I've updated this blog to Aspire 9.3. This particular release didn't have anything that I wanted to use right away, but this being such a simple blog website, it doesn't really need many of the fancy deployment features, especially since I deploy to Heroku and not Azure.
If I find any features I can use in the coming days, I'll create another post to highlight those.
It's 2025, and I'm excited about a new CLI text editor. When I need a text editor in a shell, I always reach for vim, but I don't love it. It's there when I need it and serves its purpose, but I've never gotten over the weird key binding knowledge required just to exit and save a file.
What I like about Edit is that it's built as a TUI (Terminal User Interface) which means you can use your mouse (point and click), you can use ctrl+a to select all text, you can use ctrl+c and ctrl+v for copy paste, and it's just way more intuitive to use.
Install the C++ toolchain using Visual Studio Installer. Restart my shell, to update paths. Install the rust toolchain git clone https://github.com/microsoft/edit.git rustup install nightly rustup default nightly-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc (to set the nightly toolchain as the default) rustup component add rust-src --toolchain nightly-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc (no idea why I had to do this, but rustup said I had to) cargo build --config .cargo/release.toml --release (compile and linking step) cp .\target\release\edit.exe D:\tools\ (D:\tools is where I store my adhoc tools that I build or maintain)
A few of these steps were documented on the Edit README.md file, but several were missing.
I’ve been building a new staircase for the loft in my shop. This online calculator is the golden standard for calculating the rise/run of the stairs, stringer length, number of steps, etc. I love how well designed it is. It doesn’t look super fancy, but it works very well on mobile and desktop. Kudos to them for making an amazing resource with just the right amount of information to help people make safe staircases for themselves. IMG_5421.jpeg620.82 KBEdit: stairs are done
There were multiple issues that needed to be solved:
Add a custom button that would allow me to put arbitrary HTML into a post (supported feature from Trix)
Modify the DOMPurify config in Trix to allow iframes (also supported feature)
Modify the actual trix.js code to allow iframes (not supported feature, requires forking).
This issue on GitHub helped me get there, but ultimately I needed to find my own path forward that made sense for this site. Claude code also gave me a great start by writing the majority of the trix-extensions.js file, but I had to do a fair amount of manual clean up to get it to the finish line. But it's so nice to have the AI do the boilerplate to begin with, which gives me a great starting point.
The worst part about this fix was having to patch the trix code directly instead of being able to extend it. But since I vendor the trix code in my repo, it was very easy to do. I actually modified the minified trix.js file directly by ctrl+f "iframe" to remove it from the disallow list. If I need to update trix.js in the future, I'll have to remember to re-apply this fix, so this is definitely a tradeoff, but at least it was an easy way to validate the approach.
I have some lofty cycling goals for this summer, including riding the Michelson Trail in it's entirety. Before I take it on, I need to do build up some endurance. One ride I plan to do which has been on my list for a while is riding to Cle Elum and back, along the SVT and Palouse to Cascades trails.
Edit: This post was supposed to be an excuse for me to try to embed an iframe of the route directly in the post, but I was hamstrung by Trix and DOMPurify. I'm giving up for now! Edit2: Got it working! I had to add a custom button so that I can paste in a "content attachment" and also modify the dompurify config and trix.js bundle to allow iframes. Lots of hoops to jump through. Here is the commit that got this working.
I ran into an issue using llm today where I was unable to save a response to a file using a pipe
llm llm logs -n 1 | Out-File response.txt
This would give me the error "UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u2192' in position 2831: character maps to <undefined>"
If you set the "PYTHONIOENCODING" environment variable to "utf8", it will fix the issue. This is because Python's default encoding is ASCII. Since the last response I got back from the model contained a non-ASCII character, this error was thrown.
So now, in my PowerShell profile, I've added a line to set the default to utf8, which fixes the issue.
I just found that there is a new(ish) command for figuring out where a transitive dependency comes from in your dotnet project (starting with dotnet 8.0.4xx)
dotnet nuget why <PROJECT|SOLUTION> <PACKAGE>
If you have a dependency in your project that has a vulnerability, you can use this to figure out which package is bringing it in. For example, System.Net.Http 4.3.0 has a high severity vulnerability. I've found instances where this package is brought into my projects by other packages. It's very handy to be able to trace it with a built-in tool. Before this was available, I would use the dotnet-depends tool, which is a great tool, but a little clunkier than I'd like, and doesn't seem to support central package management.
Blogs are popping off in 2025! Jeremy Warner runs Slate Creek Solutions in the Black Hills and is a great personal friend of mine. I’m excited to see more people start up their own blogs and own their words.
Simon Willison's LLM tool now supports sharing and re-using prompt templates. This means you can create yaml prompt templates in GitHub and then consume them from anywhere using the syntax llm -t gh:{username}/{template-name}.
I have created my own repo where I will be uploading my prompt templates that I use. My most recent template that I've been getting value out of is "update-docs". I use this prompt/model combination to update documentation in my codebases after I've refactored code or added new functionality. The setup is that I use "files-to-prompt" to build the context of the codebase, including samples, then add a single markdown document that I want to be updated at the end. I've found that asking the AI to do too many things at once ends up with really bad results. I've also been playing around with different models. I haven't come to a conclusion on which is the absolute best for updating documentation, but so far o4-mini has given me better vibes than GPT 4.1.
Here is the one-liner command I use to update each document:
The next thing I'd like to tackle is creating a fragment provider for this scenario so I don't have to add so many paths to files-to-prompt. It's a bit clunky and I think it would be more elegant to just have a fragment provider that knows about my codebase structure and can bring in the samples and code without me needing to specify it each time.
I'm always excited when I see a new .NET Aspire release. The 9.2 update has lots of small quality-of-life improvements. The most interesting new feature for me is "Automatic database creation support". This means that if you add a Postgres database, it will get automatically created, but the best part is that you can also provide a custom SQL script. This lets you customize the creation. I might use this to seed the database with some fake data, so I don't have to manually create data.
This project is showing really great promise. The team is actively listening to developer feedback and reacting to it quickly.
Great article that outlines some of the attack vectors of the Model Conext Protocol. I’ve been playing around with it recently in Claude Code and by attempting to integrate it into the llm CLI by simonw.
As with any dependency, it’s good to vet the source before using it. Same is true for mcp servers, which are usually docker containers, npm or python tools.
I'm very late to the trend of AI playing Pokemon gameboy games, but I just started playing Pokemon Red myself on the iOS Delta emulator, and have been having lots of fun. To be clear, this is my first time doing anything with Pokemon. It wasn't something I was into as a child, but am for some reason discovering it as an adult and enjoying it.
I just wanted to make a quick post to show how I got the PokemonRedExperiments project running on my MacBook Pro M4 using uv.
Full steps:
# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/PWhiddy/PokemonRedExperiments.git
# Install ffmpeg
brew install ffmpeg
# Copy ROM to git root path
cd PokemonRedExperiments
cp /path/to/pokemon-red.gb PokemonRed.gb
# Validate rom is valid. Should produce ea9bcae617fdf159b045185467ae58b2e4a48b9a
shasum ./PokemonRed.gb
# Set up python environment
cd baselines
uv venv --python 3.10
uv pip install -r requirements.txt
# Start the pre-trained RL agent
uv run ./run_pretrained_interactive.py
I first tried using Python 3.12, as the README suggested using Python 3.10+, but I found that there are package dependency conflicts with 3.12, so I changed my uv command to use 3.10 and everything worked. This is why I love uv. I can very easily try out other versions of python and not worry about messing up other projects.
Something happened to me a couple of weeks ago that gave me pause. I found a bright, green leaf in the middle of my driveway. This might not sound like a notable event, but it's the end of winter, and all the trees around me are barren, awaiting spring to create their buds. Green leaf in winterTo me, this looks like a full, summertime leaf, maybe from a maple tree. It really disoriented me, I had to stop what I was doing and ponder what was going on. Is reality breaking? Is the simulation throwing exceptions? Is the increase in compute usage in our world (due to increases in usage of AI and crypto) causing our host reality to lag out and add sprites in the wrong places? These are the thoughts that flooded my brain.
I've been thinking about that leaf for a while. I finally realized I live in the 21st century and can identity the leaf with my phone, and maybe that would offer a clue to my mystery. And yeah, it's Common Ivy, an evergreen plant. Mystery solved.
While this was a silly, and to me, quite funny little freak out, it has me wondering what things other people have stumbled across in the world that seemed so completely out of place, that it could only be by some non-natural means. I'm sure this happens to every one at some point in their lives.
I just learned about a new open-source tool from Microsoft called MarkItDown.
MarkItDown is a lightweight Python utility for converting various files to Markdown for use with LLMs and related text analysis pipelines.
This seems similar to pandoc, but instead of any being able to take any formatted document type and convert it to any other type, it only outputs to markdown. It can be used as a standalone CLI tool or as a python library.
I'm particularly interested in converting HTML to markdown, so that I can take public documentation online and convert it into a markdown file, which can be more effectively consumed by LLMs. I was playing around with this idea last week during a hackathon, where I wanted to take the query language specification for WIQL that is online and turn it into a compact prompt, so the LLM can more reliably create WIQL queries for me.
To get the HTML for the web page, I use Simon Willison's tool shot-scraper to dump the HTML of the webpage, then pipe it into markitdown
shot-scraper html https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/boards/queries/wiql-syntax | markitdown > wiql.md
This produces a file called wiql.md (link to gist with unmodified output). It's certainly not perfect, the first 300 lines (out of around 1000), are not related to the documentation, and is just extra HTML that isn't needed. This could probably be mitigated by passing an element selector to shot-scraper, so it doesn't dump the unrelated HTML of the page. But it's not hard to delete those lines manually, and then the final result is pretty good. It looks fairly similar to the original web page.
edit: Here is the one-liner to only dump the relevant part of the page.. You have to wrap the output of shot-scraper in a <html> so markitdown can infer the input type.
echo "<html>$(shot-scraper html https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/boards/queries/wiql-syntax -s .content)</html>" | markitdown -o wiql.md
Side by side comparisonMarkItDown also supports plugins, so you can extend it to support other file formats. I've only played around with this a little bit, but I think it will be handy to have a quick and easy way to convert more documents to markdown. I'm particularly interested in the pdf and docx input types as well.
A friend sent me this paper regarding a security vulnerability in Chinas Great Firewall. The hack is quite interesting and worth reading about, but this quote is what stuck with me
Wallbleed exemplifies that the harm censorship middleboxes impose on Internet users is even beyond their obvious infringement of freedom of expression. When implemented poorly, it also imposes severe privacy and confidentiality risks to Internet users.
Spent my free time adding image support to the blog today. I'm using Azure Storage accounts, as it's what I know, and I did not feel like diving into S3 buckets right now, although I probably should at some point.
Once again, .NET Aspire proved its usefulness. I kicked off the changes by adding the Azure Storage hosting and client integrations via Aspire, then added a Minimal API POST endpoint so I had a place to upload the images to. GitHub Copilot is very useful in these kinds of tasks. I can write a comment block describing what I want the endpoint to do, all the edge cases I think it should handle, then hit tab and get 90% of what I wanted. I go through and tweak the rest, then I'm testing almost immediately.
The last piece of the puzzle was hooking up my new endpoint to the Trix editor. Fortunately, the Trix dev team provided a nice Javascript file to show how to hook up the event listeners and use an XHR object to post the image back to the server. Considering my lack of experience with Javascript, I was ecstatic to get this working in only a few iterations.
I edited my last post to add a picture from my bike ride, so I know it's working, but I better add one to this post too :)
I broke my wrist back in January when I fell skiing down a run in the early season. Snow conditions were pretty bad and the moguls on the run had really built up. The resort really hadn't been able to groom the runs yet. I did the dumbest move possible and on my first run of the day decided to go down a black diamond. Classic move on my part.
I did a turn to go around a mogul and didn't realize how big a drop off there was. I lost balance and fell down it onto hard packed snow. I broke the fall with my left hand and immediately knew something was wrong, but did not consider that I broke anything... I got back up and continued to ski down. I did fall one other time but it was a typical lose-your-balance type fall. The only issue was getting back up, when I realized I couldn't put any weight onto my left hand. That's when I knew I was cooked. I managed to ski the rest of the way down to the bottom and found the nearest ski patrol. They put my hand in a splint and that's when I saw the massive swelling. I knew my day, if not season, was over.
The last two months have been tough, I had been really looking forward to skiing and getting better this season. I also haven't been able to bike much. But I'm now close to fully recovered, the bone is healed and I got the all-clear to start biking again. Today was my first day back on the bike in two months, my biggest gap in between bike rides in years. What a day it was, a beautiful "fake spring" kind of day.
Here's to looking forward to many more rides soon.
I'm very excited about this release of .NET Aspire. It's an absolute game changer for me, specifically in doing dev work on this blog.
This release has a bunch of great stuff, but I'm actually only interested in the bug fix to this issue. I really love the `dotnet watch run` command, which will perform a hot reload of your application when you make changes to the source files. Before this bug fix, sockets would not be freed up in a timely manner if the process ends, meaning that on reload, it would try to rebind to the existing ports and fail. This meant my workflow was 1. make a change 2. kill the running process 3. wait 10-15 seconds 4. run dotnet run again. Sometimes, I would have to rinse and repeat 3 and 4, if I hadn't waited long enough.
Now, I run `dotnet watch run`, make changes to my code (.cs, .css, and .razor files), and all I have to do to see the new changes is refresh my browser page. It's like magic. My dev loop has gone from ~30 seconds to see the changes reflected in the browser to near-instantly (the time it takes me to press F5 in Safari).
I've been very happy with .NET Aspire so far. But because I deploy to Heroku and not Azure, I can't take advantage of any of the deployment features. A side project I've been thinking about is to build a Heroku deployer based on a .NET aspire deployment manifest.
I guess Amazon is removing the ability to download your ebooks, so my wife asked me to help her download all hers. She has 1,600(ish) books in her library, so manually going through and clicking download on them was an obvious no-go.
We found a neat script (via Reddit) to do the clicking and downloading automatically and have been running it for the last 2 hours. I'm seeing some javascript errors being thrown in the console, but it seems to be working.
I was hoping that this tool would just use my existing Claude plan, but no, of course you actually pay for the tokens it uses. I'm sure this was a very conscious decision, as this tool uses A LOT of tokens right now. I mean, it's breathtaking. The first thing I did was load it up on my link blog codebase, and ran the /init command to generate a readme file for the codebase. I immediately ran the /cost command to see how much that operation costed. Thirty cents. That may not sound like much, but for as small as my codebase is, I was expecting that to only be a few cents. I then gave it a very specific task to add validation to my admin post authoring form. I gave it a fair bit of instruction, as the docs recommends treating the tool like a software engineer that you would delegate a task to. So I gave it hints as to how to find validation rules and all that. I then sent it off. It ran for something like 2 minutes making the change. It prompted me for permission to perform tool actions (e.g. run some bash commands, run build, etc). After a total of 10 minutes of use, I was up to $1.50 in spend, the code did not build, and I realized that the tool call to build the code was broken. Edit: It turns out powershell is not officially supported yet. You must use bash or zsh to launch claude.
I'm still excited about this tool and will keep playing around with it. I'll probably have to reload my anthropic wallet with more credits soon as it is expensive, but so far it seems like a really cool concept, and I hope they keep improving it and driving down the cost.
“Vendoring” software is a technique where you copy the source of another project directly into your own project.
I love this idea, so many times you need to debug into your dependencies to figure out an issue or why things aren't working as you expected.
I mainly develop in C# and .NET and am fortunate to work at Microsoft, so I've done this many times in the past where I grab the source for a dependency, copy it into my code, update the references, and start debugging. This is always a temporary step. I don't actually check in the dependent code. I don't do it that often anymore, as you can enable debug options to disable "just my code" and if your dependencies publish symbols (most do in my experience), you can just F11 and step into library code from Nuget packages.
In the future, I may take up the vendoring approach for web frontends, where licenses allow. If nothing else, it gives me peace of mind that the dependency won't just disappear from the CDN.
You can now find me on Bluesky with an updated handle. My interest in social media has been pretty low in the last few months, but I do find it fun linking myself all over the internet.
I don't actually use Mastodon anymore, but am tempted to try this out. It would be cool to have comments on the blog, even if just for the process of going through the motions and gaining a bit deeper understanding of ActivityPub.
This has the potential to become a rabbit hole for me though, as I'm sure I'll have to set up my own server and all that entails. I've been enjoying Heroku as a hosting platform so I bet it won't be too bad to set up (famous last words).
Fell in love with brown rice today.. It tastes so good, is much healthier.. Why have I avoided it my whole life? Going forward I think it will become my main driver.
Only con I can think of is it does take a while longer to cook.
I've been raw-dogging these posts thus far, manually typing HTML elements into a raw textarea in my admin page so I get something that looks halfway decent.
I decided it was time to upgrade my post editing experience. I was completely unaware of the term WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), but figured that embedding a rich-text editor into a website must be a very solved problem at this point. So I asked ChatGPT (first 4o, then o3-mini, then o1-pro) for advice on what I should do for this blog. I looked at a few options first, but so many projects are licensed under GPL2 or have weird pricing models. I needed the most bare-bones simple text editor that's totally free to use. That's when I found Trix.
I'm really liking is so far. I was able to integrate it into my Blazor admin page in about 5 minutes, including time figuring out how to make sure the binding of the content gets set up correctly. Here is the commit that shows the integration.
In my testing, it's covered 90% of my use cases for styling in my writing. I think my only grip so far is that you can only insert an h1 heading. Probably not a huge deal, and I may be able to play around with Trix a bit more and figure out how to add a custom toolbar action to insert an h2 heading instead. Or maybe I can just style the h1 in the posts class to be a bit smaller. We'll see.
I have lots of other fun things I want to do with this blog, so it may fall by the way side. I also added an Atom feed to the site today, served at https://davidjarman.net/atom/all.
I made the repo for this website public. I’ll share more details about the build process once the site is further along, but dropping the link here as I didn’t have anything else to post for the day 🤦♂️
Problem: Sometimes I start out my day at work not feeling it. Sometimes that feeling lasts all day and my productivity suffers.
Solution:Find ways to short-circuit those feelings. This requires introspection, which can be very difficult to do when you aren't feeling it. But sometimes, something happens in your day that you didn't expect, and it helps you short-circuit and get back on track.
The number one thing for me that helps me get back on track is talking to people. Find someone to have a conversation with, ideally someone who gives you energy and can make you laugh. Laughter and lively discussion can turn almost any bad day around for me. Find the people that give you joy, and give them a call. It's a better use of time than just sitting there, and when you are done, you may just have a good day.
Be that person that gives others joy and energy on the days you are feeling it. Call your friends and family on good days, not just the bad ones.
I'm starting this blog to create a space of my own on the web. I have a wide array of interests and do not plan to focus this blog on any one particular topic. We'll see where this leads. The goal is not to build a following, be an "influencer" or "thought leader". I'd almost prefer if nobody reads this to be honest. The goal is only to practice and improve my writing skills. I will not use AI to write these posts, as that would go against the goal. I have no qualms with using AI and in fact use it all the time, but I will not improve my writing by having an LLM produce these posts for me.
// Interests
I have a wide variety of interests, and have been known to say that hobbies are my hobby. I love to try new things. There is nothing better than trying something new and seeing huge personal improvements. This blog is a good example, I've had a lot of fun writing the code for this website. The problem is that I also can lose interest quickly, but the following have been lifelong hobbies of mine:
Riding bikes (all types of bikes), coding (wrote my first program in BASIC on a TI-89 in 2005), and music (playing and listening).
Some hobbies have come and gone, such as beer brewing, running, cooking, and game dev, but each one has brought me valuable knowledge that I'm grateful for. If you ask anyone in my family, the apple doesn't fall from the tree. We once counted how many hobbies my dad has had over the years, I forget the exact number but it was over 20. Hobbies are my hobbies.
// Where you can find me
I don't post much anywhere else, but maybe that will change with this blog.
