Three things you should buy and use | Hacker News Reader

Three things you should buy and use

calebschoepp.com

26 pointstriplechill26 comments

Password manager: KeePass is free and you can sync it using DropBox which is also free, or whichever service you prefer.

E-reader: libraries exist and should be used. Paper books are still better.

White noise: ludicrous. If you pay for Spotify or any other streaming service, you can get an endless stream of white, pink, or brown noise, or rain, ocean waves, or diesel engines if you prefer. Or for free on YouTube. Or you can use an app. Or you can make your own with Audacity.

Solid point on the free password managers.

FWIW you're still supporting your local library if you're checking out ebooks from them

Fair enough. I personally prefer to play it on my separate device from my phone but you're totally right that it is a viable option.

Yes. People must remember that the libraries will close down sooner if politicians and bureaucrats are able prove nobody uses them anymore.

Libraries have realized that they need to move away from printed books for years. Besides things like offering ebooks (and e-magazines; I read The Economist and The New Yorker free of charge thanks to my library), libraries often have various social gatherings -- story times, book clubs, etc. If physical libraries will continue into the future they will be more community centers than just warehouses of printed material. Which will never completely go away; if nothing else main libraries have rare book collections where the physical artifact of old books is of interest.

I love paper books too but e-readers solve the transportation problem so well that I read a lot on my Kindle as well. Plus you get the highlighting, notes and progress tracking that you can integrate with other tools like readwise.

For those with Apple iOS devices, iOS 15 comes with a white noise generator under the name Background Sounds, under Settings.

iOS also comes with a password manager, although it’s a serious work-in-progress that isn’t cross-platform. Nonetheless, it can be extended a little with Shortcuts.

I think it works pretty well. It is available for MacOS (keychain) and Windows/chrome too.

>E-reader: libraries exist and should be used. Paper books are still better.

Are you under 40? Sooner or later your eyes are going to get bad and the teeny tiny fonts most printed books use are going to become hard to read even with glasses. In the bad old days there were a subset of books published in large type but with an e-reader you can adjust the font size of any book to where it is comfortable to you.

Any reason not to just use Apple Keychain? Seems to work just fine for me. Synced to all iOS and MacOS devices.

Password manager might be just an algo inside of your head. But if you really need it, consider FOSS for not crying after mainterner do something wrong with the DB.

eBook is nice investment, but it can not read pdf decently (more than half of things I want to read and re-read).

What about white noice gen, usually I use a glass of wine for going to sleep rn, but I will try a distuned radio for that goal.

PS. My three things: bicycle for your terrain (please not mtb unless you have no roads), x86 laptop + extra hard disks (anything from the Internets may and will disappear, please save as much as possible) and an audiosystem you will fall in love with (comfortable earphones or pair of giant stationar three-way speakers, way of thumb is the bigger the speaker the better).

> Password manager might be just an algo inside of your head.

This is dead in the water as soon as you realize that a leaked and cracked password can reveal all of your other passwords. If you want to say that your algorithm can't be reverse-engineered I'd be more inclined to think that you are underestimating the people around you than that I am underestimating you.

Probably best to just consider that your not-randomly-generated password is insecure.

There is no perfect security, so it's always an assessment of are the increasing security measures worth the cost? Even a simple algo of (base password + hash(website_name)) prevents the most common issue of any site leaking your password to a black market password list that just attempts brute force on any of the passwords on said list. It would be much much rarer for you to be specifically targeted by seeing base_password_hash(Amazon) on a list and trying to reverse engineer your bank password from that.

IMO it seems more secure than entrusting everything to a centralized source (password manager) that can be compromised.

Yes, that's a fair point. I often forget that my threshold for "secure enough" is higher than most.

https://xkcd.com/538/

In case you haven't tried it and want to: I read PDFs on my Kobo with KOReader (hosted on GitHub). The Mobile Read forums have instructions. The barrier to reading science papers (or anything in columns) is high for me because the text is both small and washed out, but reading The Declaration of Independence (from Feedbooks) is okay (anything not in columns, so far) as is an a collection of poems for children. So far I mostly read epubs because the text can be easily changed.

I'll have to check that out. I've been struggling with PDFs actually.

Nice! Agree with all of those. I got a gravel bike that is perfect for the trails around my house and I love it. I never knew that there was a bike that crossed between a MTB and a road bike.

Also yeah plus one to noise cancelling headphones.

I'll have to try that wine trick ;)

I echo the ereader recommendation. I have the same (Kobo Clara HD, with KOReader and Plato as alternatives to the default interface; being able to read in landscape mode with KOReader is great, for one) and it lowers the barrier a little bit more since I don't need a bedside light on to read if my spouse is going to sleep. That said, I've been practicing going to sleep as soon as I get in bed, privileged to live in a place with little noise pollution otherwise I'd also like to use a noise generator.

For the fun of the exercise, my three things: A public library card (paid for by tax revenue) ...and nothing else; use the library card to access other perspectives and learn, generally and specifically. The ereader helps, as does an old offline Android for listening to library audiobooks, but those are just icing. Now that I think more about it, the public library of the last tens of thousands of years has been the stories we tell each other, and as awesome as a building full of books is, it is a luxury, best not taken for granted.

I'll not say you should buy anything. Carry on messily exploring, learning, and growing alongside other people, human and otherwise.

I agree about having a local library card. I almost always just get eBooks and audio books through my libraries website, but, I also like to sit in my library and write. I have a very nice office at home, but sometimes I just prefer being in an elegantly beautiful public place.

You must live in an old city. My public library is as uninspiring as a Costco

> You need to keep two things in mind to have the most success with password managers. First, you need to pay for it. Your password manager is going to be the foundation of your digital security — don’t leave that up to a free plan.

Or you could use Keepass and not leave your security up to anyone but yourself.

For the more technically minded I think that is a great option!

I like to use an ereader for books I know I'll read cover to cover (novels in my case), but for other books (e.g. technical, where I skim through and jump between chapters) it's really lacking. How do people use ereaders for nonlinear reading?

I knew some people that used highlighting/bookmarking functionality for reading textbooks non-linearly.

Yeah this is the big problem with them. Feels like there is a lot of room for innovation here.

tl;dr

  - Password Manager (software)
  - eReader (device)
  - White Noise Machine (device)

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