Well hello there to the first issue of my newsletter on buttondown! Or everywhere. Technically my blog sends out emails when I publish a new article, but I don’t count that as a newsletter.

Quick intro to those who don’t yet know me. Name’s Gabor, 42, you can find me via the Blog link above, or the socials below, senior engineer at corpo where the powers that be decided to uh… encourage the adoption of AI tools, or else. So I did. Reluctantly. And turns out that either the models I’m using are just freakishly good at what I want them to do, or I’m holding them right, but it’s been a thoroughly enjoyable experience!

I therefore started putting together my ideas at home using my own tools. As Shrek says, it’s better out than in! Now the ideas that have been in my mind collecting dust because executive dysfunction and task initiation paralysis, courtesy of my adhd, suddenly get built!

Along the way I discover a bunch of maybe niche, but definitely new to me stuff that I will collect and send out every Wednesday* to y’all in the hopes that it will be informative, or at least entertaning!

Without further ado, the first batch of stuff AI helped me learn:

A domain can have at most 10 SPF lookups

That’s a thing you need to use when you want someone else to send an email on your behalf and you don’t want your email to land in spam. The records live in the DNS settings as a single TXT record. They look like this:

v=spf1 include:<domain1> include:<domain2> include:<domain3> ~all

If you have more than 10 mechanisms – include, a, mx – then you either need to start separating them to different domains, or use an spf flattening service.

One include might mean 5 lookups

It’s essentially a DNS lookup. At the end there should be at least one IP address. If the record points to other records, it could branch off, and be counted against it. As an example include:mailgun.org branches off to like 5 other lookups. See https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=spf%3amailgun.com&run=toolpage.

SPF flattening is a thing

There are services that parse your current spf records, and give you a list of IPs instead. https://autospf.com/spf-macros-vs-flattening/ is one of these services (not sponsored, I literally just found it).

You can only have a single DMARC record per subdomain

It’s a TXT record starting with v=DMARC1 at the host _dmarc. If you have more than one, all of them are ignored. There’s no lookup limit though.

Subdomain: domain.com is an empty (or root) subdomain. archive.domain.com is another subdomain. So you can have _dmarc.domain.com and _dmarc.archive.domain.com records. Most specific wins.

Creating halftone with CSS is fun!

Go read this: https://leanrada.com/notes/pure-css-halftone/. Super thorough article with interactive illustrations!

Apple AirDrop and Handoff is using port 5000

It’s something I needed to know to free up due to docker containers.

Continuous blood pressure monitoring during surgeries reads data from inside your vein

They do it using an arterial line. Basically a little device is inserted into your vein, along with the IV and other bits, and that has a strain-gauge membrane or a pressure transducer.

Which also means there’s almost no way to get an accurate continuous blood pressure monitor that doesn’t need to pierce your skin.

Gilded looking frames are probably made with paste

Instead of buying thin gold leaves and applying them with a brush, it’s probably just a paste you smear onto the surface. I’m about to do this on a wooden frame. See Liberon Gilt Cream!

AI would probably talk to AI in English

They’re trained that way. Inventing a new language would be hard work, and both of them have English in their training data, and they have no need to hide stuff from humans. At least that’s what the AIs have told me.

You can use the vacuum sealer for your sous-vide to create an inflatable cushion

In case you want to secure a cylinder that’s just too big for your arm to your arm.

For example a PipBoy!

You will need a pump though and valves.

Counties in the UK have a complicated, and independent way to figuring out their borders

There’s a whole organisation, the Local Government Boundary Commission for England, that recommends changes. There are analogues in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Borders depend on community identity, geographic features, poplation size, administrative efficiency.

Districts within a county goes to the same organisation, these ones take into account population equality, community ties, geographic factors, and local input. They go and talk to people.

Gerrymeandering is so weird!

Credits:

• Google Gemini

• Claude Sonnet

• one of the GPTs (not sure which one it was)

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All right, that’s enough for today. I’ll keep collecting the weird things for next week. See y’all then!