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Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,415 posts.
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How to set up continuous deployment using free hosted tools
I’m going to describe a way to put together a world-class continuous deployment infrastructure for your side-project without spending any money. With continuous deployment every code commit is tested against …
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Over the past 21 months I’ve written a code editor from the ground up
Over the past 21 months I’ve written a code editor from the ground up, including: a fast (~120fps) canvas-based editor component; multi-language syntax highlighting with Tree-sitter; snippets; a file browser; find-and-replace with regex and JavaScript expression support; and two completely new features: AST mode and…
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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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Go away Python
A blog post written by Lorentz Kinde. It's probably about something technical.
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Guest WiFi using a QR code
On my home network I have guest WiFi configured and when guests come round they need to know the password. Happily there's a way to make thi...
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Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018)
We turned a MacBook into a touchscreen using only $1 of hardware and a little bit of computer vision.
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So you want to parse a PDF?
Suppose you have an appetite for tilting at windmills. Let's say you love pain. Well then why not write a PDF parser today?
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Web automation: Don't use Selenium, use Playwright
For web automation/testing, Selenium has been the de facto "standard" since forever. It's simple to get started with and supports almost every programming language. My problem with it has been: It's good enough, but nothing more. It doesn't work that well with modern, Javascript framework heavy sites (Angular, React
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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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Please scan my towel
My friend Scott pointed out the towels in most hotels now have RFID tags to help with inventory control: I also knew that my RSA Conference badge would have an RFID tag in it so it could be scanne…
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Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture (2022)
A couple of moments ago, I finished reading the article by Rob O'Leary about the pervasive data collection done by Visual Studio Code. Whilst Visual Studio Code is "open-source" (as per the OSD) the value-add which transforms the editor into anything of value ("what people actually refer
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What Is The Morning Writing Effect?
Many writers anecdotally report they write best first thing early in the morning, apparently even if they are not morning people. Do they, and why?
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Terminal and shell performance
There’s a great MSR demo from 2012 that shows the effect of latency on the experience of using a tablet . If you don’t want to watch the three minute video, they basically created a device which could simulate arbitrary latencies down to a fraction of a millisecond. At 100ms (1/10th of a second), which is typical of…
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Download your favourite YouTube videos
Signal boosting Laura's post that you should absolutely download and archive the stuff that matters to you.
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Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you, like me, have a large pile (or digital equivalent) of books or articles you've been meaning to get around to reading, plus maybe a long queue of podcast episodes to which you'd love to listen, if only you had the time. It's the archetypal "first-world problem", I…
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Overgrown, when plants invade your abandoned tabs
A fun little project that came out of a creative exercise around the word 'Overgrowth'.
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Using Voice to Code Faster than Keyboard
2021-11-13 page moved to http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html
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Google removed my Yubikeys from a Google account 'just to be safe'
The world's worst security flow
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How to Report a Bug to Microsoft
So you found a bug in one of Microsoft’s great works of software art. What do you do now? I realized that there isn’t a nice step-by-step guide online, so I will give you the low-down on how this process works. It’s not straightforward — Microsoft is a large company, and has probably thousands of calls or reports each…
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How Home Assistant is being used to protect from missile and drone attacks
🏡 My home automation setup built with Home Assistant