anthonyhn

Search engines. In recent years its become increasingly difficult to navigate the popular search engines. Results have become too general, too much SEO spam, not enough tools for filtering results, a lot of page bloat. I'm currently working on my own search engine[0] to test a few ideas I have for improving search results. Right now its mostly just a front end for the bing index with some adjustments, but I'm working on creating my own index.

[0] https://simplesearch.org

>Palm didn't have a fully-featured browser but pre-rendered pages server-side

iirc opera mini browser did something similar. The browser would tunnel all requests through their server and render and optimize the page before sending it back to the browser

I have an old Nokia N900 phone that runs a custom alpine linux-based rom (postmarketOS). Given the limited hardware resources, small screen size, and sliding keyboard, you'll be mostly running terminal applications on this phone (some GUI apps works but the experience is mixed). There are some unofficial terminal clients for Signal [0], and iirc hacker news works with the lynx terminal browser. The N900 might work for this scenario as a feature-minimal phone, but depends on your use cases.

[0] https://github.com/boxdot/gurk-rs

The colors are just for style and a bit of usability. The color is determined by the first letter of the domain, for example here is the CSS for domains starting with 'w':

  .comhead>a[href^="from?site=w"] {
    color: #0098ce !important;
  }

There is also a extra rule for Apple domains (domains ending with 'apple.com') that adds an apple icon to the left of the domain:

  .comhead>a[href$="apple.com"]:before {
    content: "---";
    color: #ffffff00;
    background: var(--mac-apple-icon) 0px;
  }

Nice blog! Do you have a link to that XFCE mac os theme in the screenshot? Would love to try it out

I'm trying to improve my search results by building my own Search Engine.

Over the past couple of years, the popular search engines haven't given me great results, and I've had to use a series of different engines, search operators, and dorks to prod out the search results I'm looking for, with mixed success. The front ends have also become a bit too feature rich for my use cases; I prefer a minimal front end with just search results, but most front ends have links to news, videos, drop downs, cards, cookie banners, SEO spam, and have too much javascript. Too much time spent loading and rendering the page, and too many requests, in my opinion. Instead, my search engine only take 1 HTTP request per search result page and is only a few KB in size.

Right now this project is still in the early stages, and mostly proxies bing's api with some minor adjustments, but if anyone is interested in testing it out here is the link to the search engine [0] and a link to the blog with an RSS feed to follow future updates [1].

[0] https://simplesearch.org

[1] https://simplesearch.org/blog.html

I have a Nokia N900 running PostmarketOS [0]. The Nokia N900 is a great device, it has a sliding keyboard, touch screen, pen stylus, removable battery and micro sd card. PostmarketOS is an Alpine Linux-based OS using i3 as the window manager, so it doesn't take up a lot of resources (N900 only has 256 MB of RAM, every byte counts) and provides a lot of room for customization.

[0] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Nokia_N900_(nokia-n900)

Nice, always refreshing to see these small web pages projects. Shameless plug, but I had recently started a search engine [0] with the goal of generating search result pages that are only a few KB in size, backward compatible (HTML 4), and only takes 1 HTTP request per page (no images, inlined CSS, base64 encoded favicon). It's surprising how big the page sizes are for the popular search engines, you would think these pages would be small, but a google search result page can be over 1 MB in size and take over 70 requests.

[0] https://simplesearch.org

>I was able to use the non-pro pinephone as a daily driver for a bit, and it worked, but not well

which distro were you running on the pinephone? If you haven't tried out PureOS yet, I'd recommend giving it a shot. The Phosh UI has improved a lot, firefox is now installed by default and scales well, and a lot of usability issues have been fixed. For some workloads, its actually works pretty well as a daily driver.

>I think third place these days is Tizen which is in a worse place than the two big ones for apps,

iirc third place is KaiOS, a proprietary fork of the discontinued FirefoxOS [0]. It's primarily used on feature phones though. As for app support, an official youtube and whatsapp app are available on KaiOS.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS

There is also LuneOS [0], its sort of a successor that is built using a combination of Open webOS components and android components, and uses a web rendering engine (Qt WebEngine) for UI and app development.

It's available on a few devices (I have it running on a pinephone; also tried running on a galaxy 4 but got stuck in a boot loop). The wiki is a bit out of date, but there is an active community on their IRC [1].

[0] https://www.webos-ports.org/wiki/About

[1] https://www.webos-ports.org/wiki/Contributors

>Nokia had Linux on their smartphone until Microsoft bought them and stopped everything, they even shut down the app store. The OS was called MeeGo.

There is a fork called Maemo Leste [0][1] that is actually still around and updated. I have it running on a droid 4, and it works pretty well. The UI is still the same Hildon UI. Definitely a fun OS and device to play around with, and interesting in that it's the only mobile OS I'm aware of that is running Devaun.

[0] https://maemo-leste.github.io/

[1] Technically a fork of Maemo, the predecessor to MeeGo.

fixed, thanks

Netscape's news portal page [0]. Loads fast, basic HTML, and uses official Netscape branding!

[0] https://isp.netscape.com/news/

Jekyll [1] for static site generation. It's not really a library, more of a framework, but works very well for static sites and has a large ecosystem of plugins.

[1] https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll

Most of my notes are in the form of bulleted lists that either:

1) Describe some task that needs to be completed.

2) Describe a set of steps needed to complete some task.

3) Summarize a topic at a higher level.

If I need to write something more descriptive and/or with complex visuals, I usually think of it as writing documentation as opposed to note taking, and use tools such as jupyter notebooks

>what makes you stick to Outlook?

Not that poster, but in my experience there are often plugins that make it difficult to switch from Outlook to other clients. In many cases you can find a replacement plugin, but it takes time and resources to evaluate new software. Also, at a more general level, even though LibreOffice is a good replacement for the base functionality of the Microsoft Office suite, many VBA macros would need to be ported over.