Eddy Luten

mkdocs-alias-plugin 0.11.0 Release

eluten@pm.me (Eddy Luten) — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700

The latest version, v0.11.0, of the mkdocs-alias-plugin is now available here. This new version adds the ability to use interwiki-style links, using the following syntax:

[[w:Hypertext]]
or
[[w:Hypertext|The Article on Hypertext]]
or
[[w:Hypertext#History|The History of Hypertext]]

The prefix (w: in the example) can be configured through the plugin’s options and can point to any external site.

mkdocs-alias-plugin is an MkDocs plugin allowing links to your pages using a custom alias such as [[my-alias]] or [[my-alias|My Title]].

License Laundering a Copyleft Project

eluten@pm.me (Eddy Luten) — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer; this is not legal analysis, nor legal advice, just an opinion.

Mark Pilgrim, the original creator of chardet recently opened a GitHub issue on the project after he found that the project he started was relicensed under the MIT license from the original LGPL, a process generally referred to as license laundering. The current maintainer, Dan Blanchard, rewrote the project “from scratch” using Claude, changed its license, and assigned the copyrights to himself, claiming this was an independent implementation done in a clean room environment.

mkdocs-live-edit-plugin 0.4.0 Release

eluten@pm.me (Eddy Luten) — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700

The latest version of the mkdocs-live-edit-plugin, v0.4.0, is now available here on PyPI!

Changes:

Feature: support for custom documentation file directories through the new option user_docs_dir
Bug fix: fix for a TypeError in the plugin config

Furthermore, this latest version enables the usage of the mkdocs-live-wysiwyg-plugin, which, as its name implies, replaces the plain textarea in mkdocs-live-edit-plugin with a WYSIWYG Markdown editor. This plugin uses mkdocs-live-edit-plugin as a dependency; pretty cool stuff!

California AB-1043 Knock-On Effects

eluten@pm.me (Eddy Luten) — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Image Credit: “Justice isn’t blind, she carries a big stick” by Jason Rosenberg on Flickr

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer; this is not legal analysis, nor legal advice, just an opinion.

The way too short and ambiguous California bill AB-1043 seems to have the potential to do real damage to the software industry. It aims to consolidate age-verification at the operating system and application distribution levels seemingly without understanding what either actually are.

Super Basic SDFs

eluten@pm.me (Eddy Luten) — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0700

In a recent experimental 2D gamedev project, I wanted to play around with drawing a bunch of game entities purely algorithmically rather than creating sprites for each of them. One important technique I ended up using was Signed Distance Fields (SDFs). In this post, I’ll go over the most basic implementation (we’ll draw a circle!) and explain how and why it works.

Kinesis Advantage 360: 2 Years In

eluten@pm.me (Eddy Luten) — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0700

In December of 2023, due to carpal tunnel, I switched from my Happy Hacking Keyboard setup to a Kinesis Advantage 360. It’s been two years and change, and I haven’t looked back. Well, kind of.

mkdocs-alias-plugin 0.10.0 Release

eluten@pm.me (Eddy Luten) — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0700

The latest version, v0.10.0, of the mkdocs-alias-plugin is now available here. This new version adds the ability to use aliases in Markdown footnotes, a great way to keep links short and organized.

mkdocs-alias-plugin is an MkDocs plugin allowing links to your pages using a custom alias such as [[my-alias]] or [[my-alias|My Title]].

Jekyll on sourcehut pages

eluten@pm.me (Eddy Luten) — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0700

In a New Year’s resolution-driven attempt to un-Microsoft-ify my life, I’m moving all of my repositories over from GitHub (owned by Microsoft) to sourcehut (owned by some dude). This blog was the first repo to make the switch and was previously hosted via GitHub Pages, and now uses sourcehut pages instead. Here’s the config I created to make the CI-driven deployment work:

The Books of 2025

eluten@pm.me (Eddy Luten) — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0600

This year I read a surprising (to me) amount of books: 21 according to my notes, 6 more than last year. Here they are, listed chronologically in reading order. I’ll also list my favorite reads towards the end of the post.

Copyleft From Now On

eluten@pm.me (Eddy Luten) — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0600

I’ve been putting my work online in various formats for almost 20 years now. For most of that time, I’ve used extremely permissive licenses such as the MIT License to distribute my work in an attempt to promote usage and adoption. Now that I’m quite a bit older and experienced (you may say curmudgeony), let me tell you why I’m changing my tune and am adopting a Copyleft approach.

In the past decade or so, I’ve noticed a widespread adoption of the MIT license, even by those who in the past opposed Open Source Software as a concept. Why the swing and why so extreme? You’d think that those companies would slowly adopt Open Source rather than going all-in all at once. What’s going on?