I checked The Pi Hut and Pimoroni both are priced the same for the UK market.

Raspberry Pi 5 for £292.80? Who in their right mind would buy that?

I see they introduced a 1GB model for £43.20. A 1GB Pi 5 has extremely limited use, a Pi 4 or even Pi 3 with more RAM would be a better choice. 1GB is a marketing scam. They can claim “from £43.20” and maybe trick a few unobservant suckers.

I bought my 8GB Pi 5 for £65.75 in 2023 and even that was way too expensive.

I’ve noted similar price hikes for computer parts. The PC and self-hosted hobby is dead right now. Guess who ruined it?

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Today I tried to rebuild my Tauri app and I get a weird error.

I run tauri info to find:

[✘] Environment
    ✘ rustc: not installed!
      Maybe you don't have rust installed! Visit https://rustup.rs/
    ✘ Cargo: not installed!
      Maybe you don't have rust installed! Visit https://rustup.rs/
    ✔ rustup: 1.29.0 (2026-03-05)
    ✔ Rust toolchain: stable-aarch64-apple-darwin (default)

Weird, I thought I had installed Rust via Homebrew.

I run which rustup to find:

/opt/homebrew/bin/rustup

I run rustup and everything updates.

I check ~/.cargo/bin and see all the Rust tools are symlinked to /opt/homebrew/bin/rustup-init — the rustup-init file does not exist.

I delete everything and reinstall:

brew install rustup

Only to be notified:

This formula no longer provides `rustup-init`.

rustup is keg-only, which means it was not symlinked into /opt/homebrew,
because it conflicts with rust.

What does this mean? I’m using Homebrew because a package manager is supposed to be convenient. I’m not here for cryptic beer metaphors. What’s the point if it can’t install usable packages? This happens so often. Homebrew package break, I’m left trawling GitHub issues trying to make heads or tails.

So I give up and go to the original source piping install scripts straight to bash.

I get that Homebrew is an open source volunteer project. I don’t want to sound complainy. I just don’t understand what it’s supposed to do anymore.

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Random talking with no context. I’m supposed to guess who is speaking and what they’re rambling on about? I look forward to the vague deja vu I get when it’s repeated in 40 minutes 🙄

This ain’t TikTok. Nobody is getting hooked on a poorly chosen mid-sentence quote that isn’t half as profound and the editor imagined.

I’m getting real tired of hitting fast-forward an unknown number of times to find the actual start. Much easier to hit unsubscribe.

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I can’t remember when or why I switched to VS Code. I moved to VSCodium for a short period last year and then gave Zed a spin.

These modern apps and their “developer experience” suck.

Sublime Text with five minutes of configuration in a breath of fresh air.

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(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

It’s practically impossible to control what CSS is actually output. The documentation and config are infuriating on missing details.

It’s not a problem until it’s a problem. As soon as you try to fix issues like animation shorthand a side effect is triggered elsewhere.

Lightning CSS is like one of those mini-games where you have to activate a row of switches but when you toggle one switch others are inverted. That game sucks.

I’m back to using ESBuild to bundle and minify CSS. If minification doesn’t matter, and it rarely does with HTTP compression, I’m using ten lines of janky Node.js to bundle CSS imports myself.

ESBuild is annoying too. I had to write a custom plugin shim to flag font and image URLs and “external” otherwise it cried about path resolution. I just want to bundle imports! Why is there no option to do the most basic thing?

I’m convinced none of these tool developers ever build real websites. Modern dev tools all have main character syndrome. Sorry, you’re not that important. By all means have your cryptic JSON dot file and CLIs for the converted. But please just export the no-nonsense primitive parts as a code library.

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TL;DR: keep your slop on GitHub.

Nice to see a project push back against the dead internet.

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Shiki churns through all 932 code snippets on my blog in around ~1800ms. Lumis can do it in ~1400ms. On one hand that’s quite a significant saving, on the other hand it’s 2026 and I’m not running CI pipelines to rebuild the same code every commit. I hash-and-cache highlighted snippets so speed is a non-issue. And two seconds was never a problem anyway.

Lumis’ gimmick is that it uses Tree-sitter to properly parse code rather than regular expression pattern matching. In theory this should produce more accurate results.

Take a look at the before and after below. Lumis chokes on JavaScript template literal string interpolation.

Shiki can highlight whitespace. I bodged it myself in Lumis so ignore that random bar after @layer, that’s my mess. For these examples I used the Dracula theme which is objectively the correct theme under all circumstances. I slightly modified colour values in both Shiki and Lumis to boost contrast. I did not change where colours were applied.

Lumis does a better job picking up unique tokens like the CSS hex colour hash. However, I don’t think it’s always necessary to change their colour. I think hex colours should be a single highlight.

The JSX example below illustrates the opposite problem.

Why are the curly braces the same colour as the variables? The tokens were parsed but no colour was applied. Perhaps this is just a bad application of the Dracula theme. I’ll also concede that I’m used to seeing how Shiki does it.

Theme differences can be fixed if I cared to spend the time. That highlight mistake in the JavaScript code is more off-putting.

Side note: Lumis triggered GitHub’s vibe detector. There are slop commits and multiple SLOP.md files. All I’ll say is that quality of code is the least of my concerns.

All in all, not enough reasons for me to change. Maybe I’ll check again later.

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It’s nice to see CSS-Tricks ramping up quality content again. Following the Digital Ocean sale it was looking rather dicey. I feared it would be another .net magazine disaster. Remember when that just got eradicated? They promised to migrate content but now links just redirect to a generic landing page.

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I am persevering with Astro despite spending almost an hour trying to get my code editor to recognise HTML (it’s a modern app).

I was a little perturbed by Astro’s “Use minimal (empty) template” option writing a damned CLAUDE.md — come on! That’s absolute rage bait.

Now that I’m settled, Astro does look well designed and documented. The website I’m building is small enough should I ever need to jump ship. If Astro makes me snap I’ll take 11ty for a spin. If that fails I’ll go back to writing HTML as god intended.

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Eric Meyer’s post on split-cell table headers uses @supports to detect Safari. I gave a drive-by suggestion to Sophie Koonin who adapted this for: “Time-based background colour transitions with Temporal and CSS color-mix” — that’s a really cool theme! I wish my website was themeable…

I would only use such a technique on sites I actively maintain. You never know what future browser versions might do to break it!

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Generative AI killed that career. Towards the end, I was asked to replace my thoughtful activity with ill-gotten slop. My prior activity was supported by my unique relationship with the tools and practices learned and refined over a long career of identifying patterns and differences. That experience, though shareable, was never fungible.

And the sea, Dent - Chris Dent

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Just skip to my next note.

Reading Salma’s post “Goodbye, forever, probably.” hits hard. Especially the part about AI killing developer education. I wish Salma all the best in her future.

I don’t like to swear so choose your own word: #$@! the AI boosters in this industry. Those selfish despicable #$@!s are destroying the web from the inside.

Personally I’m focused on my own challenge and opportunity. I’ve got no other skills to be successful offline. If I’m eventually driven away though, expect an explosive uncensored blog post! I’m half inclined to start naming and shaming these #$@! more directly.

I need a cup of tea to cool down.

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I collected an innate upgraded Arsenal followed by Crash Landing — also innate from Royal Stamp — along with the Throwing Axe relic — meant a guaranteed 14–15 strength in the first two cards! Not to mention a Regalite relic for the same amount of block. Follow that with a corrupted Supermassive for 100+ damage. Then a couple of Cosmic Indifference to rinse and repeat.

Absolutely melted act 3! Time for random runs.

Ascension 10 wins:

• The Silent
• The Defect
• The Necrobinder
• The Ironclad
• The Regent

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While the attempts to collectively gaslight the entire world into believing this technology is anything more than an elaborate pyramid scheme branded in warm orange and transitional serifs continue unabated, there is a world of opportunities away from the noise and clamour.

By Humans, For Humans - Scott Riley

Scott speaks the truth in this piece.

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The W3C ARIA Authoring Practices Guide is an incredibly detailed resource. It describes every common pattern (tabs, dialogs, menus, accordions) with expected keyboard behavior, ARIA roles, and states.

And with modern LLM agents, turning a spec into working code is surprisingly fast. Point the agent at the APG pattern, describe your component’s markup, and get a solid first draft you can refine and test.

Evil Martians

It’s from a blog post in May I won’t be linking to (I found it searching the quote). The final word “test” is doing some serious heavy lifting.

As Manuel Matuzović notes the APG is full of anti-patterns. It is decidedly not a practical how-to guide. The purpose of the APG stated by WAI is to demonstrate the ARIA specification regardless of support. Browsers and assistive technology can use the patterns to test their support. What patterns are supported? Who knows! Not your LLM.

The first rule of ARIA gets misquoted often as “don’t use ARIA” but that’s honestly salient advice. The more I learn the less I use.

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A heavy block build carried me to an easy ascension 10 victory. I picked up the Sturdy Clamp relic to persist 10 block per turn. Then I got Unmovable from the first Act 2 elite and Barricade from the Act 2 boss. It was a long grind as I struggled to deal damage.

Only The Regent to go for ascension 10 on all characters.

Ascension 10 wins:

• The Silent
• The Defect
• The Necrobinder
• The Ironclad
• The Regent

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