blakewatson

I have a bunch of these. They are my favorite things to make. I've been making things like this for a long time but I only recently started to appreciate them after discovering this article. https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

- I have a disability and require daily personal care so I made a system for recruiting and hiring caregivers. (https://blakewatson.com/journal/a-home-cooked-app-for-hiring...)

- I need to track those caregivers' hours so I can make sure timesheets are accurate, and I wanted to do it with minimal effort. So I created a plain text syntax readable by a web app I created that takes that syntax and outputs exactly what should go on the timesheets.

- Sometimes the government agency that runs the program doesn't send me enough timesheets, so I created a "forgery" of their timesheets in CSS where all of the values are interchangeable via JavaScript. Now I can print any timesheet for any one of my caregivers for any time period on demand.

- I made my own web-based bookmarking tool to replace my Pinboard account. It automatically sends every bookmark to the Wayback Machine. (I wrote about that one and a couple of others https://blakewatson.com/journal/the-joys-of-home-cooked-apps...)

- Sadly I'm no longer able to use this one because of decreasing strength, but I once created a custom mobile-based keyboard for typing on my Mac. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pre6EQGIuKY

- I wanted to be able to share my plain text notes so I made a CLI for selectively publishing notes to the web.

Really most everything I make outside of my day job is for me/family initially, but a lot of it I end up publishing. For example my main side project is A Fine Start (https://afinestart.me/). It actually started as an assistive technology just for me—typing is difficult so I wanted a new tab page with just clickable text links. I used it for a while myself before eventually turning it into a browser extension and service for other people.

I did!

You get a surprising amount of functionality for $20. I just got an account and I've been poking around for about an hour. I'm seriously impressed. You get:

- a webpage

- DNS

- email forwarding

- a statuslog

- url shortener

- a pastebin

- a weblog

- an optional Mastodon account

- optional IRC/Discord

- and probably some more stuff I missed

And all of this stuff is much more configurable than it would typically be on other services. It is ripe for creative integrations. Oh and the whole thing can be interacted with through an API. Pretty cool for $20. Definitely not the same as "just getting your own domain."

https://bw.omg.lol/

Sorry to hear that. There's a toggle switch for light mode if that helps.

Good luck! I'm also doing Nano and was supposed to be working on my novel but instead I wrote about the font I was using.

Take a look at Drafting* Mono: https://indestructibletype.com/Drafting/

I love Matthew Butterick's fonts (eg, Triplicate). The license for his fonts is perhaps the most generous I've seen when it comes to commercial fonts.

Yeah, you’re right. You lose columnar alignment but beginning indentation still aligns and, in Input Sans, I believe the numbers are tabular. David Jonathan Ross makes this argument in the explainer for Input:

> Sometimes programmers rely on the monospaced grid to create a second column of values or comments on the right side of the page. It’s true, these secondary columns won’t align in a proportionally spaced font. But why are we making these columns in the first place? Even in a monospaced font they can be finnicky and hard to maintain.

> In virtually every other form of typography, the responsibility of alignment is given to the typesetting application, not the font. If source code editors can highlight syntax, they could also interpret tabs and syntax to create true, adjustable columns of text.

https://input.djr.com/info/

Nitti is the OG monospaced writing font for me. Soon as I experienced it on those older versions of iA Writer I was hooked. I do love IBM Plex and these derivatives but I also miss Nitti. Might have to pick that one up from Bold Monday for old times' sake.

That’s a good point. Something close to a "properly fitted proportional version of iA Quattro" might be Nitti Grotesk. https://www.boldmonday.com/typeface/nitti-grotesk/

Yeah this is my anecdotal take. Haven’t looked at studies on this, if they exist, but in my experience, reading monospaced fonts for several paragraphs is tiring.

> The article doesn’t use the font it is extolling the virtues of, except for illustration. I found that interesting.

I do use them for writing and coding.

Now that I've used this, I want it everywhere there is rich text.

My friends and I used to play TripleA by emailing the game file back and forth. Good times.

If anyone is interested, there’s a great game similar to A&A but with simpler rules and tons of maps and scenarios. It’s called Lux Alliance by SillySoft.

https://sillysoft.net/vox/

As someone who has to use scrollbars for accessibility reasons, I too hate the war on scrollbars. It is such a useful, battle-tested UI component.

If you’ve ever experienced the feeling of "this theme is almost perfect except for one thing," then VS Code has a decent way to address it (not sure about other editors/IDEs).

In your user settings, you can override a good number of styles in your current theme. Examples: make comments more visible, remove italics (if you don’t want them), make the active tab more prominent, darken/lighten the editor background, etc.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/themes#_custom...

100% this. And I'll add that somehow the new Electron app feels faster and more responsive than the native one. Huge props to the team for that.

Excuse me while I try to unread this.

Super basic, but I recently made my own: https://github.com/blakewatson/bookmarks

The name Theranos sounds like an evil company in a dystopian fiction.

I enjoy listening to synth-y, mostly instrumental, music while working. I ended up making this site after I got tired of searching for mixes on YouTube: https://synthwave.live/

Edit: I forgot to mention, the design of this site is amazing. Love the monospaced type and use of color. The interactions are perfect.

I’ve been a Pinboard customer since 2010 and I subscribed to the archival service several years. But archival seems to have stopped on my account. I think I emailed once but never received a reply (which I’ve heard is common). I love the philosophy of Pinboard and I also like Maciej. That said I recently decided to roll my own bookmarks tool with Wayback Machine archival capability.

https://github.com/blakewatson/bookmarks

There is a party game based on this principle. Mad Gab.

Every developer must also write their own CMS at some point. :)

Oh man I thought Private Internet Access was still one of the independent VPNs. I feel duped. :/

Ooh, this looks really cool. I feel like task management is something I haven't figured out how to do well yet. I might give this a tray.

Yeah this sort of thing was my experience as well. Despite being Electron, VS Code is faster and smoother for the main project I work on. Which sucks because I would love to use Nova more (I’ve owned it for over a year now).

> you'll never get anywhere if you let small obstacles in life deter you from your goals

It is true that I decided not to read the article, but I don't think that is indicative of a larger life pattern. In fact, I have a lot of extremely large obstacles that I face every day that haven't stopped me yet.

Clicks link. Starts to read article. Two seconds in a newsletter modal takes over. :(

https://synthwave.live/ - a collection of synthwave mixes on YouTube with some specialized functionality on top of embedded videos that makes listening to music compilations more convenient.

I made this mainly for myself because I was really into synthwave compilations at the time and YouTube's playlist functionality wasn’t getting the job done.

I run the update script every week and fix the occasional bug. I'll continue maintaining it because I like using it.