Vadim Makeev

Yesterday, I gave a talk about MathML, and I heard that some people thought “ML” stood for “machine learning.” “Math Machine Learning” even makes some sense. To their disappointment, I was talking about markup language instead. It got me thinking… With all the hype around AI, maybe next time I pitch an HTML talk, I should throw in “Hypertext Machine Learning” somewhere in the description, just to improve my odds 🤔

Last week, I successfully broke free from the vendor-locked and rather limited Apple smart home ecosystem and jumped straight into the rabbit hole of Home Assistant, running on a VM inside of my NAS with Zigbee and Bluetooth dongles sticking out of it. If you know what the hell I’m talking about, give me a sad like and share some of your favorite Home Assistant tricks and resources 🤓

Remember* that annoying browser behavior when they copy text in uppercase, although it’s only styled like that with text-transform? Yes, the one that goes against the spec. Apparently, Chrome 127 shipped the fix in July! Now, only Safari does that 🤨 It only took me half an hour to figure out how to find a specific branch base position here to download an old Chromium version from here and test it. Oh, and also xattr -cr /Applications/Chromium.app to be able to run it 🙄 * If you don’t, here’s an updated article

Starting from Firefox 131, released yesterday, text fragments are now cross-browser, aka Baseline (newly available). You can also style the highlighted content with the ::target-text pseudo-element. I’m still getting over the #:~:text= thing, but it might be a good moment to start using it. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Releases/131#:~:text=Text%20fragments%20are%20now%20supported

TIL there’s a .mml file extension for standalone MathML files (like there’s .svg for SVG, you know), and only Firefox supports MML rendering! Chrome shows it as plain text. Safari doesn’t even bother with that. Naturally, I filed feature requests (Safari, Chrome), but I’m not holding my breath: it’s MathML, after all.

What does running a music commentary podcast feel like on different platforms? You know, fair use and all that. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. just fine. Google Podcasts used to be like that, too. Now YouTube Music? They’ll just block the hell out of your feed.

Some pictures from Zurich and Pilatus mountain near Lucerne from last week’s trip to Switzerland.

Was this helpful? I don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to see the content yet, and I probably won’t.

One low quality face, you say? That’s rude.

I have a birthday coming up in a few days, an anniversary even. My favorite bar is on vacation, my friends are scattered around the world… So, I decided to invite everyone to a livestream. August 25th at 12:00 Berlin time. Let's chat about everything. I suspect it would be mostly in Russian, but everyone’s welcome, really. Drinks are on you.

Dublin was nice, but I’ll mostly remember hiking at the Howth peninsula last week.

Some late pictures from the trip to Hamburg on a bike.

These days, I see MathML everywhere 🙄 codepen.io/pepelsbey/pen/ExBQNLx

They have Firefox installed in the Dublin zoo.

Every hotel room is a decently-sounding podcasting studio. You just have to be creative with pillows and not be afraid to raise the mattress against the wall behind your back.

I have some news for you: 1. There’s a city somewhere along Elba called Pisselberg. 2. Three days and 350 km later, I finally arrived in Hamburg on my bicycle. 3. My bum hurts. Over and out 😵‍💫

Planning next week the longest bikepacking trip so far: around 650 km from Berlin to Hamburg and back in a week. Two-thirds of the way along the Elba with a few ferry crossings. It looks terrifying, but I’m going to be fine, right? 😬

Ordered a book to learn how to cook, but instead, they sent me “Web Accessibility Cookbook” by Manuel Matuzović 🙄

Your browser is not supported! It’s probably lacking some serious API, and we can’t possibly make it work, sorry * * Just kidding. Spoof the UA string, it’ll work just fine. beta.maps.apple.com