somethingSTRANGE

RegEx Cheatsheet

Michael Ryan — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 14:20:00 -0700

A handy cheatsheet and overview of the syntax for various regular expression flavors and implementations.

Got Tabs?

Michael Ryan — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 10:28:45 -0800

Hey there! Ever find yourself wanting a simple way to create tab spacers without resorting to browser extensions? That was me a while back, and that’s when the idea for this little Tab app popped into my head. It started with a simple goal: to add tab bar spaces without titles. But as I tinkered and tailored it, it blossomed into something much more robust and versatile. Let me take you through its journey and highlight the cool features it now boasts.

Tab

Michael Ryan — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 08:20:45 -0800

Name

Icon

Note

Characters remaining: 0

Commenting with Giscus

Michael Ryan — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For a while now, this website has been powered by Hugo, a fantastic static site generator that ensures the site content is compiled into static files, making it swift and efficient. As a static website, there is no backend server running scripts, which means fewer points of failure and faster load times.

I’ve been having fun experimenting with CSS and JavaScript to add some dynamic flair, interactive elements, and sleek transitions to bring a modern touch to the site. At its core, however, it’s all still a beautifully simple static site.

Closing Duplicate Tabs in Directory Opus

Michael Ryan — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

One of the standout features of Directory Opus is its capability to manage multiple listers and a multitude of open tabs. However, this flexibility can quickly lead to a cluttered workspace if redundant tabs aren’t regularly closed.

The script helps simplify tab management by automatically identifying and closing duplicate tabs, ensuring that only unique and necessary tabs remain open. This allows users to maintain a cleaner, more efficient workspace and reduces the time spent manually sorting through tabs.

Sorting Tabs in Directory Opus

Michael Ryan — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

One of the best features of Directory Opus is the ability to have multiple listers with numerous open tabs. However, if you’re not diligent in closing unnecessary tabs, you’ll quickly end up with a cluttered mix of relevant and irrelevant tabs.

Managing a multitude of tabs can be daunting, especially when you need to keep them organized for efficient workflow. The script in this article aims to streamline this process by automatically sorting your tabs based on their paths. It distinguishes between locked and unlocked tabs, ensuring your most important tabs remain accessible while others are neatly arranged.

Using with Font Awesome SVGs

Michael Ryan — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Throughout this site, I use SVG icons by inlining them directly into the page, ensuring immediate availability without unnecessary network calls. Basic inlining would embed data for each SVG separately, even if the same icon is used multiple times, quickly bloating the page with duplicate data. But there’s a solution!

SVGs support the <use> element, which references and duplicates content from another SVG document. This process effectively clones nodes into a hidden DOM and pastes them where the <use> element is, similar to how template elements are cloned.

GameView Sizes in Unity

Michael Ryan — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Unity Game view toolbar has a dropdown that allows you to select various resolutions and aspect ratios presets for testing how your game will look on different monitors. While custom presets may be added to that dropdown menu by clicking the button at the bottom, there's no obvious way of removing items from the list once they're added.

Fortunately, there’s a configuration file that contains all custom menu entries, and it’s a standard Unity YAML data file that can be modified in any plain text editor. The file is called GameViewSizes.asset, and it’s located under your user profile.

Natural Sorting of SemVer Strings in Hugo

Michael Ryan — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 13:25:41 +0700

Earlier today, I saw a post on Hugo’s Discourse site where someone was asking for a way to sort version numbers with a natural sort order where multi-digit numbers are treated atomically.

The accepted solution seemed somewhat complicated with the way the versions were split into separate version components (i.e., Major, Minor, Patch, PreRelease), sorted into nested maps, and then merged together again afterward.

I believe the solution I came up with is a bit more straightforward, and it should be able to sort all SemVer strings. Also, since it doesn’t assume the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format, it can also handle version strings with pre-release suffixes, such as “beta” and “rc”.

Hugo with Font Awesome

Michael Ryan — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 15:01:43 -0700

Font Awesome is an icon font widely used across various websites, applications, and projects. I’ve been utilizing it for years to develop editor tools for my Unity projects. It’s truly awesome.

One of the first decisions I made as I started building this site with Hugo, a popular open-source static site generator, was to integrate Font Awesome to handle my icon needs. I specifically wanted to use SVGs due to their numerous advantages over traditional font icons. Many articles detail the advantages of SVG icons over font icons, so I won’t repeat those here.

Command-Line Syntax Key

Michael Ryan — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 01:10:00 -0800

The following table describes the notation used to indicate command-line syntax.

Notation	Description
Loose Text	Required text that must be typed as shown.
`<` … `>`	Placeholder for a required value.
`[` … `]`	Set of optional items.
`{` … `}`	Set of required items. You must choose one.
`\|` (pipe)	Pipe separator for mutually exclusive items.
`...` (ellipsis)	Items that can be repeated and used multiple times.

Verdaccio, Synology, and Unity. Oh My!

Michael Ryan — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 13:30:03 -0800

Setting up a private Verdaccio package registry is generally quite easy, however it gets a bit more complicated when using a docker container on a Synology NAS.

A Convenient Caboodle of Unicode Characters

Michael Ryan — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 22:55:31 -0800

Quick access to some useful Unicode characters.

Photoshop Scripting

Michael Ryan — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 16:53:42 -0800

The ScriptingListener plug-in

The ScriptingListener plug-in can record JavaScript to a log file for any operation which is actionable.

Install the ScriptingListener plug-in:

Quit Photoshop.
Download the ScriptingListener plug-in package. This package contains the ScriptingListener plug-in in the “Utilities” folder, scripting documentation, and sample scripts.
- Windows:
  Scripting Listener Plug-in for Windows
- macOS:
  Scripting Listener Plug-in for macOS (Photoshop 2020 and later)
  Scripting Listener Plug-in for macOS (Photoshop 2019 and earlier)
After you download the ScriptingListener plug-in package file above, double-click it to decompress it. If asked, extract all the files.

An Indent Shortcode for Hugo

Michael Ryan — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Indenting markdown usually isn’t difficult, however there could be a few gotchas. Skip down to the end for a quick little Hugo shortcode for inserting indents in markdown.

The Problem

Earlier today, I wanted to indent a markdown page element that included a link, but for some reason, the HTML that wrapped the markdown link was breaking the things.

Search the web for how to “indent without adding a bullet or number in markdown” and you’ll likely come across multiple suggestions that rely on a mix of HTML tags and CSS styles.

The Markdown Grimoire

Abdul Alhazred — Fri, 31 Oct 0730 00:00:00 +0000

Transcribed from the crumbling vellum discovered beneath the shifting sands of Rub’ al Khali, 730 CE

Bound in a leather not quite animal, stained with the ink of bygone intellects, this manuscript was unearthed from the shattered ruins of a ziggurat whose shape defied Euclidean geometry. It is said that Abdul Alhazred, driven mad by revelations glimpsed beyond the veil of time, encoded forbidden truths in what modern scholars feebly call “Markdown.”