blakewatson

> Everything is full of interesting sidebars, but sidebars like caveats just make for boring reading for someone who's presumably there for the title topic.

I've found that you can have the best of both worlds here and use footnotes for sidebar material. I love reading articles with footnotes (they can be funny and delightful at times) but if someone doesn’t, they can easily ignore them.

Just wanted to mention that you could try falling back to StartPage (!sp) first as it uses results from Google.

I’m gonna miss dislike jokes (eg, "13 people just want to watch the world burn.")

This. There's nothing wrong with using mature technology that is still being developed. LAMP is still a perfectly fine choice if it's what you want to use.

I can't help but worry about Hoefler&Co's subscription service, cloud.typography. Monotype use to offer an affordable subscription called the Monotype Library Subscription. I still have it since, fortunately, they continue to provide the service to those who had signed up. But they no longer offer new sign-ups.

cloud.typography is affordable for personal/solo developer use ($99/year). The cheapest Monotype subscription plan is $7.5k/year. I worry that Monotype will eventually shut down cloud.typography, which will be a real shame if they don't provide some kind of affordable/non-enterprise alternative. These are some beautiful fonts. I would hate to see them end up behind a big paywall that only businesses can afford.

I'm really hoping they bring back some form of the Monotype Library Subscription.

I can’t imagine not being able to modify an existing note. What if I made a typo? That would drive me up the wall.

I’m currently using Craft. Previously I used Simplenote and, before that, Notational Velocity (and nvALT). My standard for notes now is that it needs to be fast, it needs decent search, and its data needs to be portable.

_writes this down as a National Novel Writing Month idea_

I was just looking at this site earlier today independently of HN. I revisit it several times a year, mainly because I can’t get enough "scale of the universe" comparisons (if you know any good ones, please send them my way).

I especially love the light speed auto-scroll because it does a great job of visualizing just how slow the speed of light is (or how vast space is).

I always have cognitive dissonance about this kind of stuff. I read this article and “In defense of the modern web” and I feel like I agree with both of them.

I think new things don’t necessarily make older things obsolete. We have printers, for example, but it’s not like pens, pencils, and even chalk aren’t useful.

Whenever I start a new project (admittedly, these are personal projects so not the same kind of scale—but in my job where the where the scale is bigger I’ve noticed a similar sentiment), I like to think about everything I have available to me. I could make a Vue SPA, a generated static site with 11ty, a backend CRUD app with PHP (I like Fat-Free Framework), WordPress (haters gonna hate), a site with no JavaScript, a site with only vanilla JavaScript, or anything in between.

I at once feel like a wide-eyed optimist ready to plow into the future and a curmudgeonly get-off-my-lawn skeptic who’s been burned too many times.

It's a good thing I consider building websites/apps good fun or else I would be really stressed out. :-)

For Mac users, combining the desktop app NetNewsWire with the service Feedbin is a pretty sweet combo.

I don’t claim to have any insight whatsoever, but I can’t help but think about all those decades old (now hilarious) articles about how the internet is a buzz word and hasn’t really lived up to its hype.

Hard same. If something is really important to me (aka... catastrophic if lost) I try to make sure it's backed up onsite (backup drive on my desk) and offsite (one or multiple cloud services).

Otherwise I try to diversify services and stay in a place where I can switch services if needed. I don't obsess about it or anything and I still sometimes choose convenience over keeping my options open. But anytime I get involved with a service, I try not to go all-in.

I've never liked the built-in new tab pages in browsers. I made my own years ago never looked back. Since 2017 I’ve run my new tab page as a small SaaS.

I did something similar with Stylus a while back. I made it light on dark. I didn't mess with the font sizes (even though, yes, they are too small imo).

https://gist.github.com/blakewatson/dcfa8350f279b1fce7a7cd96...

Due to my disability, I have times during the day where I need to use my computer laying down flat. I'm not really able to use a chair like this, but I've been wondering how to pull it off laying in bed.

Right now, it's just a MBP sitting on a laptop stand, with no other peripherals other than headphones/mic. I found a few different stands online but they are pretty expensive. It would be awesome if I could get a desktop setup going—rather than a laptop—that's still easy enough to move out of the way when not using it. But the setup has to be easy enough for my non-technical assistants to help me with.

Some people just want to watch the world burn. :)

I came here to say the same thing. :) I also wish I could see the hourly rate in the search results or at least in the profile (it seems like you have to click "Book..." currently).

Yeah this happened to me as well.

And 3 hours later, VisionShot finished importing my 2,000+ screenshots lol.

I don’t know if this was intentional or just a happy accident, but I’m really glad that the menu bar app doesn't disappear automatically on mouse click. It means I can type into the search input with the macOS Accessibility Keyboard without the app closing on me—which is what happens to me in most menu bar apps.

This also hurts my app (https://afinestart.me/) because the free, no-account-needed version stores users' bookmarks in localStorage (only the web version though, the extensions have their own, more persistent local storage).

Not an API, but these same reasons are why I love hosting my sites with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. It’s all about incentives being aligned. Pay-as-you-go is great for that.

I had just kind of learned Knockout around the time that I discovered Vue. It felt familiar and didn't have some of the problems I was running into with Knockout.

Learning Vue (and in general, JavaScript) is one of the best decisions I've ever made. I'm a person with a severe disability who can just barely move a mouse around and twitch a finger to click. But I found a job on a job board dedicated to Vue jobs. Now I'm able to work from home and make (to me) good money. Thanks Evan & friends!

I keep thinking of the potential fallout of copyrightable APIs. I don't know who's right here, but I can't help but think that copyrightable APIs would stifle the proliferation of good software.

It probably isn't for most people. To me, it's indispensable. I've paid much more for things much less useful.

I wanted something that would sync across multiple browsers and devices.

Hi fellow HN readers. I made this this new tab Chrome extension a while back and I recently published an add-on for Firefox.

This is a little side-project of mine that began life as something of an assistive tech tool. I have great difficulty typing (SMA Type II) so I try to minimize it in favor of a mouse-based approach where possible. A Fine Start is essentially just a list of text links with a minimal amount of categorization functionality. I originally developed it for myself and eventually turned it into a fremium product. I hope some of you find it as useful as I do.

Reminds me of this video by CGP Grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

I love NFSN. To me, it feels like a step up from conventional shared hosting, while not going as far as to be a VPS. Despite the price increase, I'm still a happy, longtime customer.

Oooh, I too would like to see a curated list of tech Discord servers.