Recent Articles

Fast Clojure Startup with CRaC

Clojure is the best programming language, but one of its downsides can be startup time. There are a variety of existing techniques you can use to speed things up but even with those tools, initialization isn’t free. While trying to speed up a CI pipeline, I discovered that Clojure works quite well with CRaC/CRIU on Linux. The idea is that you can start a Clojure REPL, initialize the slow parts of your application, and then checkpoint it.
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MELONARE PM-1 for Bedroom Practice

I was visiting a local guitar shop and a salesperson introduced me to the Boss Waza Air wireless guitar amp system. As I was playing with the Waza Air, I really enjoyed the lack of wires and great amp modeling, but I was turned off by the price and single specific-use aspect of the product. The Waza Air only works with the one instrument you buy it for. So, the guitar version might partially work for bass or keyboard but the amp modeling is focused on guitar.
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HTMX Tailwind Modal with Transitions

Enabling CSS Transitions in HTMX apps isn’t hard, but it wasn’t obvious to me. Hopefully this article will help someone (probably future me) grok it faster than I did. HTMX is an appealing tool to me. It lets me write mostly server-side applications in a language I like and still have some dynamic sizzle on the front end where it’s useful. If you haven’t tried it out, I recommend taking a look.
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image from Mimicking an RC-300 with an ESP 360 Remote.

Mimicking an RC-300 with an ESP 360 Remote.

I have a natural gas Heat & Glo fireplace/stove that is responsible for heating the main living areas of my house. That fireplace is operated by an RC300 Radio Frequency(RF) remote that unfortunately does not have a scheduling feature. So in cold months, the morning ritual has been to go downstairs and turn the fireplace on in the morning and patiently wait for the area to warm up. I’ve always wanted to get this fireplace onto a timer of some sort, but couldn’t figure out how I’d do that until I came across an advertisement for a new device called the ESP360 Remote on CrowdSupply.
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