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Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,416 posts.
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Turn the radio volume down for adverts and DJs talking
A script for automatically lowering the volume during radio advertisements and DJ announcements and turns the volume back up when songs are playing. It controls a Sonos speaker using the Soco-cli P…
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The hard part in becoming a command line wizard
I've long been impressed by shell one-liners. They seem like magical incantations. Pipe a few terse commands together, et voilà! Out pops the solution to a problem that would seem to require pages of code. Are these one-liners real or mythology? To some extent, they're both. Below I'll give a famous real example. Then…
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Bubblewrap: A nimble way to prevent agents from accessing your .env files
Last week I wrote a thing about how to run Claude Code when you don’t trust Claude Code. I proposed the creation of a dedicated user account & standard unix access controls. The objective was to stop Claude from dancing through your .env files, eating your secrets. There are some usability problems with that guide- I…
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iOS Ships Dvorak, Finally
I’m a huge fan of the Dvorak keyboard layout, but if there’s one thing I love more than “Evolved vs Engineered” solution debates, is that nothing wins the ”standardized” debate.
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Why You Should Write Your Own Static Site Generator
I rewrote my personal website using basic libraries and the flexibility is incredible.
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Rich Command Shells
Many applications benefit from a mix of a graphical and textual interface. This has ranged from entire environments, like the Lisp Machine and the follow-on Common Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM), to specific applications like Mathematica and others which employ a "notebook interface". There have also been various…
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Wolfram Alpha doesn't "get it"
Apologies, but the page you requested could not be found. Go to the front page →
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Using Git Offline
Some companies use an isolated network or even the complete lack of a network as a security measure to protect from unauthorized access. Working on these systems can be a struggle but it is still possible, and perhaps even more important, to use a proper version control tool like Git.
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Weird monitor bugs people sent me in the last 5 years (2022)
I develop 🌕 Lunar, a macOS app for getting intelligent adaptive brightness on external monitors and controlling every aspect of your monitor using DDC and other obscure protocols. I get tons of email about Lunar, especially after it became my full time “job” in 2021. A lot of those emails complain about Lunar bugs…
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Get It Done
Too often people do the best they can with what they have when they should instead get it done
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Why Custom GPTs are better than plugins
On November 6, 2023, OpenAI announced Custom GPTs. Since then, over 3 million GPTs have been created, with over 200.000 of them made publicly available.
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Raspberry Pi Car Speed Detector
(2016-12-18 Version 2 is now on github. It fixes one bug, makes the code style more consistent, and adds a few additional options for tracking the results.) It started with a Facebook post from my …
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The Feynman Technique: The Best Way to Learn Anything (2012)
Master the Feynman Technique: Nobel laureate's 4-step learning method to understand anything deeply through teaching, simplification, and systematic review.
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Bing Jail
A short story on how my website lost all indexed pages in Bing, affecting my presence in DuckDuckGo, secret blacklisting and classification as a splog by Bing AI
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Tools for thought as cultural practices, not computational objects
On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens
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Reproducible Git Bundles
Describes how to create reproducible and deterministic one-file bundles of git repositories for use cases such as backups.
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Home 3D metal printing: first results
A couple of weeks ago I learnt about an interesting 3d metal printing process , from a company selling it for $100k USD, and speculated that it might be DIY-able for much less. Well I now have some promising first results.
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Scripting tmux
I often want to start similar workspaces in tmux; for example I always want to tail those two log files in a pane , or I always want to start both vim and mysql in a pane, etc.
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Visualizing binary files with ImHex's DSL, the "pattern language"
Viewing my binary file with ImHex. The pattern language pane, on the right,...
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Switching from Vim to Intellij
From Vim To IntelliJ In the beginning, a love affair For the last 10 years or so, I have been a die-hard Vim user. I was introduced to Vim…
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I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys
Sometimes keyboards come with a 'Fn' key that allows some of their context-sensitive keys to do particular general-purpose functions. Sometimes these are implemented in careful, considerate and configurable ways... and other times they just make me want to throw the keyboard out of the window.
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JJ Cheat Sheet
I’ve been learning Jujutsu a.k.a. jj , a version control system that’s compatible with git repos. It’s clicked for me in a way that git hasn’t even after many years of use.
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Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker
Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker : Effectively speaking, I've always been a Vim user. When I got my first shell account, I started with Vim (In the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic ages of `vi`, `vim` and `neovim`, I came of age somewhere in the late Jurassic): my
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Two-factor paper passwords
I guess it makes me boring but I try to get people to use stronger passwords. People love to use the same password over and over again, o...