Topics /

Tools & Productivity

The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 521 posts.

2021
241

Hacking a $200 Under Desk Exercise Bike

Due to COVID, I haven’t been getting my usual amount of exercise this year. To help with that, I decided to take a chance and order an under-desk exercise bike to get some extra cardio. The bike I bought is decent: it has good tension, stays in place, operates quietly, and offers Bluetooth connectivity for tracking…

245

Halide for iPad

We have a big announcement. Very big, in fact. Four times bigger than any previous announcement. We make Halide, a camera app that combines intuitive, polished design with the powerful features found in professional gear. Today we’re bringing Halide to a whole new form factor. Meet Halide for iPad!

246

Do not use redirection characters in your shell prompt

Over the years of troubleshooting performance problems in the Unix/Linux world, I have seen multiple cases where a regularly used command line tool in a customer server just stops working for some reason. The tool just returns immediately, doing absolutely nothing. No output printed, no coredumps and the exit code is…

247

How I Use Notion

This post is a fairly comprehensive discussion of how I use Notion (a free personal knowledge management app) to organise various aspects of my life: project management, reading, academics, plans/goals, investing, and more. The post is not designed to be read linearly – pick and choose the bits that are relevant to…

253

Encrypted Backup Shootout

Recently I have been spending time on improving the performance of bupstash (my encrypted backup tool), and wanted to compare it to some existing tools to try and find its relative performance in the backup tool landscape.

257

Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

I maintain a VPS which I use to self-host a variety of services that I use: Joplin Server, Seafile , as well as for hosting websites that I develop. For the past few years, that VPS has been managed with Docker Compose, but recently I decided to build something a bit bigger. My goals with the project:

259

Git from the Bottom Up (2008)

Welcome to the world of Git. I hope this document will help to advance your understanding of this powerful content tracking system, and reveal a bit of the simplicity underlying it — however dizzying its array of options may seem from the outside.

260

Default disappearing messages

As the norms for how people connect have changed, much of the communication that once took place through the medium of coffee shops, bars, and parks now takes place through the medium of digital devices. One side effect of this shift from analog to digital is the conjoined shift from the ephemera...

264

Buying an ebike

You thought your family was going to be talking about web3 this Thanksgiving. But they’re actually talking about ebikes. Let’s help you prepare. Ebikes are about to change the world. They are already the best selling electric vehicles, and are selling as fast as factories can make them.

269

Quick and dirty way to rip an eBook from Android

I recently purchased a book for my MSC which was only available via a crappy Android app. There was no obvious way to decrypt it to read on a more sensible device, so I resorted to the ancient art of screenscraping. This is a quick-and-dirty way to grab images of the pages and convert them to a standard PDF using…