I run self-hosted Plausible analytics to keep track of how many people are visiting my various websites and web apps. I’m largely very happy with it - it gives me all of the info I need with only a miniscule JS payload, no cookies or other invasive tracking, and full control over the data.

However, recently I’ve been running into an issue with fake/bogus traffic getting submitted for my personal homepage. Usually, I’m more than happy to see a bump in traffic to one of my sites, but something was off about it this time.

For a new project at my dayjob, I’ve had the opportunity to try out sea-orm for the database layer. In the past, I’ve tried out other Rust SQL solutions including diesel and sqlx, so I have some context to compare this one to.

At a high level, sea-orm provides a fully-featured solution for managing your database setup in Rust. It provides a framework and CLI for setting up and maintaining migrations, code-gen’ing entities and relations, and writing + running queries. Like most other Rust DB options, it is fully typed and integration into Rust’s type system.

I recently received a bug report on a library I built - three-good-godrays - which implements screen-space raymarched godrays for Three.JS as a pass for the pmndrs postprocessing library. One of the problems pointed out was that colors seemed washed out/desaturated when my pass was used, even when the pass wasn’t rendering any godrays.

Here’s how things look by default without the effect (and are supposed to look with it on):

For a long time - at least a couple of years - I’ve been cursed with an issue on my KDE Plasma Linux desktop where my PgUp key doesn’t work. Instead of scrolling up in my terminal or editor, it pops open a menu with the title “Select to paste” and a listing of my most recent clipboard entries:

I was recently working on speeding up a MIDI editor UI written in PIXI.JS which is part of my web synth project. The UI is fairly simple itself, but it needs to be efficient in order to render potentially thousands+ notes on the screen at once.

Here’s what the MIDI editor UI looks like:

The Problem

After upgrading svelte-seo to the latest version (1.5.4 at the time of writing this), I encountered this error when trying to run my SvelteKit dev server:

Error while preprocessing /home/casey/dream/node_modules/svelte-seo/index.svelte - Cannot find module './transformers/"application/ld+json">${'
Require stack:
- /home/casey/dream/node_modules/svelte-preprocess/dist/autoProcess.js
- /home/casey/dream/node_modules/svelte-preprocess/dist/index.js
Error while preprocessing /home/casey/dream/node_modules/svelte-seo/index.svelte - Cannot find module './transformers/"application/ld+json">${'
Require stack:
- /home/casey/dream/node_modules/svelte-preprocess/dist/autoProcess.js
- /home/casey/dream/node_modules/svelte-preprocess/dist/index.js

The Fix

The issue turned out to be that my svelte version was too old.

Recently, I’ve been working on a rainy scene in Three.JS. One of the most important parts of this scene is a greenhouse with big glass windows.

I decided to take a stab at making some realistic raindrop-covered window panes for them using Three.JS’s built-in transmission shader. The result turned out pretty well if I do say so myself, so I thought I’d write up my process for building it from start to finish.

I have an Anker USB hub that I use with my work laptop - an M1 Mac Pro. I use it to plug in two USB-A peripherals (mouse and keyboard) as well as to plug in a HDMI monitor. The hub itself connects to my laptop via USB-C. In addition to the hub, I also have a second HDMI monitor, a USB-C internet adapter, wired headphones, and my charging cable connected to the laptop.

While watching some logs for my webserver recently, I’ve noticed a significant amount of requests coming from a bot I didn’t recognize with the user agent of fidget-spinner-bot. It seems to be pretty aggressively crawling my personal network of sites that I maintain, following links and downloading page contents. Some requests are also coming from user agents including my-tiny-bot, thesis-research-bot, test-bot which seems to be the same or related. I usually recognize most of the user agents of bots making significant amounts of requests to my server, so these stood out to me.

Recently, I’ve been working on some interactive sketches/games in Three.JS. For one of the levels I was building, I had the idea of importing something I built from one of my old MineCraft survival worlds in to use as part of it.

I figured that there was a pretty good chance of some software existing to export MineCraft levels to some 3D model format for 3D rendering or other purposes, and that indeed is the case. There are multiple options out there, but the one I chose to go with was jmc2obj.