Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,416 posts.
Turn the radio volume down for adverts and DJs talking
A script for automatically lowering the volume during radio advertisements and DJ announcements and turns the volume back up when songs are playing. It controls a Sonos speaker using the Soco-cli P…
The hard part in becoming a command line wizard
I've long been impressed by shell one-liners. They seem like magical incantations. Pipe a few terse commands together, et voilà! Out pops the solution to a problem that would seem to require pages of code. Are these one-liners real or mythology? To some extent, they're both. Below I'll give a famous real example. Then…
Bubblewrap: A nimble way to prevent agents from accessing your .env files
Last week I wrote a thing about how to run Claude Code when you don’t trust Claude Code. I proposed the creation of a dedicated user account & standard unix access controls. The objective was to stop Claude from dancing through your .env files, eating your secrets. There are some usability problems with that guide- I…
iOS Ships Dvorak, Finally
I’m a huge fan of the Dvorak keyboard layout, but if there’s one thing I love more than “Evolved vs Engineered” solution debates, is that nothing wins the ”standardized” debate.
Why You Should Write Your Own Static Site Generator
I rewrote my personal website using basic libraries and the flexibility is incredible.
Rich Command Shells
Many applications benefit from a mix of a graphical and textual interface. This has ranged from entire environments, like the Lisp Machine and the follow-on Common Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM), to specific applications like Mathematica and others which employ a "notebook interface". There have also been various…
Wolfram Alpha doesn't "get it"
Apologies, but the page you requested could not be found. Go to the front page →
Using Git Offline
Some companies use an isolated network or even the complete lack of a network as a security measure to protect from unauthorized access. Working on these systems can be a struggle but it is still possible, and perhaps even more important, to use a proper version control tool like Git.
Weird monitor bugs people sent me in the last 5 years (2022)
I develop 🌕 Lunar, a macOS app for getting intelligent adaptive brightness on external monitors and controlling every aspect of your monitor using DDC and other obscure protocols. I get tons of email about Lunar, especially after it became my full time “job” in 2021. A lot of those emails complain about Lunar bugs…
Get It Done
Too often people do the best they can with what they have when they should instead get it done
Why Custom GPTs are better than plugins
On November 6, 2023, OpenAI announced Custom GPTs. Since then, over 3 million GPTs have been created, with over 200.000 of them made publicly available.
Raspberry Pi Car Speed Detector
(2016-12-18 Version 2 is now on github. It fixes one bug, makes the code style more consistent, and adds a few additional options for tracking the results.) It started with a Facebook post from my …
The Feynman Technique: The Best Way to Learn Anything (2012)
Master the Feynman Technique: Nobel laureate's 4-step learning method to understand anything deeply through teaching, simplification, and systematic review.
Bing Jail
A short story on how my website lost all indexed pages in Bing, affecting my presence in DuckDuckGo, secret blacklisting and classification as a splog by Bing AI
Tools for thought as cultural practices, not computational objects
On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens
Reproducible Git Bundles
Describes how to create reproducible and deterministic one-file bundles of git repositories for use cases such as backups.
Home 3D metal printing: first results
A couple of weeks ago I learnt about an interesting 3d metal printing process , from a company selling it for $100k USD, and speculated that it might be DIY-able for much less. Well I now have some promising first results.
Scripting tmux
I often want to start similar workspaces in tmux; for example I always want to tail those two log files in a pane , or I always want to start both vim and mysql in a pane, etc.
Visualizing binary files with ImHex's DSL, the "pattern language"
Viewing my binary file with ImHex. The pattern language pane, on the right,...
Switching from Vim to Intellij
From Vim To IntelliJ In the beginning, a love affair For the last 10 years or so, I have been a die-hard Vim user. I was introduced to Vim…
I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys
Sometimes keyboards come with a 'Fn' key that allows some of their context-sensitive keys to do particular general-purpose functions. Sometimes these are implemented in careful, considerate and configurable ways... and other times they just make me want to throw the keyboard out of the window.
JJ Cheat Sheet
I’ve been learning Jujutsu a.k.a. jj , a version control system that’s compatible with git repos. It’s clicked for me in a way that git hasn’t even after many years of use.
Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker
Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker : Effectively speaking, I've always been a Vim user. When I got my first shell account, I started with Vim (In the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic ages of `vi`, `vim` and `neovim`, I came of age somewhere in the late Jurassic): my
Two-factor paper passwords
I guess it makes me boring but I try to get people to use stronger passwords. People love to use the same password over and over again, o...