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I designed a cube that balances itself on a corner
This cube manages to balance itself on a corner, and can simultaneously rotate around its axis in a controlled manner. It does so using clever controls and a set of three reaction wheels.
Topics /
Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 330 posts.
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An NFC movie library for my kids
When I was a kid, my sister and I had a tower of VHS tapes we watched endlessly. Fast-forward to today, and my children's movie collection is vastly different. It's completely digital and dispersed across services. I wanted to recreate the tangibl...
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Greppability is an underrated code metric
Keeping your codebase searchable will make your maintenance life easier in the long run. A collection of guidelines to keep your code base greppable
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The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
The strangest hardware problem I've ever had to debug.
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Did you lose your AirPods?
Reuniting AirPods with a few clever tricks
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Use a work journal
You’re working on the most complex problem in computer science: fixing permissions on a deployment pipeline. It’s been 4 days you started on that simple task...
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Fixing Macs door to door
Fun stories from my time working as an AppleCare Dispatch contractor going door to door in Chicago.
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Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
In this post, I talk about pleasant but seemingly minor features in personal sites
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Dokku: My favorite personal serverless platform
Like Heroku, but you own it.
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PySkyWiFi: Free stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights
The plane reached 10,000ft. I took out my laptop, planning to peruse the internet and maybe do a little work if I got really desperate.
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Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
Instead of doom-scrolling through my phone in the morning, I built an alternative with a Raspberry Pi, a dot matrix printer, and some PHP.
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Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities
macOS comes with a lot of built-in utilities. Here's a list of some that I find interesting.
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My favourite Git commit (2019)
I like Git commit messages. Used well, I think they’re one of the most powerful tools available to document a codebase over its lifetime. I’d like to illustrate that by showing you my favourite ever Git commit.
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Making a PDF that's larger than Germany
We’re gonna need a bigger printer.
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Building a fully local LLM voice assistant to control my smart home
I’ve had my days with Siri and Google Assistant. While they have the ability to control your devices, they cannot be customized and inherently rely on cloud services. In hopes of learning something new and having something cool I could use in my life, I decided I want better. The premises are simple: I want my new…
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I automated my job application process
A developer automated job applications, sending 250 in 20 minutes using Python scripts and GPT
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Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week
I’m a huge fan of Claude’s Artifacts feature, which lets you prompt Claude to create an interactive Single Page App (using HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and then view the result …
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Inside a $1 radar motion sensor
I recently got some cheap microwave motion sensors, mostly because I was wondering how China managed to make a radar for under a dollar:
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How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
How do you transfer files off an Apple laptop from 1994? It's harder than it sounds!
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Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
In this article, we explore Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX. We explore its syntax, current uses and possible uses; we test its scripting system, which is incredibly powerful; we compare it with LaTeX, Markdown and Word, which can be used in similar roles; and we explore its applicability to the task…
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I keep a WTF notebook (2021)
There's a very specific reputation I want to have on a team: "Nat helps me solve my problems. Nat get things I care about done."
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Using an 8K TV as a Monitor
TLDR: If your job is to write code all day or stare at Excel spreadsheets, buy an 8K TV instead of a multi-monitor setup. You can even use the same TV for 4K 120 Hz gaming or watching movies as a bonus!
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I just wanted Emacs to look nice – Using 24-bit color in terminals
Thanks to some coworkers and David Wilson’s Emacs from Scratch playlist, I’ve been getting back into Emacs. The community is more vibrant than the last time I looked, and LSP brings modern completion and inline type checking.
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How I write code using Cursor
A personal review of Cursor, an LLM-powered coding tool.
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Okay, I Like WezTerm
A guide to configuring WezTerm using its Lua API. Focuses on appearance, keybindings, multiplexing, workspace navigation, and status bar (powerline) setup.
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The best $4 ever spent
Kids get excited about things that are very different from those of adults. You probably remember your kid's first birthday...
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Nix is a better Docker image builder than Docker's image builder
Xe Iaso's personal website.