Brian Cottingham (spiffytech)

How many SIMs can my Pixel 8 have?

I conduct ✨science✨ to see if my Pixel 8 can be subscribed to 3 cell plans at once

I tried out the Vision Pro

This morning I went down to the Apple store at opening so I could do a demo. I was 50/50 on whether it'd be just me, or a line around the block. An hour ahead of opening there was one other guy there. At quarter-til, when they

🫴🦋 Is this an emoji?

ReadStuffLater uses emojis to tag content †. It's simple, it's fun, and it affords basic content organization without encouraging users to spiral into reinvent-Dewey-Decimal territory. There's just one problem: data validation. When the client tells my server to tag a record, how can the server

Audit log ALL the things?

My app ReadStuffLater fundamentally revolves around scraping web pages with the Microlink API. Sometimes that goes wrong: the target web page has a problem. Or Microlink does. Or the target throws up a captcha or blocks data center IPs or something. I thought I'd done an alright job

A Framework laptop success story

I was recently on my way out the door when I knocked over a glass of water, spilling it across my Framework laptop. I panicked and tried to dab it up, but saw that water had seeped under the keyboard and was leaking out the bottom of the laptop. The

Preserve an element's position in the viewport after a layout shift

My app includes content areas that expand and collapse. A lot like accordions, except they take up the whole page and can be huge. When you open one, whatever's open gets closed, and that makes whatever you just clicked on jump around as the previous content area stops

I used a Monte Carlo simulation to pick my health insurance plan

We have to pick a new health insurance plan this month, and we've had a tough time making the decision. You can't just add up what you'll spend - what each thing costs depends on how much you've already spent! And some

Neurodivergence has trade-offs

I give 100% effort. But I have no sense of moderation - I'm on or off. I can do great work when I care about something. But if I don't, I can barely work at all. I don't take credit for work that wasn&

Dokku with Let's Encrypt behind Cloudflare

Dokku has a Let's Encrypt plugin which works behind Cloudflare. There's just a little bit of chicken-and-egg setup involved. Let's Encrypt needs to connect back to your server to validate ownership of your domain. You can't have Cloudflare's "full&

Creating a type from nested interface properties in TypeScript

While at work I was upgrading graphql-code-generator, and found that the generated code no longer exports the type for a query node. Instead, the type of the whole query response was exported. But I had code that relied on having the node type available. To solve this, I created a

A lazy-loading higher-order component for Svelte

Recently, while building a simple Reddit clone, I wanted to lazy-load images and comments. That is, rather that loading all of the images and comments the instant I added a component to the DOM, I wanted to wait until the component was actually visible. This spreads out the impact of

Creating a bottom nav with CSS Flexbox

I needed to create a bottom nav (like what's used in many mobile apps) in CSS. Here's how I did it. (CodePen) <div class="container"> <div class="content"> <p>bar</p> <p>