Tristan Dunn

Resurrecting Crimsonland

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 21:27:44 -0500

Some games die quietly. They get delisted, lose their multiplayer servers, fade into the digital void. Others get remastered by the original authors with slightly better graphics and a battle pass.

And then there’s the third way: you open the binary in ghidra and start naming functions.

I played this top-down shooter from 2003 with my roommates, and recently remembered the gameplay but couldn’t remember the name. And today I stumbled upon a recreation of it, with an incredible knowledge base for the mechanics and implementation details.

You can run it now with one command, uvx crimsonland@latest, if you have uv installed. If that’s not amazing enough, this was completed in only two weeks with the help of GPT-5.2, and the source code is available.

Customizing the Claude Code Spinner

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 23:58:00 -0500

Claude Code just added a spinnerVerbs setting that lets you customize the rotating status text shown while it’s working. By default, there are 52 gerunds that cycle through, but now you can replace them with your own.

For example, to set a static “Working” message instead of the rotating verbs, add this to your ~/.claude/settings.json file:

{
  "spinnerVerbs": {
    "mode": "replace",
    "verbs": ["Working"]
  }
}

Claude Code currently claims the mode option supports "append" to add your own to the rotation, but I wasn’t able to verify this. There’s an issue to add documentation that may reveal if appending is possible.

hid-magicmouse

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 11:50:00 -0500

During my slow switch from macOS to Arch Linux, I’ve been frustrated with how the Apple Magic Mouse behaves, so this driver is the start of improving my experience with it. Currently it addresses my most common frustrations by preventing scrolling when the mouse is moving, resetting scroll tracking on mouse movement, and decreasing the maximum scroll acceleration.

Voxtype

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 22:00:00 -0500

Push-to-talk voice-to-text optimized for Wayland, works on any Linux desktop. Hold a key, speak, release. Your words appear at the cursor.

This looks like the perfect Linux alternative to my macOS solution.

Glamorous Christmas: Bringing Charm to Ruby

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:56:44 -0500

Ruby developers deserve glamorous terminals too. I want Ruby developers to build terminal applications so beautiful that even people who “don’t like CLIs” find themselves captivated.

I’ve recently been using AI to write CLI utilities in Go with Charm, but I know Ruby much better than Go so this is very exciting news. I’m even more excited about the coming work for the libraries to “feel more Ruby-like and idiomatic”.

Why I Write (And You Should Too!)

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 14:40:12 -0500

Be okay with bad writing. Most writing isn’t great! If my hit rate is 1 out of 5, I’m thrilled. Get comfortable publishing things that aren’t perfect. I know many people who wait too long to publish and, well, never do.

Ruby 3.4.8 Released

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 22:28:55 -0500

Ruby 3.4.8 has been released as a routine update that includes bug fixes. The full details are available in the release notes on GitHub.

It’d be nice if the Ruby team maintained the Docker image now that Ruby has a release schedule. Always feels odd to see a new release and then have to wait for an image update to be able to test a deployment.

Litestream VFS

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 14:40:33 -0500

This is Litestream VFS. It runs SQLite hot off an object storage URL. As long as you can load the shared library our tree builds for you, it’ll work in your application the same way it does in the SQLite shell.

I’m imagining running this in the browser with the WASM version of SQLite3 using read-only credentials. Combined with JSON virtual columns, this could create a serverless interface to data being streamed into the database from another source. This could power a graphing interface for analytics or metrics, where the data is truncated at specific intervals to keep the database compact while using litestream_time to query historical data.

Upgrading to RubyGems/Bundler 4

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:19:40 -0500

We introduced breaking changes in RubyGems/Bundler 4 in order to improve usability, security, and maintainability of the tool.

I’ve upgraded a few projects and not noticed any issues so far. Restoring the default command to be install is nice for my muscle memory locally, but elsewhere, like in a Dockerfile, I already use bundle install explicitly.

And while new lockfiles include checksums by default, you have to manually add them to existing lockfiles via bundle lock --add-checksums.

Claude CLI deleted my entire home directory! Wiped my whole Mac.

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:34:26 -0500

I found the problem and it’s really bad. Looking at your log, here’s the catastrophic command that was run: rm -rf tests/ patches/ plan/ ~/

Not that it’s a foolproof solution, but I’ve aliased rm to a trash command for almost ten years now to move files to the trash instead of deleting them. A trash command is built into macOS Sequoia and newer.

The one downside is the command doesn’t support the -f or -r arguments, so it often causes issues with Claude Code. Sometimes it’ll switch to using rmdir, so I’m also aliasing that now.

I’m not sure how much moving the home directory to the trash would have helped, since the trash command does completely remove files and directories prefixed with a period.

Simple and Free Speech-to-Text on macOS

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 22:00:00 -0500

After seeing Wispr Flow mentioned a few times, I was curious about using speech-to-text to interact with Claude Code. The idea of paying $12/month and potentially sharing all my prompts wasn’t ideal, so I decided to see what Claude Code could help me build.

With a bit of experimentation, I settled on using sox for audio recording, since it seemed the best at silence detection, and parakeet-mlx for transcribing. I tried various improvements to silence detection, but found turning up my input volume helped the most.

With three commands in a script, I have a decent local speech-to-text solution:

#!/bin/bash

RECORDING_FILE="/tmp/record-recording.wav"
TRANSCRIPT_FILE="/tmp/record-recording.txt"

# Record until silence or 60 seconds.
rec -q "${RECORDING_FILE}" rate 16k pad 0.2 0 silence 1 0.05 1% 1 1.0 1% trim 0 60

# Transcribe and output.
if [ -f "${RECORDING_FILE}" ]; then
  parakeet-mlx "${RECORDING_FILE}" --output-format txt --output-dir /tmp --chunk-duration 30 >/dev/null 2>&1

  if [ -f "${TRANSCRIPT_FILE}" ]; then
    cat "${TRANSCRIPT_FILE}"
  fi
fi

The real script is a little more verbose, but this demonstrates the core of it. I use Hammerspoon to trigger the script and type the response for me. I also have it display a recording and transcribing status indicator in the menu bar.

My next step is to decide what to use for transcription on Linux so I can use it on my other machine. I might also create a second script that pipes the results through an LLM for use outside of prompts.

Introducing Mistral 3

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 19:29:42 -0500

The release also features the Ministral 3 series—three edge-focused models (3B, 8B, and 14B parameters) designed for superior cost-to-performance efficiency. These smaller models include multimodal and multilingual capabilities, making them suitable for edge deployments.

I’m excited to see small models continuing to advance. While I’m all in on Claude Code for code-related tasks, I enjoy using local models for simple copywriting tasks or for tasks requiring complete privacy.

Command Line Interface Guidelines

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 09:55:00 -0500

An open-source guide to help you write better command-line programs, taking traditional UNIX principles and updating them for the modern day.

Found this while working on a small CLI utility and searching to see if there are standards for outputting help. The real-world applications they link to were helpful for inspiration.

Mastering DOM manipulation with vanilla JavaScript

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 09:27:00 -0500

An extensive list of examples on DOM manipulation without any external libraries.

Web development moves at lightning speed. I still remember when I first started using libraries like jQuery, Prototype, script.aculo.us, Zepto, and many more.

Interesting to think about how libraries evolving fast back then was so exciting compared to today where I almost wish they’d slow down a bit. Maybe it’s from feeling like there was only a handful of options then and today there seems to be endless options.

The hardest working font in Manhattan

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 23:21:00 -0500

An incredibly detailed and informative article on an old font, Gorton, that’s all over the place.

How I built an AI company to save my open source project

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 21:40:00 -0500

Interesting read on the journey of an open source constraint solver started 19 years ago.

obsidian-cupertino

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 19:43:00 -0500

After using Obsidian for daily notes at work for around three years with the Things theme, switching to the Cupertino theme is a breath of fresh air. It feels much nicer to have the application appear native. And for people who enjoy dark mode, it supports that too.

I do recommend the Style Settings community plug-in for its ability to tweak things a bit, such as hiding the active line highlight when editing.

Monitoring ActionCable

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 22:48:00 -0500

I would never have found and fixed this without the monitoring that I’ve set up.

Detailed article on adding metrics for ActionCable, but I’m surprised yabeda-actioncable doesn’t exist when yabeda-anycable does.

My approach to running a link blog

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 21:16:00 -0500

I realize now that link blogging deserves to be included a third category of low stakes, high value writing. We could think of that category as things I’ve found.

I enjoy the idea of a low-stakes, high-value writing category. My articles often take bits of time here and there over the course of weeks to complete, but short thoughts on all the interesting things online should be much easier.

So, here’s my first link with some very minimal commentary. To help speed up the process even more I can provide a URL to a short script to fetch the content, extract the title, create a Markdown file for me, and open it in my editor.