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The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 522 posts.
Some readers will know, but most will not, that I am a bit of a self-confessed foodie. I enjoy cooking, but especially so when others get enjoyment from it. Be it friends, family, or neighbours, and sometimes all three, I’m always up for putting something together.
I gave Claude Code access to my pen plotter. Not directly. I was the interface between the two machines. Claude Code produced SVG files that I plotted with my pen plotter. With my smartphone I captured photos that I pasted into the Claude Code session, asking Claude what it thought about the pictures. In total, Claude…
How do they fare with (not so) recent additions to HTML?
The toolkit for spec-driven development. Write feature specs, not prompts. Ship better software with AI agents that understand your requirements.
This was posted in the TIL section, the low-effort section of my website where I post things that I find useful, but that don't get the full quality checks content elsewhere on this site does.
I test Unsloth GGUFs of Qwen3.8 27B (Q4_K_M, UD-Q2_K_XL, UD-IQ1_S) with llama.cpp on GPQA Diamond, IFBench, Terminal-Bench 2.1. Q4_K_M matches BF16 and fits an RTX 4090.
Welcome to the digital home of Daniel Ball. Explore my portfolio to see the projects I’ve worked on and learn more about my professional journey.
How a software developer bypassed proprietary publishing silos using LibreOffice, Standard Ebooks, and LaTeX to build a sustainable, Git-tracked book production pipeline.
TL;DR I use an Excalidraw, wrap the elements of interest with a frame, name it with export_ prefix, my forked excalidraw extension automatically generates SVGs for light and dark mode.
Discreetly modding my friend’s apartment intercom to work with Apple Home.
It’s been about 6 weeks since I joined Tano, and this is what my commit history looks like:
The Napoleon technique is a productivity technique that involves postponing dealing with something if it’s likely to get resolved without your immediate input.
Throughout Excel's 40-year history, you've only been able to put one value per cell. In this announcement, we're excited to share how that's changing with...
Most of what an AI coding agent does for me isn't thinking. It's I/O.
A guide to implementing JSON-LD on your personal website for better SEO, covering WebSite, Person, BlogPosting, and more with ready-to-use code snippets.
I try to pay attention to the small things that affect my quality of life. When something keeps bothering me, I want to investigate, find a likely cause, and act on it. What changed recently is what I'm willing to build to support that. With AI tooling, projects I
In late 2025 the company behind MinIO decided to abandon it to pursue other commercial interests. As well as upsetting a bunch of folk, it also put the cat amongst the pigeons of many software demos that relied on MinIO to emulate S3 storage locally, not to mention build pipelines that used it for validating S3…
How to switch inputs between desktop and laptop on one monitor using built-in KVM and DDC
Last week I had to diagnose a bug in an open source library I maintain. The issue was gnarly enough that I couldn’t find it right away, but then I thought: if I set a breakpoint here and fire up the debugger, I will likely find the root cause very soon… and then proceed to mercilessly destroy it! So I rolled up my…
Update: In Safari 27 and Safari Technology Preview 247, we’re introducing the Safari MCP server — a Model Context Protocol server for web developers that makes your web development and debugging workflow faster and more powerful.
Researcher and runner writing about technology, nature, and physical endeavours.
How I'm using Kagi Search with low vision to manage visual fatigue, plus my favorite Kagi accessibility features for low vision + CVI and Kagi low vision theme
Claude Tag is a new way for teams to work with Claude.
As a maintainer of several OneBusAway projects, I regularly ask contributors to rebase their branches before merging. The response is often hesitation or…
A practical guide to creating and maintaining powerful megamerge workflows in Jujutsu for faster, conflict-free development.
In a quest to reduce the number of processes running in macOS Tahoe, consider the example of Time Machine backups, which can easily be replaced by 3rd party alternatives.
The one where I build my own text editor (until I get bored).
Come to the dark side, we have keyboard shaped cookies.
