I’ve got a small repo, ContextFree, that I keep coming back to whenever I want the specific kind of fun that comes from writing a handful of lines of code and having something unexpectedly pretty fall out the other end. It’s a collection of Context Free Art scripts — a tiny grammar for describing images as recursive drawing rules — plus a Docker image wrapping the cfdg renderer so I can run them without installing anything locally.

Back when I wired GoatCounter into this blog, the honest answer to “does any of this actually get read” was a shrug — no analytics meant no way to know. It’s been running for a couple of weeks now, so pulled the first export and had a proper look.

Rather than paste a wall of numbers, here’s the breakdown as an actual chart — daily pageviews, top pages, referrers, and where the hits are coming from:

A follow-up to my first impressions post on the Bambu Lab A1 Mini — I’ve moved past calibration cubes and benchies now, so here’s a look at the first useful things I’ve actually printed with it.

First up is a phone stand, printed in blue — one I designed myself. Nothing fancy, but it’s exactly the kind of small, practical thing that makes owning a printer worth it, and there’s something extra satisfying about it being your own design rather than someone else’s model. There’s now a permanent stand sat by the printer holding my phone up at a useful angle.

I’ve finally pulled the trigger on a 3D printer — a Bambu Lab A1 Mini. This is something I’ve wanted for a long time, years of watching other people’s prints show up online and thinking “I should really get one of those” before actually doing anything about it.

Went with the A1 Mini over the bigger models mainly for the price and the smaller footprint — it doesn’t take up much desk space, and it felt like a sensible way to dip a toe in without committing to a huge enclosed printer before I know how much I’ll actually use it.

Taking Antigravity for a spin

Been using Claude Code as my daily driver for a few days now, so when Google’s Antigravity CLI showed up I figured it was worth a proper look rather than just reading the launch blog post. Ran it side by side with Claude Code on the same kind of day-to-day work — repo exploration, small fixes, the usual — to see how the two actually compare in practice rather than on paper.

A Hugo repo hadn’t been looked at properly in a while

This blog is just Hugo content and a vendored theme — no app code, nothing exciting — which is exactly the kind of repo that quietly accumulates small rot nobody notices because nothing ever actually breaks the build. Spent a session pointing Claude Code at it to find and fix that rot.

Started with a straight status check: a couple of generated CSS cache files showing as deleted (build artifacts that shouldn’t have been tracked in the first place) and a stray uncommitted edit sitting inside the ananke theme submodule from as far back as November 2024. Both restored/reverted to get back to a clean tree before touching anything else.

Vibe coding a Mandelbrot renderer

Spent today “vibe coding” with Claude, just describing what I wanted and letting it drive, to see how far that gets you on a small self-contained project. The result is fractalPy, a small Numba-accelerated Mandelbrot set renderer.

It started as a single script — render the set to a PNG, colour it, done — using @njit(parallel=True, fastmath=True, cache=True) to JIT-compile the escape-time kernel so it’s fast enough to iterate on interactively:

Squid doodles.

Awesome TUIs

Stumbled across this list of good command line applications and utilities.

Awesome TUIs

Well worth a look.

N8N Self hosted Google Alerts Replacement

I’ve been using Google alerts to get emails of news about various topics for a while. As I’m reducing my Google footprint this was one of the things I had trouble replacing, until now.

Using Brave Search API node in N8N I can now search for news on a topic and format it into a email digest.

Saved Workflow in Jason format.