TIL macOS ships with the networkQuality command line utility that tests your network performance. No more going to random speed test websites for me! 💽

I stumbled across the dc command, after mistyping cd. It’s a math tool. It’s pretty esoteric in my opinion, but you can switch bases, which means you can do something like convert from a hex color to …

I recently learned about the wcurl command. It’s a wrapper around curl, focused on making downloading files simple without passing options. It has some heuristics to figure out what to do with the …

I fixed an issue on my blog where the archive and photos pages didn’t go anywhere. Please enjoy.

Silly dream: I want my domain, chrisdeluca.me, to return something for every protocol supported by curl. 💽

Today I learned about the Trivial File Transfer Protocol, and the matching tftp command. It’s like FTP, but much more simple, less secure, uses less memory, and is sometimes used in initial bootloading on low memory devices. It isn’t used over the internet, given the security concerns.

This trivia brought to you by me mistyping something in the terminal and seeing this command in the autocomplete suggestions. 💽

I used the unix look command to find every SASS variable in a file: look '$' my-file.scss. Kind neat, but the use case is pretty narrow. Anyone have a more wide use case for look? 💽

I discovered the uuidgen command, which generates a unique ID like 3E7FE9F8-9D26-42BE-999D-43D2D34697BC. This seems like it would be great to use in some shell glue script or another. 💽

I think Corey Doctorow is right about the corporate motivations and economic implications of AI.

AI can’t do the jobs it’s replacing: AI is predicated on the premise that the monopolies, duopolies and cartels that control the global economy can deliberately worsen their products without suffering economic or regulatory consequences, because they’re the only game in town.

Give the whole thing a read, I think it’s worth it. 💽

Don’t fear git rebase 💽

I just took the State of CSS 2026 survey. It’s a good thing to do for the web industry for the demographic data alone. Go take it if you have a minute! 💽

I found a little command line program, ftb, to align markdown tables. Very useful. I use it as a Neovim filter, as I recently blogged about. 💽

I was looking for a quick, minimal way of aligning columns in grid-template-areas values, and found something more generic and, I think, useful—the venerable column command.

echo "'image title …

I gave a talk at Florida Drupal Camp over the weekend. Advanced CSS Custom Properties for Components. The camp was great, the organizers are terrific, and I think the session went well, despite some technical mistakes on my part. I’ll post the session as a blog post soon.

Today I Learned that the diff utility has the --ed option, to output the diff as commands for ed to transform a file. I don’t know that this would be actually useful over a pipeline with patch or similar, but I like it a lot. 💽

I’ll be talking about Advanced CSS Custom Properties for Components at Florida Drupal Camp in less than a month! It’s a great speaker lineup, myself excluded. 💽

A little while ago, I discovered the ditto command on macOS. It’s a copy command, similar to rsync, but handles some macOS things? Something like that.

I don’t have any need for it (yet?), …

🙋‍♂️ I’m interested in learning #AppKit (yes, not SwiftUI). I found Resources for learning Objective-C and AppKit by Jeff Johnson, which seems great. Does anyone have any other recommendations? 💽

I’ve been using the Helium browser for about a week, and I really like it. Fast, minimal, open source, and no ads/spyware/bloat. Honestly, the worst thing about it is the icon. 💽

This is so cool: an old school print magazine full of cool HTML programs you can type in and run. Bought a copy immediately. 💽

When you’re trying to grep but you keep typing gerp. 💽

abbr --add gerp 'grep'

git status -s | awk '{print $2}' | xargs your-editor

Replace your-editor with the command to launch, well, your editor. If you use a terminal editor, like Neovim, you’re all set. If you …

Ali Alkhatib: Defining AI.

I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power.

I tend to agree—what else could be so valuable to all these billionaires that would be worth sinking unprecedented amounts of cash into with no clear path to profitability? 💽

The proposed CSS reading-flow property seems very useful—it’s challenging to create complex layouts that also have good reading order for screen readers, and that usually results in jumping through markup hoops. I’m hopeful reading flow would make those non-issues. 💽