Matthew Howell

Anyone running alternative firmware on their Kobo reader? Anything that supports libraries? I use my Kobo exclusively for Overdrive, but it's been so buggy for the last year that it barely functions (can't browse lists, search rarely works, etc).

"When was the last time you visited a someone's personal website?"

If personal web logs count, a few hours ago. If blogs don't count, a few hours ago.

(You should see my rss reader)

A.I. Isn't People How many Reddit posts does it take to learn to read?

"Does 200 lines of Python code *understand anything*?"

this by @rusty.todayintabs.com is a must-read

Color Palette Pro — A Synthesizer for Color Palettes Generate customizable color palettes in advanced color spaces that can be easily shared, downloaded, or exported.

As a connoisseur of online color tools, it’s such a delight to discover a new funky take on the palette generator experience.

I love the Teenage Engineering / Dieter Rams aesthetic here colorpalette.pro

Are you an author who sells DRM-free epubs? I’d like to read them, links please.

How I Write Custom Elements with lit-html You can use a smaller part of Lit to build web web components that still take advantage of some of it's best features, particularly if you're cool with Light DOM.

President of #webcomponents logging on to share a couple good posts from over on the @frontendmasters.com blog... Here we go...

Declarative Dialog Menu with Invoker Commands The one where I unpack the new CSS behind my menu

Invoker Commands feel like something the platform should have had decades ago. Comparing its functionality to how we traditionally have to toggle a dialog makes current practice seem straight-up absurd. dbushell.com/2026/02/12/d...

Book menu breakdown 📙
#pixelart #indiedev #GameMaker

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

Nodding and feeling very grateful that we get to have Cory writing so clearly about AI. 👏
www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Cool: built a little Cloudflare worker to generate public domain art for my personal website, uses a tiny little SQL database and bit of JavaScript to generate SVGs

Not cool: site gets hit so hard by bots that Cloudflare's free worker limits are immediately exceeded and the worker shuts down

Pushed two new photos from my personal NYC archives.
www.matthewhowell.net/photos/

Creating “Edit” Links That Open Plain-Text Source Files in a Native App Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

📝 My OS is my CMS:

- Read my site in the browser
- Click 'Edit' to tweak a post
- Opens iA Writer with that post's markdown file
- Edit
- Fire shortcut to trigger build
- Refresh page

I love links and custom protocols!

blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/os-as-c...

Just watching a steady stream of excited kids climb up to it and then have their hopes crushed. Might have to move seats.

I get the sense that they’re pretty hard to keep functioning? Still, kids are quite bummed out.

Hyper-local Auckland news: the flying fox at the playground in Western Park is not operational, cord removed, no signage posted

Standard.site - One schema. Every platform. Standard.site provides shared lexicons for long-form publishing on AT Protocol. Making content easier to discover, index, and move across the ATmosphere.

Hello atmosphere ! Over the last few weeks, a bunch of us have been collaborating on a new set of lexicons for publishing, indexing, and building out social features across long-form reading and writing apps ! 🧵1/7

🎥⭐️ New Video⭐️🎥 Re-creating the Top-Down movement of #Zelda games in #Pico8 !
www.youtube.com/watch?v=frqf...

Working on a new essay built around a single sentence:
The future is already here — it's just being artificially restrained by monopolistic corporations.

A vertical website navigation list, in order: My account AT HOP Top-up Parking Jetski registrations Contact us Logout

Auckland Transport surfacing the most important parts of the website in the navigation

Pushed a personal website refresh and wrote a little thing about being a web generalist:
www.matthewhowell.net/notes/2025/w...

#web

people who say stock HTML and CSS aren't fun are dirty liars you can safely ignore

Soft launching a new personal website on a Friday afternoon is a bold, perhaps silly, decision. And being bold and silly are two of the many worthwhile things one can do with a personal website.
www.matthewhowell.net

Is everything just esbuild in a trench coat?

How's everyone minifying their JS these days? Seems like Deno and Bun have built-in build tools for this?

Once again, I’m asking you to @ me if you’re a human in #Aotearoa #NZ

bsky.app/profile/did:...

The entire “Asynchronous JavaScript” module of JavaScript for Everyone is now free This module has so far been one of the most useful to people taking JavaScript for Everyone, so we made it free so you can get an idea of how good Mat is at teaching JavaScript. Maybe it’ll convince...

This module has so far been one of the most useful to people taking JavaScript for Everyone, so we made it free so you can get an idea of how good Mat is at teaching JavaScript. Maybe it’ll convince you to get the whole course 👀

piccalil.li/links/the-en...

A bit of a vulnerable post by me but we need your help to get us through what has been a more difficult period than 2020.

It would be really appreciated if you could read and share in your networks too 💛

bell.bz/its-been-a-v...

The line and the stream. — ethanmarcotte.com “Artificial intelligence is the future,” they tell me. The thing is, futures are tricky.

🦊

“Artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere. It’s the future.”

I hear that line a lot. The thing is, futures are tricky.

ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/the-li...

You can listen for the `htmx:configRequest` event and alter the event's `detail` object (change parameters or headers or whatever).

Any other examples of this specific flavor of event driven JS?

Rewriting htmx (kind of, for fun) and trying to name this architecture pattern that it uses to allow requests to be altered after they're triggered, but before they're sent.

htmx.org/events/#htmx...