One of my goals this year is getting better at CSS. I joke that my CSS skills peaked in 2015. But CSS has gained a ton of new, really cool things and browser support has been moving quickly compared the days of old.

This talk by Dylan Beattie from NDC London 2026 is a great introduction to what CSS is capable of these days.

I’m also slowly working through a course called CSS for JavaScript Developers by Josh Comeau, which is fantastically done.

The CSS Working Group publishes a page with all of the things that they’d like to fix in CSS but can’t because the “mistakes” are already in the wild and changing them would break the web—an unforgivable sin. Here are a few of my favorites:

• z-index should be called z-order or depth and should Just Work on all elements (like it does on flex items).
• The alignment properties in Flexbox should have been writing-mode relative, not flex-flow relative, and thus could have reasonably understandable names like align-inline-* and align-block-*.
• It shouldn’t be !important — that reads to engineers as “not important”. We should have picked another way to write this.
• Not quite a mistake, because it was a reasonable default for the 90s, but it would be more helpful since then if background-repeat defaulted to no-repeat.
• Box-sizing should be border-box by default.

And finally, the funniest one:

• Table layout should be sane.

I had a Fonts.com subscription for a number of years, followed by a Monotype one. I also had a cloud.typography sub for webfonts. All of those services were from Monotype, the largest type company in the world.

Lately I’ve been acquiring fonts from indie foundries and quit giving Monotype money. Feels good man.

Even if you’re not in the market for a professional font, just browsing the incredible artwork and type specimens from these foundries makes The Punch worth a look.

The popular CDN, bunny.net, has a drop-in replacement for Google Fonts that is privacy friendly and GDPR compliant.

I just came across this so I haven’t had time to use it yet, but I will definitely be trying it the next time I start to reach for Google Fonts.

As a typographical aside, you can get some nice fonts with a generous web license from both MBType and SimpleBits.

It’s always interesting reading about other people’s note taking setups. This one from Dave is interesting because he explains the thought process that went into it. And he dumps a huge list of Obsidian plugins that he is using.

Sometimes you need graph paper, whether it’s for a digital background or to print out and draw on. Rather than scouring the internet and settling for something subpar, this neat little home-cooked app from Dave Rupert lets you generate a variety of different types of graph paper.

Superwhisper has been my speech-to-text daily driver for over a year now. But I’m constantly seeing other neat ones. This one in particular is cool because it is open source and free to download.

I’m constantly needing to convert various snippets of text into different cases. Sometimes it’s because I’m dictating with superwhisper and it didn’t use the case I intended for a particular piece of text. Sometimes it’s code related—I use Vue.js a good bit and sometimes you need to convert a kebob-case attribute to a camelCase method name and vice versa.

Changing string cases is mostly what I use it for, but DevUtils also does a bunch of other operations like various file format conversions, time/unit conversions, and a lot more. It has integrations for Alfred (my go-to), Raycast, and terminal/CLI.

I’m a happy Obsidian user but Trillium Notes looks pretty cool, especially if you want a personal wiki or prefer a rich text experience over Markdown.

A bold opinion on about using less syntax highlighting in code. I’m not sure whether I completely agree, but it’s a well made argument and interesting since it’s contrary to popular opinion. I found that I do enjoy the theme he created called Alabaster. It’s a light theme which I only use some of the time. There have been equivalent dark themes made but I didn’t enjoy those as much.

It makes me wonder if I’m able to read code better in light mode and have just never realized it. When I’m using a dark theme I find that I still need a good bit of syntax highlighting to be able to navigate the code comfortably.

Some cool fonts you can use for free for non-commercial purposes. I love that there are two monospaced fonts on this list.

Jordan Rocke provides a fantastic tour of this sub-genre of solo RPGs. I’ve seen Thousand Year Old Vampire recommended elsewhere. It seems like that one’s pretty popular, but as I’m not much into vampires I found some of the other featured games to be intriguing. Particularly, Reminiscence of Decay.

I stumbled across this article when I was trying to find out more about solo TTRPGs in general. I’ve really gone down a rabbit hole. I had no idea these games existed and that there are so many of them. You can think of them as sophisticated writing prompts. If you have ever been interested in writing but scared of the blank page, these games give you permission to write with assistance.

(As of the time of this writing the page design seems a little broken—might want to use reader mode).

I can’t get enough of these named colors catalogs. People group them in different and interesting ways.

This quick reference from venerable D&D resource site donjon is great for when you suddenly need to know things like how much falling damage an overzealous rogue should take after slipping and falling 50 feet (5d6 bludgeoning).