For no major reason other than that I feel like writing about a few odds and ends which have recently occupied my mind, here’s yet another “Mixed nuts” post.
Although I haven’t yet tried it on this here site, the Hugo static site generator has added AVIF support to its already impressive image processing capabilities as of v.0.162.0. The curious may want to check out this demo repo and its corresponding site. Note that, apparently, not all browsers handle the HDR aspects equally well.
When I build this site through CI/CD, I typically use a GitHub Action which, in turn, calls on other actions to facilitate things — e.g., checkout for accessing the site repo’s contents. After reading about one supply-chain attack after another over the last few months, I finally decided to heed widely discussed advice and pin those actions by their respective commit-hashes, not their release tags. This means that even if a bad actor manages to hijack the repo of (again, e.g.) checkout, my overarching GHA won’t be affected. This article by Rafael Gonzaga explains; and this one on the StepSecurity website gives you additional details, notably how you get each hash in the first place.1
Ah, me, but getting old does so bite sometimes. To quote T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
Well, that’s all well and good, but Eliot never said a word about floaters; and, boy, are they ever in my eyes (which are both aged and myopic, an especially floaters-friendly combo). So much so, in fact, that my web-browsing habits have veered away from a position I took here six years ago — in one of the earliest “Mixed nuts” posts, as a matter of fact — on the question of light mode vs. dark mode. Despite studies I cited back then, I am now making use of dark mode whenever possible because, simply put, the floaters make reading light text on dark backgrounds far less aggravating than is the case with dark text on light backgrounds. I will reserve judgment on the trousers, the hair (as if I had enough to consider), the peach, and the beach.
I’ve added another “slash page.” This one explains my stances on AI where the site is concerned. The bottom line: I don’t use AI for writing, although I do let it give me limited assistance in coding. The day when I can no longer write without the help of clankers will be the day when I call it a day, website-wise. There’s already enough slop out there without this site’s adding to it.
In short: you navigate to the web page of the commit itself and copy the hash from the end of the page’s URL. ↩︎
Latest commit (0fd03c1fb) for page file:
2026-06-03 at 2:31:37 PM CDT.
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