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Tools & Productivity

The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 158 posts.

2014
123

DigitalOcean Indicator

The other weekend I took some time to play around with the DigitalOcean API, and this is what resulted. The DigitalOcean indicator allows you to monitor and manage your droplets directly from your panel. You can: Quickly see which droplets are active. Reboot, power on, and/or power down you …

125

Using Freenet

I've been following the Freenet project for many years, occasionally firing it up and seeing if I can do anything useful with it. I've been using it regularly over the last month and it has come a long way since I first tried it. It's much faster than what it was in the past. This post describes a bit of...

129

How I OCR hundreds of hours of video (2011)

One of the features that I’m most pleased with on Richmond Sunlight is the integration of video. It’s one thing to put up chunks of video for people to paw through, but it’s another to automatically index it so that people can be directed to just the parts of the video that interest them. That […]

139

Software Checklist

During the second World War, fighter pilots would scramble to take off. As they bumbled down the grass runway, engines open at full throttle, trying to take off on a short, bumpy track with a full load of fuel and ammunition, their heart would stop when the engine mis-fired. Was the fuel mix too rich, or too lean?…

141

Bezier Curves and Type Design: A Tutorial

[2026/09/14]: This article became the most popular I've ever written. Since it was written a long time ago, I decided to rework it: polishing the wording to facilitate comprehension, fixing dead links and typos, and adding interactivity. Still, it remains faithful to the original — a lot of people discussed it and…

145

Editing binaries: easier than it sounds

Editing binaries is a trick that comes in handy a few times a year. You don't often need to, but when you do, there's no alternative. When I mention patching binaries, I get one of two reactions: complete shock or no reaction at all. As far as I can tell, this is because most people have one of these two models of the…