built with a tiny 10.7kb javascript library called Datas­tar. The… + read on

Today, I final­ly made a voice clone of my own voice to use on this blog. I had actu­al­ly done this process once before using the pro­fes­sion­al voice cloning option from Eleven­Labs. But I didn’t end up using that ver­sion — it just didn’t sound quite right to me. The mis­take I made was my own fault. To cre­ate a pro­fes­sion­al voice clone you need at least 30 min­utes of clean audio. I dis­cov­ered that with­out… + read on

Text-a-Mess is a basic web app that does one thing: It mess­es up the text you enter by adding dia­crit­i­cal marks through­out to obscure it while keep­ing it some­what read­able visu­al­ly. It does not encrypt the text in any way. A sim­ple text search will still find the orig­i­nal text. How­ev­er, it will severe­ly mess up any text-to-speech soft­ware because it will use dia­crit­i­cal marks to alter text pro­nun­ci­a­tions. Please use it with that in mind. Why… + read on

The col­or scheme of SuperGeek­ery depends on the day you read this blog post. If you don’t like the col­ors you see today, return tomor­row, and they’ll be dif­fer­ent. This post will show you how I gen­er­ate each day’s col­or scheme. It’s based on a sin­gle col­or cho­sen based on the day of the year. I then use CSS’s rel­a­tive­ly new OKLCh col­or func­tion to gen­er­ate 20 pos­si­ble col­ors through­out the site. The Oklchro­ma site inspired me to… + read on

Have you mis­placed the sudo pass­word for your user and need to reset it? In Lar­avel Forge, you can save reusable bash scripts in the con­trol pan­el and run them as the root user. Save the fol­low­ing in a Recipe, updat­ing NEW_SUDO_PASSWORD with your desired pass­word each time. If you’re reset­ting a user oth­er than forge, update the user. Run it on your serv­er. Presto! You’ve got your sudo pass­word back. The same script… + read on

What is CHOP? A post on Source­graph titled The death of the stub­born devel­op­er defines it as ​“Chat-Ori­ent­ed Pro­gram­ming,” mean­ing the devel­op­er is con­stant­ly con­vers­ing with an AI mod­el, most like­ly Chat­G­PT, while pro­gram­ming. In short, LLMs are decent at exe­cut­ing small, well-defined tasks, leav­ing ​“the more dif­fi­cult plan­ning and coor­di­na­tion” to the human devel­op­er. Accord­ing to the post, the chop method­ol­o­gy ​“gives enter­prise engi­neers a min­i­mum boost of 30% in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty across the… + read on

I’ve men­tioned on my blog pre­vi­ous­ly that I used to be a heavy Twit­ter user. I joined in 2007, and it became one of my favorite places to spend time online. Twit­ter gave me a feel­ing of com­mu­ni­ty. From nerds to news to real-life friends, my feed was fan­tas­tic. That began to change after Musk bought it. Over time, Twit­ter became increas­ing­ly unrec­og­niz­able, and I want­ed to leave but didn’t know where to go.… + read on