I use Audiobookshelf (abbreviated ABS) for all my legal audiobooks that I bought legally, and I really like it. I also use the Smart Audiobook Player (abbreviated SABP) Android app, which I also bought (legally this time) to list
Visit stavros.io → RSS feedOn Hacker News Sep 2013 – Mar 2026
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It was on the news this mroing, Mozilla will stop developing FirefoxOS phones , and the top Hacker News comment really resonated with me. Sure, IoT is the future, and it would be great if we had more nifty stuff there ( shameless IoT privacy plug ), but these headlines make the bad taste that I’ve had in my mouth ever…
UPDATE : Revolut has refunded me, I will update the post with more details soon.
Lately I’ve gotten heavily back into making stuff, and it’s mostly because of LLMs. I thought that I liked programming, but it turned out that what I like was making things, and programming was just one way to do that. Since LLMs have become good at programming, I’ve been using them to make stuff nonstop, and it’s…
I find Flash games on Facebook great fun. Not playing them, of course, that’s boring. As you may remember from my previous post, “ winning at Puzzle Adventures ”, I like to take a look into their guts and figure out how they work, and whether or not I can get insane scores with no effort.
I’m entirely convinced that basically every developer alive today heard the adage “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” and figured that, since they always wear jeans and a t-shirt anyway, they might as well apply it to their systems’ architecture. This explains why the stack of every single company I’ve…
Listen, anyone can make a PCB at home, it’s easy. PCBs (printed circuit boards) are those flat things with all the components that are inside all electronic devices, you’ve seen them. All you need is a laser printer, some glossy magazine pages, print your circuit onto the page, use a clothes iron to transfer the toner…
Microservices are awesome. We know this because of all the success stories that are circulating lately. The news is full of such stories, of people taking large, monolithic codebases, breaking them up, adding HTTP APIs and enjoying all the benefits.
A few minutes ago I came across a Hacker News post that detailed a method of adding search to your static site. As you probably know, adding search to a static site is a bit tricky, because you can’t just send the query to a server and have the server process it and return the results. If you want full-text search…
I came upon a very interesting and cryptic snippet of code somewhere nameless , and I can’t decide if it is brilliant or completely insane. It is a very obscure way of accomplishing the required task, but it’s around four times faster than the alternatives I’ve tried, so I have to admit that it’s not completely…
As you may remember, or completely not know, I have a bit of a fascination with old rotary phones . Occasionally, when people learn about this fascination, they donate their old rotary phones to me, so I have ended up with a small collection.
I’ve been making web apps since 2003, which means that I’ve been doing this for fourteen years now, or it means that I can’t count. So, there are few people more qualified than me to tell you this:
I bought a really small 8x8 LED panel a while ago because I have a problem. I just can’t resist a nice WS2812 LED panel, much like I can’t resist an e-ink display. These days I manage to stay sober, but once in a while I’ll see a nice cheap LED panel and fall off the wagon. It has now been thirteen minutes that I have…
I recently installed Ubuntu Wacky Whatever, the latest version, and I’m very excited about it shipping with SSH 8.2, which means that I can finally use hardware USB keys for secure, easy to use authentication. If securing your devices has been something you’ve wanted to easily do yourself, read on, because it’s…
If you’re a regular reader, you might have noticed that I’ve been on a quest for the perfect backup program , and ended up writing my own encryption layer over bup.
As all developers, I’ve been using git since the dawn of time, since its commands were an inscrutable jumble of ill-fitting incantations, and it has remained this way until today. Needless to say, I just don’t get git. I never got it, even though I’ve read a bunch of stuff on how it represents things internally. I’ve…
After designing my first PCB , I went on a designing spree. It turns out that making PCBs (printed circuit boards, basically a piece of plastic that includes all the connections of your components in it. It helps make your project smaller and cut down on the amount of wires floating around) is so enjoyable, I’m PCBing…
I finally managed to deploy Django in a Docker container on production! I’ve been trying to switch to a full Docker development/production model since Docker came out, but only recently did the ecosystem mature enough to allow me to easily use Docker both for development (where it excels, in my opinion) and on…
A few days ago, I saw an article about someone’s Playstation Network account getting stolen . The problem wasn’t so much that the account got stolen, as this apparently happens more often than not, but that Sony has created a system so convoluted that it’s possible for the thief to keep your account, without you…
A few minutes ago I came across a Hacker News post that detailed a method of adding search to your static site. As you probably know, adding search to a static site is a bit tricky, because you can’t just send the query to a server and have the server process it and return the results. If you want full-text search…