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alexpls

512 karma · joined July 28, 2014

Web developer in Brisbane, Australia

https://alexplescan.com

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alexpls··on Show HN: bigdraw, a big shared canvas anyone can draw on
Thanks! Plan's to keep the drawings on the canvas (with the exception of ones deleted by moderation).
alexpls··on Show HN: Analog Reader – Turn newsletters into printable newspapers
Neat! Generating PDFs from RSS feeds is a great idea. Some thoughts:

I have a Kindle - something I'd find valuable would be having a digest of "Today's top stories" sent to my kindle's email address as an epub so I can check it out each day. But on Kindle, I think the 3 column layout would be too narrow to read - it makes sense on A4, but not smaller. How do you do your daily sync to ReMarkable?

btw, it looks like if I enter a direct link to an RSS feed it doesn't work (e.g. when testing it for my site, https://alexplescan.com/index.xml results in a blank page, but https://alexplescan.com works well)

> curious how others handle the "too many newsletters" problem

I like to have everything funnelled into my RSS reader, pick a few things that sound interesting each day, and archive the rest. For the getting everything into RSS part, I'm building https://mailgrip.io to help (it gets email newsletters into RSS feeds).

alexpls··on Gitlab password reset bug leaves more than 5.3K servers up for grabs
Oh yeah, good pickup thanks!
alexpls··on Gitlab password reset bug leaves more than 5.3K servers up for grabs
For folks who wanna see what led to this exploit in a Rails codebase, here’s the commit where it’s fixed:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/commit/c571840ba2f0e9...

alexpls··on Making small games, which is fun in itself
I've been playing around with the Playdate SDK (https://sdk.play.date) over the holidays and it's awesome for small games like the author describes.

Working with a tiny 1-bit screen and ~150MHz CPU puts some serious constraints on what you can do, which I've found to be pretty freeing (less analysis paralysis, more doing...)

alexpls··on Easy SVG sparklines
Thanks! And thanks also for your work on ContEx, its Sparkline module [1] was a big inspiration for what I ended up implementing.

[1] https://github.com/mindok/contex/blob/master/lib/chart/spark...

alexpls··on 11 years of hosting a SaaS
This really resonates. It's so easy to get caught up in chasing trends and overlook delivering customer value/stability.

Good luck on the next 11 years :)

alexpls··on Show HN: Take Reddit Screenshots
Congratulations on launching!

Some feedback: the first thing I wanted to see on your landing page is what a screenshot taken with the tool looks like. It adds a bit of friction that to do that I need to browse to reddit, find a post, copy it in, wait for it to generate, etc.

alexpls··on Ask HN: How do you stay on top of advances in AI?
I try to direct as much news to RSS as possible, where I can group feeds by topic, and not get distracted by a constant compulsion to refresh the page (which I feel strongly on HN and Twitter). Some tools I use:

* https://www.freshrss.org/ for subscribing to feeds

* https://netnewswire.com/ for reading them

* https://hnrss.github.io/ to get Hacker News into RSS

* https://mailgrip.io/ (project I'm building) to get email newsletters into RSS

alexpls··on System.css: A design system for building retro Apple interfaces
Awesome! I had some fun implementing a System 6 inspired theme on a recent toy project for creating custom Slack emojis - https://temoji.me (desktop only).

Wish I knew about this framework earlier - would have saved me some time :)

alexpls··on Git ignores .gitignore with .gitignore in .gitignore
The global gitignore is super useful! I add a “.x” entry to it so that I can create scripts, drafts, etc in a “.x” folder in any of my projects.

Wrote more details about how I do this here: https://alexplescan.com/posts/2022/04/17/the-x-files/

alexpls··on How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf]
Great presentation! Another short read that covers similar ground is "The Day You Became a Better Writer" by Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert):

https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/06/the...