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Writing as a thinking tool
In middle school I could not get through long passages no matter how hard I tried. I would read an entire page and find that nothing had reg...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,414 posts.
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Download your favourite YouTube videos
Signal boosting Laura's post that you should absolutely download and archive the stuff that matters to you.
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Awesome repositories are no longer awesome
Erik Gahner Larsen
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How I use AI (Oct 2026)
I document how I use AI, one year after my first writeup. Everything's completely different.
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TextEdit vs. Pages
Allison Sheridan is right when she says TextEdit can usually do the job. But I'm sticking with Pages anyway.
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Let Me Ch...
That morning I woke up at 6:58, two minutes before the alarm. I lay there and waited for it to ring. And it rang. We both did our jobs. I still don’t know why I remember it in such detail. I used to forget what I’d had for dinner the night before. And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone…
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Novellas with Groff
Don't even think about it: I won't publish this. Nor send it to you privately, which is mostly the same as publishing it.
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Prospero: A new coding harness for a more civilized age
I’ve been fascinated with local LLMs for a couple of years now. The better open weight models, including some that inference on regular, higher-end consumer hardware at tolerable speeds, are now reliable enough to handle simpler programming tasks. This requires a coding harness, but so far this year I’ve been…
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Digital minimalism
For a long time I have been a fan of minimalism in my physical life: have few physical possessions, and try to do more with less. Four years ago, I wrote this blog post describing what I had in the 40-liter backpack that I travel around with.
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Claude Duet is the first personal-assistant-type harness that feels useful
Look, I really didn’t want to like Duet. I don’t want to be an Anthropic fanboy and it annoys me when they do things better than the competition. But they have done it again.
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Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category
My blog just scored a perfect 100 on every Lighthouse category. I love blogging. I wanted to build a blog that’s light, fast, free of clutter, able to run multiple blogs, and fully accessible on top of that. And finally, at long last, I’ve more or less pulled it off. It was quite a tedious proces...
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Overgrown, when plants invade your abandoned tabs
A fun little project that came out of a creative exercise around the word 'Overgrowth'.
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I Built a Stereo Vision Board for Hardware Hackers
This article was written entirely by a human, for humans. I tend to get excited about certain chips. This time, it was a microprocessor: The Rockchip …
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A practical guide to AI image generation, from diffusion to agents
Welcome to the digital home of Daniel Ball. Explore my portfolio to see the projects I’ve worked on and learn more about my professional journey.
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Apple broke an essential presentation feature of iPads
If you teach or present with an iPad, avoid iPadOS 27.
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An ad-free Android TV
Android TV is full of ads, even in apps-only mode. Here's how I replaced the launcher, YouTube, and the remote's buttons to get rid of them.
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Tmux and Claude Code: Sessions, Send-Keys, and the Ceiling
A working tmux setup for running Claude Code and other AI agents: session-per-project naming, pane layouts, send-keys for scripting an agent, capture-pane for reading one back, and the status-line monitor. Plus the limits you hit at four agents.
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Making a 88x31 button book using ImageMagick
Making an 88x31 book-button using ImageMagick
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What I self-host
I’ve always had a foot in the self-hosting world, long before it was called that. My freshman year of university, I ran a website from a Linux box underneath my bed. There was some downtime when my roommate got tired of the fan noise and turned it off. For several years I ran MythTV , then XBMC (later known as Kodi).
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Someone on Torrent Sites Kept Fucking with My Sonarr
PLEASE stop putting skid malware on torrent sites as South Park episodes
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I turned my unused Kindle into a photo frame with GPT-6 Astra
I turned my unused Kindle into a photo frame with an AI agent.
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Making big downloads resumable in Firefox
This was posted in the TIL section, the low-effort section of my website where I post things that I find useful, but that don't get the full quality checks content elsewhere on this site does.
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Local Indexing to reduce tool calling and token usage
Pensieve for developers: a local MCP server that gives Claude Code, Codex and Cursor your context. A thread for every piece of work. Free and open source, for Mac.
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Build your own decision model
"System one" decision models are models that infer and respond with calibrated probabilities or every allowed answer. Consider your everyday language model, to get typed output from it (JSON), you may use Structured Output to constrain the output to guaranteed valid JSON. While model prefills the input in one pass,
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I guess I'm using WebP now?
After using the same few image formats for 20+ years, I’m now on the WebP bandwagon. That isn’t something I thought I’d ever say. Now I’m wondering how soon it’ll be before I can use a couple more.
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100+ reactions to 100+ solutions
“Many of us are grappling with OpenAI’s announcement on 6 October. We feel that it is useful to have an updating snapshot of the community’s gut feeling.”
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Nix wrote half of my debugger
A few days ago I wrote about Rewind VM, a deterministic VM where every run of a Nix build is a pure function of its inputs, thread schedule included! I have been using it to find, reproduce and solve numerous race conditions in Nix builds, but it’s been making me feel a little crazy. What is this superpower, and why…
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Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs
A blog about software craft and quality
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I hired an illustrator to draw my house. Now it's my Home Assistant dashboard
A flickering fireplace, a softly lit garden, and a smart home the whole family finally enjoys.