Jökull Sólberg

Jökull Sólberg

Co-founder and CTO of TripToJapan.com. This blog runs in two modes: helpful posts about TypeScript, agents, and the guts of shipping software, and much less helpful ones about Icelandic politics and the end of the Atlanticist order. The overlap in readership is approximately zero, and I've made peace with that. Reykjavík, Iceland.

  • Omar Shahine built a toolkit for Apple Calendar, Reminders, Contacts, and Mail: a CLI, an MCP server, and OpenClaw and Claude plugins backed by a fast agent-friendly SQLite database, plus a mail channel with cryptographic sender verification. It's what his own OpenClaw agent runs on, alongside Codex, Claude, and Microsoft Scout.

  • Federico Viticci is building NotesCTL, a CLI for Apple Notes that lets you use whatever agent you like to assemble in-depth research reports and save them as beautifully formatted notes — rich links, tables, tags, checklists, and headings included. It turns Apple Notes into a structured destination for AI research output rather than plain text dumps.

  • ogimagecn is a free, open-source set of Open Graph image components for React built on Satori, installable with pnpm dlx shadcn add @ogimagecn/blog and fully compatible with the shadcn CLI workflow. Designer Alayman Gupta built it for anyone tired of ugly website previews — a customizable design system that makes drop-in OG images trivial.

  • Devon Govett found a much cheaper way to do text shimmer animations: animating background-position forces a full repaint every frame and burns about 20% CPU for a single line of text, but a CSS mask trick that only animates a transform drops that below 2%. A neat technique for text loading effects that lets the browser GPU-accelerate the work.

  • Ulrich Rozier ran the numbers on what Apple's Macs actually run as local AI servers, from a €1,049 Mac mini to €60,000 Thunderbolt-linked Studio clusters. His rule: memory decides, bandwidth accelerates — unified memory lets even modest Macs load models no consumer GPU can hold, but only up to a point. Cloud subscriptions beat local on cost almost always (a base Ultra takes 24 years to amortize against ChatGPT Plus), and local only wins for data-sovereignty or API bills over €1,000 a month — or for the freedom to swap in next quarter's open models for free.

  • Luke Edwards released lane, a CLI for copy-on-write worktrees and durable in-project memories. Plain worktrees throw away ignored files like node_modules and .env, forcing reinstalls and rebuilds; lane clones them by reference instead, so parallel agents each get their own cheap tree. Its note system attaches memory to a file and symbol — lane note add src/auth.rs -a 'fn verify' — and flags the note when the symbol changes. lane never calls a model; it is pure local tooling.

  • Nate shipped v2 of @nkzw/oxlint-config, an opinionated Oxlint preset whose philosophy is error, never warn — warnings are noise, so rules either fail the build or get explicitly disabled. It enforces strict consistent style, blocks buggy patterns like instanceof, bans debug-only code such as console.log, and prefers fast checks like TypeScript's noUnusedLocals over slow lint rules. Autofixable rules are favored to keep it friction-free.

  • OpenSEO is an open-source alternative to Semrush and Ahrefs that brings your own DataForSEO API key and self-hosts on Cloudflare Workers — pay-as-you-go SEO without subscriptions. It covers keyword research, rank tracking, backlinks, site audits, and competitor insights, and exposes an MCP server so AI agents like Claude Code and OpenClaw can drive the SEO workflows directly. 14k+ stars on GitHub.

  • Yonas shipped sling, an agent-first CLI for GitHub Actions that keeps CI debugging out of your context window. Instead of pulling entire GHA logs, sling why computes a failed run's logs and metadata down to the evidence lines that explain it; sling bill tallies minutes and spend by runner label, and sling top and sling usage surface p50/p95/p99 queue waits and week-over-week trends across workflows and repos.

  • Paolino built Fastpotify, a native Spotify client with no Electron anywhere in sight — a lightweight binary that starts in under a second, plays locally at up to 320 kbps with gapless audio, and controls Spotify Connect speakers from the same window. It covers library browsing, playlists, podcasts, and search, with keyboard shortcuts and MPRIS support on Linux. Available for Linux, macOS, and Windows, and packaged as yay -S fastpotify on Arch.

  • TanStack Charts hit official Alpha with v0.16.0 — a typed, tree-shakable chart grammar for SVG and Canvas in the grammar-of-graphics tradition of ggplot2, Vega-Lite, and Observable Plot. A basic React line chart comes in at 29 kB gzipped, types stay connected to the source data, and marks, scales, axes, tooltips, and motion compose through one definition. 188 examples plus a full shadcn chart catalog are up at tanstack.com/charts.

  • Why I'm voting No in the Icelandic accession talk referendum
  • jdx (@jdxcode), creator of mise, hk and pitchfork, is happy with how fnox is working — "Fort Knox for your secrets", an encrypted/remote secret manager in Rust (MIT, ~2090 stars). One CLI for secrets across dev, CI and production: encrypt in git with age/AWS KMS/Azure KMS/GCP KMS, or pull from cloud providers like AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, GCP Secret Manager, 1Password, Bitwarden, Infisical and HashiCorp Vault. He still feels it's not simple enough though — the goal is secrets that are idiot-proof.

  • One overlooked failure mode for email-handling agents is trusting the sender address, which is trivially spoofable. Developer __morse argues agents should verify DMARC and DKIM before acting on a message, and built an email CLI that does exactly that — rejecting mail with spoofed senders. He frames it as a prerequisite for letting agents respond to subscription-cancel requests, where a forged sender could otherwise trigger real account changes.

  • Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js and Deno cofounder, introduces Dactyl, a vibe coding platform for native iOS and Android apps. Its trick is a SwiftUI renderer compiled to WASM, so a device simulator runs in the browser canvas with low latency while you develop — OAuth flows and even camera access work through browser APIs. It can connect your own ChatGPT subscription, and via magic it runs the same SwiftUI code the agent writes on Android with native components. Built on Durable Objects.

  • M5Stack released PaperMono, an e-paper development board built around the ESP32-S3 with a 3.97-inch four-level grayscale touch display, front light, 1150mAh battery, PDM mic, IMU, and microSD slot. The full version adds NFC and LoRa (868–923 MHz) for low-power display, near-field identification, and long-range communication; a streamlined PaperMono-Lite drops the radio and NFC.

projects

all →
  • Business intelligence for people working in Iceland's planning, property, transport and construction sectors.

  • A privacy-first Icelandic iOS keyboard with BÍN-powered autocorrect and on-device learning.

  • Icelandic e-bike listings in one place — find retailers and models, and compare prices.

  • A harness-agnostic data toolkit for Icelandic public datasets — skills plus the scripts they reference, drivable by any agent.

  • Typed RPC for React, with one wire-safe error union from the server to the component that handles it.

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