doersino

On writing some blog posts about things I’ve built lately (both at work and in my own time). Helps a lot with diving more deeply into topics than what’s reasonable for a “just needs to work” implementation.

Recently, a fairly detailed one on doing something semi-obscure with directory services on AWS. https://excessivelyadequate.com/posts/sadwsp.html

Vaguely related (also “ping, but with a graph”, but different): https://github.com/denilsonsa/prettyping

I’ve been using https://github.com/samschott/maestral instead of Dropbox’s client for the last year or so and it’s been rock-solid.

A blog post on how to make your Bash history more useful: https://excessivelyadequate.com/posts/history.html

Since everyone's sharing their implementation of "slides, but written in Markdown", here's mine: https://github.com/doersino/markdeep-slides

It's perhaps unique in that it doesn't require any sort of build process – inheriting its approach from Markdeep (https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/), it's just an HTML file (containing your Markdown content and a few <script> tags at the bottom) and a bit of JS/CSS.

I see that we're sharing our lists of magical FFmpeg incantations – here's mine: https://github.com/doersino/ffmpeg-koraktor

TIL about "until" loops! How neat.

Wow, that's a fun tool! Very enjoyable to play with. Thank you for making it.

> I love the choice of keeping the symbols opaque - it makes it easier to use in a funny way.

That's precisely what I was going for (plus, it's impossible to find descriptive icons for most of these options, and a wall of text below each option might lead to excessive scroll wheel wear).

> I’m very surprised to not see it on the front page! Have you posted this to /r/internetisbeautiful?

Getting to the front page is a coin flip – you win some, you lose some. But perhaps I'll submit it to the second chance pool [1]. And no, I've mostly weaned myself off Reddit, but you're right, that sounds like a good place to gather some additional feedback. I've just posted UJI there [2].

> Honestly this is wonderful and I hope to use it to introduce some creative coding concepts when teaching

I'm so glad to hear this! :)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/nk7gf7...

Hiya! I've made this thing over the past week or so. It's deliberately weird!

The tiled buttons at the top are presets – use them as jumping-off points, or click your way through them to see what's possible before starting afresh by yourself. The sliders control all aspects of the generated images. Hover over the icons next to them (which feature glyphs from Imperial Aramaic and Phoenician) for descriptions of what each slider does.

Feel free to leave links to pieces you've made in this thread – I'd love to see what you come up with.

There's ærialbot – while nominally a Twitter bot I created because I wanted to follow it and it didn't quite exist in this form yet, it can be used to download arbitrarily large satellite maps from various services: https://github.com/doersino/aerialbot

Also: UnicodeMathML, a more-or-less-standard-compliant UnicodeMath (a linear encoding of mathematics that leverages Unicode for brevity and plain-text readability that's built into MS Office) to MathML translator – it's the only reasonably feature-complete, web-based UnicodeMath-to-anything compiler I'm aware of: https://github.com/doersino/UnicodeMathML

And various tools around Morgan McGuire's web-based Markdown renderer Markdeep – for creating presentations (see https://github.com/doersino/markdeep-slides), undergraduate theses (see https://github.com/doersino/markdeep-thesis), and drawing diagrams (see https://github.com/doersino/markdeep-diagram-drafting-board).

Right, or the handwriting recognition built into RAND’s GRAIL system back in the 60s: https://jackschaedler.github.io/handwriting-recognition/

...which I’ve reimplemented in SQL (yes, SQL) a while ago: https://github.com/doersino/handwriting/blob/master/code/han...

That's been done before with tixy.land, the project that inspired my tool:

https://twitter.com/atesgoral/status/1325947885817565185

https://twitter.com/aemkei/status/1325888127102226432

3D LED cubes are also a thing, as another commenter in this thread noted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26978173

There sure is – one way is using the good ol' conditional operator:

  (x==3)?sin(i+t):0

Result: https://doersino.github.io/tixyz/?code=%28x%3D%3D3%29%3Fsin%...

Another is multiplying with a boolean expression that's automatically cast to 0 or 1 depending on its value:

  sin(i+t)*(x==3)

Result: https://doersino.github.io/tixyz/?code=sin%28i%2Bt%29*%28x%3...

Wow, what a cool idea!

The author of tixy.land didn't seem to take issue with my "clone" (or the many others) – quite the opposite: https://twitter.com/aemkei/status/1325525563579244548

I don't think "deceptively" is the best word here – there's no money or private data involved, at most a small bit of street cred. The near-identical look was intended to preserve the simplicity of the original. Note that there's a reference to tixy.land in my comment here, in the README.md on GitHub, and in the tweet that's behind the "more info here" link. Anyone looking to do more than just idly play around with this tool will come across one of them.

But I get your point – I'll be adding an unobtrusive link back directly to tixy.land soon!

EDIT: Done.

That "bug" has become sort of a feature – the author of tixy.land added support for it a while ago [1], which I also merged into tixyz.

[1]: https://twitter.com/aemkei/status/1325918933375987712

Repeatedly click the dots for a tutorial, click and drag to rotate, and – after writing a function of your own – hit "enter" to generate a shareable URL!

The source code can be found here: https://github.com/doersino/tixyz

Let me be clear: This thing is wholly derivative, merely adding a third dimension to Martin Kleppe's excellent creative code golfing tool tixy [0] (which you should definitely check out if you find yourself liking this 3D variant of it) by mashing it up with David DeSandro's equally-excellent 3D library Zdog [1]. Those two deserve any and all credit.

[0]: https://tixy.land and previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24974534

[1]: https://zzz.dog and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20036169

Very nice!

A while ago, I’ve built something similar on top of the in-browser Markdown-plus-diagrams renderer Markdeep: https://github.com/doersino/markdeep-slides

Aside from things like custom themes and pop-out-able presenter notes, it supports printing to PDF via the browser’s built-in print functionality – perhaps that’s something you could look into. (Maybe you have, but my phone’s browser just doesn’t like it.)

David Coffin is an amazing vocalist. There’s more on his own channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UCuF5l9Scauvp9kQesRIfWmA

One of my bots [1] encountered an “Over capacity” (130) error while trying to send a tweet this morning, but that was all I noticed.

[1]: https://twitter.com/earthacrosstime

There's reverse geocoding data at the end of each video – and most of the time, it picks spots in the middle of nowhere, which is difficult to reverse geocode in a way that's useful, so I don't show this information more prominently.

I’ve built a Twitter bot around these timelapses a while ago – just updated to use the newly released data set: https://twitter.com/earthacrosstime

You can take a look at the source code here if you’re interested: https://github.com/doersino/earthacrosstime

Pretty, but 10 seconds of scrolling turned my phone into a space heater.

Very neat!

I've recently taken a stab at something like this, too – the result is a Pandoc-and-Bash-script-based static site generator for my personal recipe collection. Recipes are written in a format based on Markdown (with ingredients listed separately for each step, which comes in real handy while cooking), and the end result is a lightweight, responsive, searchable website. I've received very positive feedback when I shared it as a "Show HN" a week and a half ago.

It's available as open source here: https://github.com/doersino/nyum

There's also a demo: https://doersino.github.io/nyum/_site/index.html

Finally, here's what the Markdown source for an example recipe looks like: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/doersino/nyum/main/_recipe...

There's also Bindery, a JavaScript library for book creation which also leverages the print-to-PDF feature built into modern browsers: https://evanbrooks.info/bindery/

On top of that and the in-browser Markdown renderer Markdeep, I've built a tool for typesetting undergraduate theses: https://github.com/doersino/markdeep-thesis/

And, coincidentally, just a few days ago I've written a blog post about controlling the settings in Chrome's "Print" dialogue with CSS (other browsers don't support many of the relevant features): https://excessivelyadequate.com/posts/print.html

A quick update: Arrow keys for navigating search results have been implemented now.

1. Good suggestion, that's something I had in mind as a potential future improvement! Since my personal use case for search is mostly on my phone – sort of as a shortcut, right before starting to prepare the dish I'm searching for – arrow keys didn't make the "add before publishing" checklist.

2. I generally agree – but in the comment you've linked, it seems to me like you're arguing in favor of conveniences that CLI-focused static site generators can't easily provide. I've tried to keep things as simple as they can be in the CLI context I'm targeting: Pandoc has been around for quite a while, it's available for pretty much any system as a stand-alone binary, and it's one of the leaders in its niche. And Bash is everywhere. Compare with, say, Jekyll, which requires Ruby and Bundler. That can be a whole can of worms if your OS supplies an outdated version of Ruby (I've been burned before!).

Hiya! This tool turns a set of Markdown-formatted recipes into a lightweight, responsive, searchable website for your personal use as a reference while cooking, or for sharing with family and friends. It's not intended as a cooking blog framework: there's no RSS feed, no social sharing buttons, and zero SEO.

Here's a demo instance: https://doersino.github.io/nyum/_site/index.html

Nyum is somewhat opinionated, expecting recipes to be written as a series of steps, each with the relevant ingredients alongside an instruction. I first came across this way of doing it via the cuisine LaTeX package (which I then, many years ago, built a custom LaTeX template around), ending up preferring this structure over the more commonly found all-ingredients-first-then-a-block-of-instructions approach. (In the process of recently graduating from university, I found myself contemporaneously graduating from wanting to use LaTeX for everything, which was part of the impetus for cobbling this thing together.)