Transactions in the MongoDB EF Core Provider
Database transactions ensure that multi-record (or in our case multi-document) operations either all succeed or all fail together.
Queryable Encryption with the MongoDB EF Core Provider
MongoDB's Queryable Encryption lets you encrypt sensitive database fields while keeping them searchable. Unlike traditional encryption-at-rest that renders data unreadable to the database, queryable encryption supports equality and range queries on encrypted fields without requiring decryption first.
Lazy Loading with EF Core Proxies
With the Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Proxies NuGet package you can use to traverse navigation properties. This is often preferable to joins and includes such as when using one-to-many or only exploring a subset of the navigations based on client-side logic or for providers that don't support include yet.
Enhancing content articles in Nuxt3
I've already covered reading time and generated excerpts for Nuxt3 content but there are still a couple more things you can do to enhance your content articles.
Comical
Actual comic book typefaces are rather beautiful and Comic Sans - despite the name - doesn't really embrace the style instead opting for an unusual bendy lower case rather than the small caps angled lettering that accompanies gorgeous comic book art.
ZX Gona
Gona is an incredibly popular typeface used in Japan from everything from signage to packaging to user interfaces. It's a Latin typeface that is even more popular than Helvetica is in the western world. It's a clean, smart sans-serif that is very easy to read.
Star Maker
Olaf Stapledon's 1937 novel Star Maker sees the protagonist detach from his body and explore the infinite reaches of the universe across space and time.
Tanzanite
The Amiga was the first machine I had where fonts were no longer constrained into 8x8 pixels. I played with FED on the Workbench 1.3 extras disk for quite a while!
Doublewear
Yugoslavian designer Vinko Ožić Pajić produced a logo designs for the Standard Konfekcija company in 1963 with this very unique and distinctive style.
Brashi
I was lucky enough to spend an afternoon on a practical introduction to Japanese calligraphy this year and the feel of those brushes have stuck with me.
Patrol
A new and original compact and aggressive font with cut-outs, unexpected serifs, and a full lower-case all available in three weights! If you were looking at my 2019 font Needlecast and thought "I wish this was more aggressive" then this is the font for you.
Wand
A brand new all-original condensed italic/oblique with a slight curvature and flourishes gives a nice smooth and yet modern feel to anything set it in - even in so few pixels.
Radial
Looking back at my childhood I can see early signs of my love for fonts. One such sign was the joy in using a pen to paint in the letters on the tyres of my dads car.
Scarlet
An all-original new bubbly font with a very low x-bar for added style and impact.
Advent of Fonts 2024
December 2024 sees the fourth year of my Advent of Fonts project where I published a 24-day advent calendar of 8x8 pixel on Mastodon.
ZX Amelia
Stan Davis' 1964 typeface Amelia takes inspiration from the magnetic OCR of its time but in a friendly, rounded & bold style.
Generated Excerpts for Nuxt3 Content
Nuxt3 has been my stack of choice for a while now and it was time to port my site over from Nuxt2 - an exercise in itself I should blog about - but more concretely is the idea of excerpts.
Nuxt Content v1 content.db database & file size
An examination of Nuxt's content.db and how to shrink it for performance.
Email form sender with AWS Lambda, Brevo & reCAPTCHA
In this article I'll show you how to use AWS Lambda to send an email with Brevo using their API while being protected by reCAPTCHA.
Advent of Fonts 2023
December 2023 saw the third year of my Advent of Fonts project where I published a 24-day advent calendar of 8x8 pixel on Mastodon.
Melanie
I created this stylish new 8x8 bitmap font after being inspired by a recent fully-scalable typeface called Melindrosa by Flavia Zimbardi - if you're looking for a gorgeous new art deco font you should definitely check it out.
Quirky PC
Early PC video cards featured a familiar serif 8x8 font. Over the years different manufactures tweaked a few glyphs (ATI), made a serif version (Amstrad), or just plain stylized parts (AMI & Phoenix BIOS) all of which gave a slightly off-brand feel.
Matinee
The 1920's art deco movement has inspired a lot of design and plenty of typography to go with it. Personally having already published SIX such 8x8 typefaces I wasn't sure I could do something new...
Hyperlight
A new futuristic open face pruned back to the basics with isolated segments allowing them to be easily stencilled on the side of a space, air, land or sea craft - or just to save time etching or spraying.
Echoes
A classy yet fun new typeface with a high contrast x-bar and large rounded edges.
Track40
Here's to day 17 of my 2023 Advent of Fonts calendar - a tribute to floppy disks and all the magnetic glory with letter shaped a little like sectors on a track. I've always been fascinated by copy protection and the tricks you can pull off on a supposedly pure digital medium to stop it being duplicated.
ZX Revue
Revue, created by Colin Brignall in 1968, could be found everywhere in the 70s & 80s. Gamers might recognize it from the title screen and livery of the 1987 arcade classic After Burner from SEGA.
Prophecy
Another new font this time with an old worn look that takes cues from ancient chiselled serif fonts while applying a hint of uncial hand lettering for a distinctly prophetic look!
Compass
This new font was inspired as being the counterpoint to my Protractor font that featured straight lines and harsh angles and instead takes broad rounded strokes as far as they can be squeezed in!
Bitty
Narrow glyphs are common on the Speccy with 64-column routines gracing Your Sinclair as well as word-processors at the cost of readability.
Moffett
As a child of the 80s I loved the Airwolf TV show with its gorgeous helicopter (a modified Bell 222A), on-board computers, synth intro music and lone wolf hero.
Undervolt
Thick heavy fonts with cut-outs and stylized edges aren't new in the world of typography gracing everything from TRON to AfterBurner and beyond but this new alternate take on the style with a real lower-case should bring polish to any space game.
Coded Entry
The blobs on fonts were to allow optical or magnetic ink readers to quickly scan documents - many over a certain age will remember them from the bottom of cheques.
Manic
When I saw a remake of Manic Miner called Manic Person under development on the Spectrum Computing forums I thought a custom font would polish off the look.
A blog comment receiver for Cloudflare Workers
A number of years back I switched to a static site generator for damieng.com, firstly with Jekyll, and then with Nuxt when I wanted more flexibility. I've been happy with the results and the site is now faster, cheaper, more secure and easier for me to maintain.
Email form sender with Nuxt3, Cloudflare, Brevo & reCAPTCHA
I've been using Nuxt quite extensively on the static sites I work on and host and use Cloudflare Pages to host them. It's a great combination of power, flexibility, performance and cost (free).
ZX Megascope
A 2023 adaptation of DJR's (David Jonathan Ross) fantastic Megascope font for April 2023.
Extracting files from Tatung Einstein disk images
Kevin Edwards got hold of some 3" disks containing source code to various old commercial games and once they were imaged with a high quality process (a Kryoflux) it was time to write some tooling to get the files out of the corresponding DSK file.
Rendering content with Nuxt3
I've been a big fan of Nuxt2 and Nuxt3 is definitely a learning curve and I have to admit the documentation is a bit lacking - lots of small fragments and many different ways to do things.
A quick primer on floppy disks
I've always been fascinated by floppy disks from the crazy stories of Steve Wozniak designing the Disk II controller using a handful of logic chips and carefully-timed software to the amazing tricks to create - and break - copy protection recently popularised by 4am.
Adding reading time to Nuxt3 content
I've been using Nuxt2 quite a bit for my sites (including this one) and am now starting to use Nuxt3 for a few new ones and am finding the docs lacking in many places or confusing in others so hope to post a few more tips in the coming weeks.
Pixie
Here's the ultimate day of my 2022 Advent of Fonts - a family of small fonts called Pixie. Included are the usual bold variant but also a squared-off digital and then a bell-bottomed one and even a stretched out top variant of that for a little unusual variety.
Shakedown
This is day 23 - the penultimate day - of my 2022 Advent of Fonts calendar and we have a 1920s art deco font with some serious serifs and some not so serious for a little character.
Ident
My 2022 Advent of Fonts hits the final stretch with day 21 and this smart, oblique all-caps that features left-tick/serifs on the capitals only to give it a more kinetic feel. I'm quite happy how different this is from the other ~400 or so fonts in the ZX Origins collection so far.
Treatise
Day 19 of the 2022 Advent of Fonts is an original creation of a serif-style font that places them in a somewhat unusual decorative fashion rather than the typical alignment to aid in reading.