Rubyists! I am reviving Ruby Inside after 12 years of hiatus. I have too many Ruby things I want to blog about :-) So far I've got the archive up and running at rubyinside.com/archives/ - it's a bit of a Ruby time capsule..

I was asking Claude about what animal has the worst life, and this sentence out of context feels like peak horror: "he bites into her flank and his body literally dissolves into hers, losing his eyes, fins, and organs until he's just a pair of gonads attached to her bloodstream"

You might be old, but are you "radio stations have a helicopter flying around to look at traffic jams" old?

Got experimenting with Matplotlib and GeoPandas. So here's countries colored by the colors hiding in their names:

Rubyists: want to generate embeddings of text with a 25MB model that punches far above its weight and runs on CPU wherever you want? `gem install informers` and then this is it.

A huge collection of classic text mode fonts in modern formats (TTF, WOFF): int10h.org/oldschool-pc... .. think EGA, VGA, Tandy, Acorn, all the 80s computers, etc.

Looking through an SD card of photos from 2006. The same product now is 5x more expensive than then 😂

We're expanding: cobolweekly.com

I'm looking through a SIMTEL CD from 1992. I see a (rare for then) open source C compiler called Small-C. I Google to see if anyone has ported it to modern systems. A dude made his latest commit to one an HOUR ago. What are the odds.

Discovered the source code for QBasic. First step in the build notes: "1. Make sure you've got a lot of memory (around 570 K)"

Had a funny "Scunthorpe problem" on a social site I run today. A legit looking post kept getting rejected. Turns out the word "specialist" contains "𝒄𝒊𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒔"...

enjoy peterc.org/solitaire/

Just had a heck of a 30 year flash back: Borland Resource Workshop! It let you open EXEs/DLLs and edit their resources, text, and sometimes even the form layouts. I used to customize Windows 3.1 apps with it for fun. Any fellow oldies remember it?

I love how Wikipedia covers hiphop beefs the same way they cover armed conflicts

Rare moment: I have three full days to myself. Let's see what carnage I can produce 😂

Went from MacBook Pro M1 Max to MacBook Air M5 two weeks ago. Faster, form factor better, 15" way better than 14". Love it. Only complaint: it needs a USB-C on the right side!

I've only just learnt macOS has /usr/bin/time (NOT the shell one!) which has a -l option for showing memory/resource usage of whatever you ran!

Wanted a little classic Mac OS style Post-it note type thing, so there we go. github.com/peterc/yello...

One trick to slash oil prices? Shrink the barrel. Works like a charm for my favourite supermarket brands who now charge the same price for 80g for what used to be 100g. 😏

I was looking at JavaScript Weekly ten years ago and found "State of the Art JavaScript in 2016": medium.com/javascript-a... .. Plus ça change.. 😂

PureJPEG is a pure Ruby JPEG encoder and decoder. While it works as expected, it has a bunch of features to get retro/distorted JPEGs, which is what I was really going for: github.com/peterc/pure_... (Examples shown in the README!)

I love how this has been the case on Google for over ten years now. (The solution is to write USD instead, but it still catches me out.)

Dropping OpenAI for Anthropic out of ethical concerns is understandable, but reading Anthropic's statement of four days ago it feels like ditching Ultron to hang out with Wario?

You can play the original SkiFree game from the Windows 3.1 days in your browser - this is not a drill! retrotick.com

This song has aged extremely well www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zH9...

A question that flummoxes LLMs: "Does English have any words which are the name of the place where the same named product is purchased or consumed, akin to café in French?" SOTA models give wrong answers like "bakery" and "bar", except for Gemini 3.1 Pro which got "takeaway" and "carvery".

Briefly caught the genealogy bug and found my most distant ancestor so far: James Waterhouse, born in 1318, in Lincolnshire (where I live now!) At 23 generations above me, though, I realised I have 8,388,608 such ancestors, so he's probably one of yours too!

A bit sad that 3I/ATLAS didn't turn out to be an alien spaceship.

Music recs are boring, but OK: WOLF ALICE. They remind me of Fleetwood Mac. All their songs are so different. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKsf... It's refreshing how many bands this decade are heavily influenced by the 70s-90s and not continuing with the milquetoast bullshit that ruled the 2010s.

Got ruby.wasm down to 4,223 kB over the wire *including* the stdlib! 20MB+ is more typically seen in similar builds, but there's a ton of stuff that can't even be used in the browser including a huge needless C library. More to follow..

Been putting off moving off asdf to mise for managing Ruby versions for months. I shouldn't have. It took two minutes to migrate and it Just Works™.

UNIX commands are riddled with hundreds of command line options. Yet no quick way to list make targets, e.g. `make --list` or something 🤪

A power-pop song from the 80s that goes hard and totally slaps that I'd guess 99% of you haven't heard before: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXi-...

My new copy editing tool is more fun to play with than to actually use properly.

Suffered a huge wave of botnet signups from an IP range that geolocates and has RIPE and ASN data pointing to the US, yet BGP routes to Moldova. Oh, I couldn't POSSIBLY speculate what nation state might actually be behind that 😏

I love Raycast's emoji chooser but sometimes it makes me laugh at how it ranks the results.

Postgres folks! Today's Postgres Weekly is a particular banger: postgresweekly.com/issues/634 Someone's made an awesome forum-like interface for pgsql-hackers; a cute metadata hack; who built Postgres; a recently fixed Postgres bug from 1999; and, well a lot more.

"Your password is required to enable Touch ID" when I come back to my Mac after five minutes. So why have Touch ID then! 🤣

A nifty way to look through Google Fonts based on 𝒗𝒊𝒃𝒆𝒔 that I made: sweetfont.com

I gave Kimi K2.5 a photo of me and asked it for the honest truth. It said I probably work in "a technical field where personality is viewed as a liability" 🤣

Well that's one way to promote your open source project to developer newsletters.

Just shut down my final Heroku app. End of a 16 year (or thereabouts) run for me! Heroku solved deployment for a generation of developers, then sorta became something we drifted away from despite continuing to work pretty well (and this app was solid as a rock for years).

I have an old, generic Gmail address I only use for my Google login and for some deliverability testing. It gets LOTS of misaddressed email and is on Trump's mailing list somehow. I check in from time to time to enjoy his team's increasingly unhinged copy:

Like Michael McDonald / Doobie Brothers? This new remix slaps: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtYS...

RIP Chris Rea. Not his most famous track but easily the most touching: www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5tf...

Went to see my daughter who's appearing in pantomime (Wizard of Oz!) this year and they started the show playing the entirety of ELO's Eldorado Overture! It works so well as a dramatic opening track and won me over right away. Then I realised the connection.. Dorothy's on the album cover!

I estimate the average British driver wastes 5% of their memory on where numerous potholes are and the best way to approach and avoid them.

JavaScript is now thirty years old.

I wonder if the Chancellor will dare say this again 😏

If you include tokens/secrets in unlisted 'private' GitHub Gists, they will now be reported and revoked: github.blog/changelog/20... (You shouldn't use unlisted Gists to store secrets, but I bet many people do.)