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Hi! I've recently made a shade calculator specifically for climbs in North wales:

https://connies.club/shade/12083/holyhead-mountain

It's important for me to use accurate height-maps as (obviously) the terrain is very three dimensional.

Are you using the public LiDAR data as well?

Would just like to say thank you so much for this tool! Ended up finding a quieter park to watch the eclipse last night.

blargwillon AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

A while back I had the same feeling and hypothesised about a "nutriscore" for AI content in media:

https://disclosure.launchbowl.com/ https://launchbowl.com/ai_nutriscore

I think AI images can enhance a blog article as long as the reader is fully aware and trusting that it's just the auxiliary material to the blog has been generated, not the main body of value.

blargwillon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://launchbowl.com/

It's the only domain I haven't let expire. It's been many things but now it's a digital garden! Lots of loose threads and random thoughts, all half baked haha.

blargwillon Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)

I had a day-dream about nutrition labels for generative works, I made this site to feel it out:

https://disclosure.launchbowl.com/

A little cool tech detail, I didn't want a backend or to store the information of people's reports anywhere. To get around the requirement, I made the form deterministic and populated on load from a data stream of bits (form is made from booleans or bitfields) from a decoded base-64 query parameter. A cool side-effect of this approach is I can update the query parameter in the URL in real-time as you fill out the form so if you reload it remembers your form without any local storage or cookie use!

blargwillon The Java Ring: A Wearable Computer (1998)

They're used quite frequently in the UK in bars/pubs where there are several people serving drinks and (I assume) there's some metric tracking by management on till use.

blargwillon Show HN: A pager

Woah! The world really works in mysterious ways. I've found myself thinking in this space a lot recently. I've been working on a pager that takes the notifications from my phone and relays only the ones I want to see. I use LTE-M/NB-IOT to get connectivity anywhere and the device works and I'm looking to find a way to get a pcd/case made..

Landing page (doesn't link to anything): https://fob.launchbowl.com/

A little word dump of thoughts at the start of the journey: https://launchbowl.com/e_ink_pager

Your project seems really cool and allows you to bring your own hardware. Out of curiosity, have you blocked all notifications on your phone? Would this be run on your computer? Would you ever move in the direction of a physical device?

blargwillon Show HN: Jottings; Anti-social microblog for your thoughts

Feels very similar to Digital Gardens - something I've been doing to hit all the same points! (Shameless plug to mine as an example https://launchbowl.com)

This product does provide a bit more of a structured approach without any of the self-hosting/coding difficulty which I think would have a wider market appeal.

blargwillon Trifold is a tool to quickly and cheaply host static websites using a CDN

This is the first time I've read this but have personal experience similar. A few of my single page, gone nowhere, projects are seeing ~2k views a month. They're seeing zero traffic through google in that same period so no idea where it's coming from?

blargwillon Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently! My friends group all seem burnt out by the direction social media is going, with what you're building seeming like a better return to the norm. Will follow along to see your progress!

One thing that kept tripping me up when thinking about this was pricing - everyone is so conditioned to think that social media is free that this will be a huge hill to overcome. Your pricing, although I think if done right feels very fair, instinctively makes me recoil a bit.

blargwillon A (not so) small library for terminal based game development

If you don't want people to use the internals, why not make them `__private`?

Cool project!

blargwillon Show HN: Bye-bye spaghetti channels A Slack app encouranging thread use

I was on Slack one day and there were multiple time-critical issues ongoing within a channel. It became difficult to keep track of who said what and in response to whom. In the aftermath, it was decided that threads should be the sole method of organization. In the weeks following it was clear that best intentions don't change habits overnight, so I hopped on Slack's app directory and searched for a solution. Existing solutions were priced weirdly or were too expensive for what was needed, therefore I built my own!

I would be interested to hear if this has been an issue for others and if something like this would be useful. The idea with this application was that people only need a light reminder or guide for their habits to change and Slack already does all the heavy lifting as an amazing messaging tool.

blargwillon Complexity of E2E Tests

Trying to understand the problems with scaling E2E testing for products that have long flows, I dust off big-O notation.

blargwillon Complexity of E2E Testing

Trying to understand the problems with scaling E2E testing for products that have long flows, I dust off big-O notation.

blargwillon Breaking Test Assumptions

I've been working on a new way to build product, borne out of my own experiences and frustrations. I would love to validate these ideas, so I have started writing them down.

This is my first blog article, based on changing the way we test. If we represent our products in the way our users do, as flows, we by proxy start solving a lot of unnecessarily held beliefs.

I would love to discuss, having been just a long time lurker on HN in the past.