Ephes Blog

KptnCook

Nero3ooo developed a helpful Progressive Web App (PWA) frontend for my KptnCook scraper. This is particularly useful if you use the KptnCook app on your smartphone and want to save recipes for later. Now, you can simply use the share button in the KptnCook app to share recipes directly with the PWA. I feel a bit guilty about neglecting KptnCook lately, as I've been so busy. I really should maintain it more actively 😅.

Progress Update on Vibe Coding Project

I've made significant progress on my vibe coding experiment (Nyxmon). The monitoring agent is now running fairly stably, so I decided to create a dashboard to display all the checks in one place. To make use of the empty space, I added a progress ring that shows when each check will run next. Users can manually trigger checks or disable them as needed. While it looks like a modern single-page application, it's actually a traditional multi-page application that uses htmx and some web components running on a Django backend. My next steps will be implementing more sophisticated checks that go beyond simple HTTP status monitoring—like analyzing JSON responses or supporting other protocols such as ICMP.

Articles

• Instrumenting Your MCP Server
• Flying into a new era with Wagtail 7.0
• Categorize Your Dependencies
• Sorry, You Don’t Get to Die on That “Vibe Coding” Hill | Just to have an example I can point to when I get ask which idiots I mean when I talk about idiots on fediverse etc. calling the average majority extremists is just, uhm, a projection?
• Django: model field choices that can change without a database migration

Videos

• Model Context Protocol (MCP) - David Soria Parra - Anthropic - AI Demo Days 5
• Python-T-Strings (PEP 750)

Software

• Expo - create universal native apps with React that run on Android, iOS, and the web. Iterate with confidence | Kind of embarrassing I didn't know about this 😬
• ty - an extremely fast Python type checker and language server, written in Rust | ruff, uv ...
• FeedCity is a feed reader
• Kptn to Mealie Frontend | Daniel wrote something useful based on my kptncook scraper! 😎

One of the advantages of the downfall of the United States will be eradicating the mm/dd/yyyy date format --Myles Eftos

Spring is finally in the air! 🌼 With the warmer weather rolling in, I found myself inspired to set up a Bedrock Minecraft server and wrote a quick blog post about the process – mostly so I wouldn't forget how to do it again later.

The nice weather also made me feel a bit guilty about my neglected kptncook project, so I pushed out a new release with some bug fixes. While I was in a productive mood, I updated django-cast too. The new version now includes transcript URLs in your podcast feed. I tested it with Castro, and it works great – there's now a neat "Transcript" button at the top of each episode that displays the transcript when tapped. I also created a new HTML view for the transcripts, though I haven't linked to it anywhere yet since it's still pretty bare-bones and needs some proper styling and layout work.

Articles

• Understanding the trade-offs of using Tailwind CSS | Well balanced article
• You are using Cursor AI incorrectly... | Wow, I didn't know about those rules..
• The hardest working font in Manhattan
• My Life in Weeks | Awesome visualisation

Software

• A quick reminder: Martian Mono 1.1, now with coding ligatures, is out!
• Lens - Check your meta tags, icons, and rss feeds

Fediverse

• Let me share with you what 30+ years writing software have taught me about estimates: they're bad and wrong and you should never do them | Actually quite good!
• Why Europe Should Invest in Open Source Instead of Chasing ‘Tech Champions’ | Very good post!

Videos

• Want to Give a Great Presentation? Use Ugly Sketches | Martin J. Eppler | TED
• Understand the Next Phase of Web Development - Steve Sanderson - NDC London 2024 | Uhm, ok - nothing new for me there.. the c# community is digesting htmx and SSR, ok..
• How Trying Became Cool Again | Yep!