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Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro
Alexei's pile o'stuff, featuring writing on software development, travel, photography, and more.
Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,415 posts.
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Plan 9 Desktop Guide
Briefly, Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a computer operating system developed by the original UNIX design team. After decades of work on Research UNIX in the late 80's, the team decided to write a new operating system from scratch, Plan 9 was finally released in 1992, and a few years later they released yet another…
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Reason ML toolchain
ReasonML advertises itself as Syntax and toolchain for OCaml. In this article, I'll try my best to explain what ReasonML offers to the…
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How I stay motivated working on my long-term project
Becoming successful online doesn't happen overnight. If you want to make it, you need to commit to your goal for at least a few years. See how the three year rule can help you stay motivated on your long-term project.
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Assorted less(1) tips
In a recent discussion on Reddit I shared a number of tips about the common utility less(1) that others found helpful so I figured I'd aggregate some of those tips here.
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Unix as IDE
This series has been independently translated into Chinese , Russian , Turkish , and Korean , and formatted as an ebook .
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The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader
The reMarkable is a premium e-ink notebook. Imagine a Kindle, but you can write on it. It has become my daily notebook. I take all my meeting notes on it, dump my ideas and designs, and carry it with me everywhere. As a bonus, it also has replaced
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Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again
Researcher interested in usable security and privacy.
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A common mistake involving wildcards and the find command
If you don't you're not alone. Right now, as I'm typing this, 4 of the top 4 Google results for "find command linux" contain at least one example of the pattern illustrated by the command above.
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Run your own DALL-E-like image generator
Run your own text to image prompts with CUDA, a bunch of disk space, and an insane amount of memory.
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Making my own bed sensor
I recently created some “bed sensors” for my smart home that detect if one of us, or both of us, is in bed. I use a couple of pressure mats that detect when weight is applied to them, and stuck then under our mattress at around hip level and these tell my Home Assistant home automation platform if
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What's new in Emacs 29.1
What's new in Emacs 29.1? I go through every change and annotate the ones I feel are interesting or worth knowing more about.
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Jujutsu VCS: Introduction and patterns
Jujutsu (jj), a new version control system written in Rust, has popped up on my radar a few times over the past year. Looked interesting based on a cursory look, but being actually pretty satisfied with Git, and not having major problems with it, I haven’t checked it out. That is, until last week, when I finally…
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Teardown: A Generic 7-Port USB 3.0 Hub That Wasn't
The recent end-of-financial-year sales were rather interesting – I found myself spending a lot more time browsing AliExpress than I did Amazon or eBay this year which is something I wouldn…
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Conditionally setting your gitconfig
Did you know you can change Git attributes based on what folder you're in?
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Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
My startup for terminals wrapped up mid-2025 when the funding ran dry. So I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career convincing terminals they are actually GUIs.
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My favourite computer ergonomics hack
In this post I will talk about my favourite computer ergonomics hack, a DIY device I call "The Beeper".
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Build a link blog like Simon Willison
Achieving Data Freedom Through Open Source and Rust
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30 minutes a day
The simple act of reserving a tiny part of your day. Perhaps just 30 minutes. Of pure, uninterrupted focus. On the idea you want to make become reality. Will ensure at least some extent of progress. I guarantee you.
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Pipe Viewer – A Unix Utility You Should Know About
Hi all! I'm starting a new article series here. This one is going to be about Unix utilities that you should know about. The articles will discuss one Unix program at a time. I'll try to write a good introduction to the tool and give as many examples as I can think of. The first post in this series is going to be…
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Ncdu 2: Less hungry and more Ziggy
Ncdu (NCurses Disk Usage) is a terminal-based disk usage analyzer for Linux and other POSIX-y systems, (formerly) written in C and available in the package repositories of most distributions.
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Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That
A Raspberry Pi is great if you have a need for which it excels. GPIO, extremely low power requirements, tight space constraints. But the Pi should not be the first thing you reach for when “U…
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Lufthansa has not banned AirTags
Lufthansa has not banned Apple AirTags and I think it is clear why: it is the sort of rule that would practicably be unenforceable.
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TODO apps are meant for robots
What if I'm a left-handed person in the world of right-handed tools?