dv35z

This is the one I’ve got - pleased with it.

Brother Compact Monochrome Laser Printer, HLL2390DW, Flatbed Copy & Scan, Wireless Printing, Duplex Two-Sided Printing, https://a.co/d/8vMWJCK

Because of your comment, I made to decision to delete my account. The underlying reason is that I want to shape my life where I only do business with organizations which prioritize (1) quality, (2) integrity, (3) excellent customer experiences. It’s got me thinking about other companies I’m currently doing business with, and how I can make decisions so that my values are put into practice by my actions & behaviors. Thanks!

Care to share strong recommendations? Interested in maker spaces, agile, entrepreneurship & prototyping.

Below are quality suggestions

- Red Hat linux - Blender 3D - PostgreSQL - Django - Ruby on Rails - SQLite - Pandoc - Ffmpeg

Can’t wait to see others’ suggestions.

I checked out Typora today - there are a lot of promising capabilities, especially as you can customize the theme / style sheets. Very cool app, that I would consider revisiting. Paid / requires a license, so its out of scope for this mission.

Completely agree - without getting too dramatic, for such an important open standard (HTML) its surprising we don't have a open-source locally-run easy to use, visual authoring tool for HTML websites (and I'll throw Markdown in the mix here, because with tools like https://www.markdownguide.org/tools/markdeep/, useful crossover is possible).

Share this page with people who are passionate about this topic, and perhaps we can gather experts to rally behind an open-source initiative or start one.

Logseq doesn't seem to be able to edit an HTML file. I checked out Logseq when I was considering Obsidian, and I found it quite complicated (it seems closer to Workflowy...). I'd love to see something like this succeed...

Pinegrow - this seems to be close to what I'm thinking... a visual HTML editor. But wow, the interface is complicated. Looks like they've crammed AI/ChatGPT into it, a news reader widget (?!). $150/year price tag. - A simple, open-source app along these lines would be great.

This seems to be a local CMS - but you can't just edit "dumb" HTML files. Seems like a page has be inside of a blog/site you setup, and then the system "publishes" it. Looking for something thats not a blog publishing system - just a visual HTML document editor.

First off - this is a very interesting app, and the interface is clean. I think this would actually be useful in many contexts.

However, I'm looking for something that's less of a local CMS, and more of just... a document editor which can open up HTML files, edit them with a GUI interface, and save them somewhere.

Ideally, it would be an editor like Sublime, where you can drag a folder containing HTML files in there (so you can navigate folders and access other files & content), and edit visually...

- nVU - appears to be un-maintained, and last release was 2005.

- Kompozer - http://kompozer.net/ is offline, last update 2016

- BlueGriffon - just downloaded it. It doesn't seem to run - I just get a frame of an empty window...

I would love to give orgmode a chance. "On paper" Emacs sounded great to me. Last year, I gave it a few days time to try to get it to work - I just could not figure it out! It's been awhile since I tried it, but between the keyboard shortcuts, and "buffers", the various plugins to install and configure, and emacs felt slow (which surprised me, because I'd thought it would be extremely snappy, being a text app)... I'm sure if I sat down with a pro for 20 minutes, a lot of the blockers would be eliminated and could get to a productive state. If you can recommend resources, that result in an Org-Mode "easy mode", I'd love to check it out...

Emacs Org-mode is on my list technologies to check out which have stood the test of time, and may continue to do so...

Does it have a WYSIWYG editor mode? Looks like it just edits the code text, but doesn’t show the styled doc…?

This looks interesting- have you tried it? What’s your experience been like?

Update: Just tried this out. It seems to require you already have a remote blog setup (e.g. Wordpress), and you can't make a local site of static HTML, nor can you just open an HTML file and edit it.

I gave LibreOffice an honest try - thinking that “I’ll tolerate a few warts, invest in my tools - especially open source”. I used it for 10 minutes, and decided to uninstall it. While editing a document, I got weird rendering errors, interface was jankt, things felt quite broken. I’m on a recent computer, with minimal special modifications- so who knows what the issues were, but didn’t leave a great first impression.

I’m currently using Apple Pages as my “local document editor” (eg for things to be printed), its fine - but doesn’t handle the “edit this HTML file cleanly” mission.

How do you actually render / style the Markdown documents, site?

I was thinking to lean into something similar with VS Code - the hypothesis being that VSC is widely used, open source, and a powerful text editor.

Have you / others come across similar plugins? I’d be OK with editing markdown files - would love using a GUI editor. I’m not a fan of writing in markdown with a separate rendered window to the side. Would rather it “feel” like a simple MS Word / Google Docs authoring experience.

Yes - this is what I’m aiming for. For example; I’m imagining an “article” is just a folder with HTML, with images & media within it - a self contained doc which ought to be usable for decades.

I was surprised to see this functionality and tried it - it does technically work… but for authoring, the formatting tools don’t include styles (eg H1), just in-line formatting (bold, etc). I looked at the HTML output, and it added quite a bit of junk. Since TextEdit is quite basic, I disqualified it for this mission- as I’m looking for an authoring environment that I can comfortably & productively “live in” for an hour or two a day while writing. TextEdit’s HTMl mode seems more of a tacked on feature…

In this context, favoring simple text files (markdown, HTML) instead of Javascript-enabled, server-side rendering. Tech that ought to last for 20+years. I imagine a 1990s-era office - wired connections (no flaky bluetooth connections, wired ethernet, simple local file servers; minimal cloud based service - can the people in the office be productive without Wifi/internet for a half day? Async tools, like local email clients instead of web-based ones).

I tried it today - I’ll be honest, it felt very janky on my Mac (2021 / M1). The GUI had rendering artifacts, several common unicode characters (eg right-arrow) rendered as glitchy characters. It didn’t feel like authoring HTML / sites is its core competency.

Check out Charles Proxy for mac. It’s great.

Check out if a university near you has a startup incubator / entrepreneurship program. They often have events, probably socialized most on their Instagram account. From expert talks, to hackathons - go to the next event. While there, tell the organizer what type of community you’re looking for, and ask if there is a group chat.

For example, I’m in a city, and there are at least 2 or 3 very active WhatsApp groups - a mix of tech devs, creative entrepreneurs (one of those groups has 800+ members). Every day - there are 2-3 events posted, talks, seminars, workshops, code jams, pitch workshops, digital marketing how-tos.

Idea: Co--working spaces often have a formal or informal group chat (often WhatsApp). You could take a tour and ask around.

Business incubators - Business incubators, often have a Slack channel (with channels like #dev, #design, #3d-printing). They often have a networking site where you can book free office hours with vetted experts / founders / engineers / executives / angel investors). The one I participate in has a Slack group containing 2,800 creative entrepreneurs, founders, investors, etc. At the co-working space, they host events, social mixers, etc. You’ll aways find some interesting people there. Find the group chat, get on it. Eventually you’ll get “dragged” into an interesting social group of startup / entrepreneurship / growth minded people. I jokingly say dragged, but what I mean is - if you go to an interesting talk on CNC routers, you’ll likely meet someone interesting there, they’ll tell you about a cool upcoming event, you book it - over time, you’re just spending more time per week with interesting people.

I know you just asked about WhatsApp groups, but I wanted to just share some of what I’ve learned, within 1 year of moving to a new city.

Look into “solution engineer”, sometimes called “sales engineer” or “pre-sales engineer”. They are often paired with a sales expert as their technical partner. There are often 1 solution engineer to 2-4 sales experts.

Solution engineers are often engineer / developers who are good at communicating, explaining, asking questions. Activities often involve “technical proof-of-concepts” (commonly called POCs), running trials and “bake offs” (for example comparing between competitors). SEs often work closely with product engineering - communicating customer requirements, figuring out how to integrate with a clients’s particular setup, hosting workshops & webinars, going to a clients HQ and whiteboarding solutions. Often 25% travel (1-2 days on site with local customers, and travel once a month by flight to spend time with a customer for workshop.) You are expected to keep your tech skills sharp. Some progressions of this role are called “Field CTO”. This person is often a domain + technology expert (eg eCommerce + cloud microservices).

One financial benefit of a SE role is that - being on the sales org of the company, you are on the revenue generating side - not a cost center. Quality of life in the company can be nice because of that. Your compensation will often have a variable “bonus” to it - tied to the performance of the sales team (eg 25%+ of your total compensation).

If you know a piece of software, tool, or general domain, and you’re personally a big fan of them and use their software, that might be a good company to talk to about SE positions. Sometimes they might have a “developer advocate” role - which is someone who is also very plugged into the company’s customer / developers community.

If you’re interested in getting an SE job, one easy “cheat code” would be recording yourself doing “how to” on that company’s software, post to a youtube, and sharing it where customers are - might even be a subreddit you’re already in.

I saw a video where someone scanned thru months of a niche subreddit, found most common problems, and then made videos on how to solve those. Another idea is to use a tool like AnswerThePublic.com to find top questions related to a topic you know well (its based on search trends) - pick questions that are easy for you to answer, be prepared to see how crappy and annoying most videos are to solve that… then make your own video. Don’t want to get much into video on this thread, but Google Slides + OBS / simple 5 min how-to screenshare with decent audio would be better than 95% of the videos out there.

I’ve done this for awhile and happy to answer questions/ help out - worked at large cloud SaaS companies, and my clients are large well-known “Fortune 500” companies.

My career has bounced around from developer / architect / project manager / professional services (consultant) / customer success (technical account manager) / engineering product manager/ entrepreneur/ solution engineer and “fractional CTO” for startups.

You may be interested in ASMBLY Makerspace in Austin, which has a scholarship program to help foster kids / teens get skills that can help them transition into adulthood and get great jobs: https://asmbly.org/new-maker-scholarship-program/

Are you familiar with https://snyk.io/?

Disclaimer: I used to work with the founder, he’s great.

Check out https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/3982438802/ref=dp_ob_neva_mob.... It goes into depth on how to practically setup the system. Absolutely fascinating & life changing book. The title doesn’t quite convey the genius contained.

You might get a laugh out of this. Cheers. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I

I used Amazon Polly (text to speech engine) on a project a few years ago - the “neural” voices were decent. I’ve since heard much better synthetic voice engines, but don’t know names. What’s the best quality one you have found recently?

Great suggestion. I use this as my default news page.

Check out Affinity Designer. There’s a MacOS version and an iPad one - if you have an iPad & pen, definitely get it.

It’s a vector graphics tool - and it’s in a good sweet spot. Easy to make simple and useful diagrams - export them as transparent PNGs and start incorporating them into documents, presentations.

What are your thoughts on (1) Obsidian vault (folder of markdown files), (2) stored on a shared Google Drive folder (several team members can edit files using Obsidian) (3) Less technical users could publish the site by using GitHub Desktop app. When they commit changes (4) git-based CI/CD uses MkDocs-Material to publish the site somewhere...