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Losing Sight
Léonie Watson's personal website. Writing about the web, accessibility, and other things.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,937 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Just Say No
I grew up in Amsterdam, which is a pretty rough town by Dutch Standards. As a kid there are all kinds of temptations and peer-pressure to join in in bad stuff is something that is hard to escape. But somehow that never was a big factor for me, computers and electronics kept me fascinated for long enough that none of…
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Learning music with Strudel
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
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Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?
Link to: https://tidbits.com/2025/12/17/compromised-apple-gift-card-leads-to-apple-account-lockout/
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Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated
Most people have an extremely incorrect perception about waste disposal and recycling. Here’s the reality.
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Effective Spaced Repetition
“To flash conviction on the mind.”
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The hotel bathroom puzzle
In his wonderful book The Evolution of Useful Things, the author and civil engineer Henry Petroski shares one of the most famous case studies in the history of design: Before it was destroyed by fi…
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I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978
A story about Disneyland's Space Mountain and a 10-year-old inventor.
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I built a lay-down desk
After spending part of the last 12 months travelling in Europe I'm now settling down around Paris and I need to adapt my multi-screens setup. You probably have seen an ads for the altwork desk a $7000 desk that let you work laying down. Spending a big part of my …
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Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity
How Bill Watterson Stuck to His Guns — and Vanished
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I returned my 2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar
tl;dr: After two weeks of use, I returned my 2016 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and bought one with Function Keys instead. Read on for detailed Battery stress tests, performance tests, and an exploration of how Apple's botched this year's Pro lineup. I've owned almost every generation of Mac desktop and laptop…
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I Knew a Programmer Who Went Completely Insane
Not long ago one of our programmers just lost it and he lost it good. He walked into the manager’s office and began screaming strange things...
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In the aggressive pursuit of expanding ad revenue, Apple is gambling with one of its core values: great products.
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What would you do if you lost your Google account?
What happens when you forget your password or loose your phone? What Google wants to know to validate your identity?
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We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio
When I started my ham life as KK6VSI in August of 2015, I wish I could have had the information I'm about to lay out here. Of course, most of the equipment didn't yet exist. So another way of looking at it is that my entry into amateur radio was perfectly timed for my generation's Golden Age of Ham Radio.
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What Is a Dickover?
dickover — a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of…
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Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"
In 2000, Douglas Adams made an interesting observation that I keep returning to. A user on Slashdot named “FascDot Killed My Pr” had asked the following question (where HGttG = Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy): Comedy….or Tragedy? First, a big thank-you. You’ve made a lasting contribution to “our” culture (or should…
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You’re a slow thinker. Now what?
Figuring out how to lean in to my thinking style
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The microhydro plant
setting up a microhydro installation
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On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years
I caught the chess bug as a college student, twenty-one years old, and it’s become my favorite way to unwind since then, as I’m now working at VisioStack and starting a master’s i…
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Don’t be spooky
It’s possibly the best advice for managers I've given so …
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How to parent more predictably (2018)
(As with anything else I write about parenting, this is mostly just my observations with my own two kids and may not generalize as well as I think it does.) A few weeks ago I wrote about why I think it's valuable for parents to be predictable. I was mostly describing an end state, though, and reasons why it's a good…
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PG and Jessica
A lot of people want to replicate YC in some other industry or some other place or with some other strategy. In general, people seem to assume that: 1) although there was some degree of mystery or...