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I turned a 40 year old Apple Mouse into a speech to text button
A place to play around with technology and make it easy and fun
Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 404 posts.
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Evaluating LLMs for my personal use case
My life is not a math Olympiad
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ImapGoose
ImapGoose is a small program to keep local mailboxes in sync with an IMAP server. The wording “keep […] in sync” implies that it does so continuously, rather than a one-time sync. ImapGoose is designed as a daemon, monitoring both the IMAP server and the local filesystem, and immediately synchronising changes. When…
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How Cursor (AI IDE) Works
Turning LLMs into coding experts and how to take advantage of them.
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A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024)
There's a new web search in town! I spent the start of 2024 kicking the tires on Kagi's paid search and their Orion web browser.
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Printf debugging is ok
A balanced take on the printf vs debugger debate: why there is no single right answer, and how to choose the right debugging approach for the situation at hand.
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Emacs Solo: A Surprise System Crafters Live Demo
Rahul's Blog
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A critique of package managers
n.b. This is a written version of a dialogue from a YouTube video: 2 Language Creators vs 2 Idiots | The StandupPackage managers (for programming languages) are evil.11 The term “evil” is being used partially hyperbolic to make a point.To start, I need to make a few distinctions between concepts a lot of programmers…
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What I Self Host
I’ve always liked reading blogs, and have used several feed readers in the past (Feedly, for example). For a long time I was thinking it would be fun to writ...
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Recreating the Canon Cat document interface
Exploring the emergence of user conventions in a minimal system.
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Some notes on Grafana Loki's new "structured metadata"
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Switch to Jujutsu Already: A Tutorial
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…
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Obsidian Note Codes
I made a little plugin for Obsidian: Note Codes.
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Overthinking GIS (2024)
A roundabout way to downsampling data Maps in the Modern Era GIS is probably one of the best things to happen to cartography in the last couple hundred years.
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Podfox: First Container-Aware Browser
A port conflict pushed me to abolish container port forwarding once and for all, making my Firefox talk to Podman's whole network. Also: containerizing dev environments for command-line addicts.
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Claude Code Is My Computer
I run Claude Code with --dangerously-skip-permissions flag, giving it full system access. Let me show you a new way of approaching computers.
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How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm
An extremely detailed guide on how to configure WezTerm
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I Prefer RST to Markdown (2024)
I will never stop dying on this hill
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Why Rust nextest is process-per-test
Why nextest runs each test in its own process: a game-theoretic view.
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Copy Excel to Markdown Table (and vice versa)
Easily create Markdown tables by copying data from Excel or Google Sheets and pasting it into the text box below using Ctrl+V. Alternatively, as a new feature, paste a Markdown table to convert it to Excel/Google Sheets format. The result is automatically copied to your clipboard and ready to use. Error: This tool…
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De-Clouding: Music
I’m going through a phase of figuring out what I can get out of the cloud and “own”. Particularly with regard to streaming services. I’ve never paid for Spotify. But I’ve had iTunes Match so that I can take all of the weird, not-on-streaming music that I have (I wrote about this back in 2013!!!!), […]
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The Helix Text Editor (2024)
I’ve come to accept that I’m just a sucker for shiny nerd things. I use Rust, despite never having had a professional reason to use it in my life. I switched to Linux in my student years and I’ve never looked back since, even though it constantly breaks and I can’t get my Bluetooth headphones to connect. I have a…
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My Gift to the Rustdoc Team
About two weeks ago I entered a discussion with the docs.rs team about, basically, why we have to look at this: When we could be looking at this: And of course, as always, there are reasons why thi...
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Cell Phone OPSEC for Border Crossings
I have heard stories of more aggressive interrogation of electronic devices at US border crossings. I know a lot about securing computers, but very little about securing phones. Are there easy ways to delete data—files, photos, etc.—on phones so it can’t be recovered? Does resetting a phone to factory defaults erase…
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Vim Language, Motions, and Modes Explained (2023)
Vim is a powerful text editor that improves coding speed & efficiency through its shortcut-based Vim language. While learning Vim can be challenging, it is a valuable skill that can enhance your career as a computer professional.
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Organize your Slack channels by "How Often", not "What"
A few weeks ago, I changed my Slack channel sections. I’m now more responsive and engaged, while also feeling less stressed. How? By sorting my Slack channels by urgency, or how often I want to read them. Versus Sorting by “how often” lets me read my most urgent messages first, focusing my energy on what
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VisiCalc on the Apple II
In 1978, Bricklin and Frankston took out a loan to develop "Calcu-ledger," a tool that could project the fiscal health of taking out that very loan