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The Power of Power Cycling
Topics of interest for James
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,416 posts.
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Making Electronic Calipers
Have you ever wished for a 500 Hz, millimeter-precise linear position sensing system? Well you're in luck --- all you need is some circuit board, a basic microcontroller, and a wee bit of maths!
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How to record and retrieve anything you've ever had to look up twice
Stop re-learning things you've already figured out. Two simple ways to document any process, and find it again when you need it.
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Incremental note-taking
I’ve been delving deeper into the vast and strange world of knowledge organizing tools (notes apps, contact organizers, personal search engines). During this rather abstract expedition, one of my goals has been to emerge with some opinionated thesis about the way these tools should be designed to harbor and extend our…
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Bash Shortcuts For Maximum Productivity
The bash (Readline) shortcuts worth knowing for editing, recalling and controlling commands, plus the ! and ^ history tricks.
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Awk driven IoT
With a Raspberry Pi or other modern single-board computers, you can make very simple toys. I started with the hello world of interactive apps: the soundboard. But even then, I was too ambitious. The soundpad Since the main target was kids. I wanted a simple, screen-less toy that would teach …
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Illustrated Notes for “Building a Second Brain”
Illustrated notes on the Building A Second Brain course
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Cranking
This domain is parked. There is no active website here.
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Programmer Time Translation Table
An experienced project manager I used to work with claimed that he took the programmers’ time estimates, multiplied by pi and converted to the next time magnitude to get the true number. 1 day converts to 3.14 weeks. He had learned the hard way that programmers are bad at estimating times . To get a more precise…
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Rules of thumb for software development estimations
Project estimates are a crucial part of project management, helping to predict the time and resources needed for successful completion. Accurate estimates can be achieved through experience, understanding the project's complexity, and using the right estimation techniques. Overestimation can lead to wasted resources…
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My next main browser: a review of Orion
Orion is currently my favourite browser, and has replaced Safari entirely on one of my primary Macs. Here's why.
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IKEA-Oriented Development
To frugally furnish a codebase, imitate Ikea.
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The pitfalls of using SSH-agent, or how to use an agent safely
Unfortunately for you, we promised a follow up to talk about the security implications of using such an agent. So, here we are.
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Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds
A tour of erm, a local CLI that removes disfluencies from English speech recordings using faster-whisper, a few detectors that look at the audio directly, and ffmpeg.
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How to install Linux from a Windows installer
I'm not sure why you would want to do this. Presumably for the same reason as me? I also don't know what that was.
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Speeding up this site by 50x (2014)
I've seen all these studies that show how a 100ms improvement in page load time has a significant effect on page views, conversion rate, etc., but I'd never actually tried to optimize my site. This blog is a static Octopress site, hosted on GitHub Pages. Static sites are supposed to be fast, and GitHub Pages uses…
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Light Table 0.5.0
This release was about simplifying the experience of Light Table, making it far more robust, and making sure it’s fast enough to handle whatever you throw at it. We’ve made big strides in each of these areas, from removing some of the UI elements that didn’t add anything (the left vertical menu), to reaching the point…
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The second-order-diff Git trick
One of the things that Git makes safe and practical is bulk editing by way of “sledgehammer-and-review”:
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Blackholing My Email
How Counter-Strike map credits led to my email address being harvested by worms, and why I had to ask my ISP to blackhole it.
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On Comments in Code
I used to think that I didn’t need comments if I wrote self-documenting code. However, I have realized that I do write comments, and that I find them really useful. To see how many comments I…
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Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox
I began my descent to Chrome two years ago. At first, I only used Chrome while waiting for Firefox to load. Later I found Chrome made pages like Gmail and Grooveshark usable, and eventually stopped loading Firefox altogether.
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Dotfiles feel too personal to share
I love dotfiles and I love sharing. But I have this weird feeling that sharing my dotfiles is too intimate and personal.
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Secure Computing for Journalists
This morning on Twitter, Buzzfeed editor Miriam Elder asks the following question: Possibly stupid question: is the Signal desktop client as secure as the mobile app? — Miriam Elder (@MiriamElder) …
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Solving My Email Problem
Email is not a messaging protocol. It’s a TODO list. Or at least my inbox is a TODO list and email is the protocol for putting stuff on it. Here’s the problem. It is a s**tty TODO list. Any one of you can put something on my TODO list. And I don’t want that.
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How to save $13.27 on your SaaS bill
Vercel has a decent entry level analytics product which I cannot afford so I am going to build my own.
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Tract: A Hugo theme for ambitious documentation projects
Hello! I wanted to tell you all about an open source project I’m working on that I’m pretty excited about. It’s called Tract and it’s a Hugo theme for large documentation projects. I aim to release version 0.1.0 by the end of 2019. In the meantime, check out the current home page or a sample docs page .
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How to use your DSLR from 2008 as a webcam in 2022 (NixOS)
Why throw away your old Camera? In this guide we'll show you how simple it is to reuse your old Camera as a webcam using the NixOS linux distribution.