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Canistilluse.com
There’s something beautiful about the website caniuse.com which I never fully appreciated until last week when news spread that alert , prompt , and confirm…
Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 381 posts.
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The open calendar, task and note space is a mess
The last few weeks I’ve been looking into the open calendar, tasks and notes space with the goal of finding or building a privacy-conscious and still practical system. This post is an exploration of the available technology in that space, its problems and how to solve them.
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Open Source Tax Software
Filing taxes in America sucks. Your options are to do it by hand, pay someone like Intuit, or if you are below a certain income threshold get some tax software for free. The kicker is that free tax software is from Intuit who will try very hard to make sure that you either don’t find it in the first place, or try to…
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macOS Nix setup: an alternative to Homebrew (2020)
I recently got a new Macbook, and began setting up the Nix package manager to install my developer toolset. I mainly did this to try and have a working setup without installing Homebrew. Since I ran into a few issues, I wanted to briefly document what I did and why in case others wanted to try the same. Why Nix? (and…
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Monitoring my home's air quality with AirGradient's DIY sensor
A few months ago, I found this Hacker News post about the AirGradient DIY Air Quality Monitor. I had already been considering buying an AirThings Wave Plus sensor to monitor my home's CO2 levels, but the high price and limited 'ownership' of the data coming from it turned me off. So I built two AirGradient DIY air…
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Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac
The landscape of security is changing quite a bit. We've gone from basic username and password to 2FA, facial recognition, fingerprint recognition, and so
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Developer tools can be magic but instead collect dust
Three research developer tools that made programmers dramatically faster (Reflexion Models, the WhyLine, MatchMaker), and why none still run.
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Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
This article is part of a series: Seven years later, I bought a new Macbook. For the first time, I don't love it How I moved my setup from a Mac to a Linux laptop This article The M1 Macbook Air, one year later Due to very bad
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Building apps in minutes, not months
In order to build the many experiments for my research on the future of personal computing, and the subsequent demos for these Lab Notes, I needed a way to build much faster than was presently possible...
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Why can an ad break the Windows 11 desktop and taskbar?
A new promo message for Microsoft Teams broke the Windows desktop shell and the taskbar for Windows 11 Insider users. Why can cloud services break Windows PCs?
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The fish shell is amazing
I’ve been lurking the fish shell for a couple of years now (and the nushell but it is another story for another time). Not so long ago, I decided to try it, and it’s simply… amazing. If I had to state one feature that makes me like to use it, it’ll be the autocompletion, hands down. It’s the first time I just take a…
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The Return of Fancy Tools
Dreamweaver as a low-code local-first native app
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Bash functions are better than I thought
I've been using Bash functions quite liberally over the past couple years, but last week I discovered that they can be much better than I thought. In this post, I'll explain how I thought they worked, why I was wrong, and how that makes them better.Function syntax
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The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla
Comparing the core values of our text editors, describing the history of Neovim's development, and discussing the rise of VSCode.
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Web developer tool secrets that shouldn’t be secrets
This is a talk that I’ve given at CityJS this September. I am a principal product manager for developer tools in Microsoft Edge and these are things I encountered during working on the tools, documenting them and going through user feedback.
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Automated Hydroponic System Build (2020)
Hydroponic farming is a method of growing crops without soil, with the main benefits of environmental and nutrient control, water conservation, and reduction of labor. This technique relies on a number of technologies that the principles of automation can be applied in order to improve yield and consistency. In this…
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Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer
At this point, most developers use Git as a tool for collaboration. We have our rote-learned commands to pull, commit, and push. And of course, there's that one coworker who knows a bit more about Git…
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A different kind of keyboard
I’ve always been attracted to chording keyboards in theory, but I lack whatever childhood musical training is required to wrap my fingers around them. So I made something else: an arpeggio keyboard. Peggi is an eight-key keyboard that fits on the back of your phone. While chording keyboards require you to press…
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More Casio Watch Mods
Hey everyone, it's been a while. Hope you're all doing well. Today I want to show you some more watch related stuff I've been working on.
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My Emacs Lisp book is finished
I am very proud to say that after about 10 months of work I finished writing my Emacs Lisp book . If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s called “Hacking your way around in Emacs” and it is an intermediate-level textbook on Emacs Lisp, showing a lot of useful things on about 100 pages.
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Experiments on a $50 DIY air purifier (2020)
You can make a DIY air purifier in 30s. To test if it works, I generated smoke, and measured how well it removes tiny particles.
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Bluetooth Trackball Mark II
I made a Bluetooth trackball in which all the electronics are inside the ball. The ball is the entire trackball. Here it is in action: I...
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Teardown of a PC Power Supply
Have you ever wondered what's inside your computer's power supply? The task of a PC power supply is to convert the power from the wall (1...
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An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
This post has everything you need to know about xargs , an essential tool for shell programming . It's based on my # comments on this "wrong" post: