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fevangelou

180 karma · joined March 1, 2013

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fevangelou··on SparkyDraw – Simple-to-use, all-device drawing web app for children
Claude Code
fevangelou··on SparkyDraw – Simple-to-use, all-device drawing web app for children
SparkyDraw is a simple, delightful drawing web app designed for children (and not only!), compatible with any device and screen format (touch, pen/pointer & mouse friendly) and in any orientation. It remembers your artwork and settings across visits, exports high-resolution PNG images locally and adapts easily in small or big screens, in both portrait and landscape modes!

Supports multiple languages (more to be added - auto switch enabled) and is built with pure Vanilla HTML, CSS & JS — zero external frameworks, libraries or build tools.

As a PWA, it can also be installed on any device for quick access.

Zero ads, seamless updates.

P.S. This was purpose built, out of pure necessity, as it got frustrating having a simple app that is kid-friendly to draw on any device.

fevangelou··on Greece to ban anonymity on social media
Πάντα πρωτοπόροι στη μλκ.
fevangelou··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
Firing 10% of their workforce on the one hand. Tracking employee PC screens to supposedly train AI on the other. Get fired or get tracked. Well, isn't that convenient...
fevangelou··on Qwen3-Max-Thinking
Funny. Ask the US ones about Palestine. Come on...
fevangelou··on Show HN: Prism.Tools – Free and privacy-focused developer utilities
@BLGardner

Thank you for building and sharing this.

fevangelou··on Removing XSLT for a more secure browser
Here's a 3rd option :)

For RSS/Atom feeds presented as links in a site (for convenience to users), developers can always offer a simple preview for the feed output using: https://feedreader.xyz/

Just URL-encode the feed like so: https://feedreader.xyz/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2...

...and you get a nice preview that's human readable.

fevangelou··on Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
A handy bookmarklet to find & preview any site's feed (before subscribing):

https://feedreader.xyz

fevangelou··on Campsite switches to Creative Commons Non-Commercial license
With so many "critical" dependencies, it probably cost more to operate. No wonder it got "acquired" by Notion.
fevangelou··on End the line: The last Sun SPARC workstation [video]
Good luck downloading a firmware upgrade for these. Oracle requires a subscription nowadays, even if there are security related issues that the firmware resolves. And mind you, it's not a $29 subscription.
fevangelou··on Blocking=render: Why would you do that?
Once ad agencies/networks take note of this feature, they will 100% start using it and abusing it.

We're already seeing some ad networks using initialization scripts to bootstrap their ad setup, with dynamically constructed secondary scripts that have a high fetchpriority (so they supposedly load faster than others).

For reference, modern news/media sites may load multiple ad networks (3-4 on average perhaps) in order to optimize ad performance (revenue) or inject different kinds of ads or sponsored content. If we take Google's Ad Manager (or similar) as the base network to serve ads (own or third-party), many times we see additional networks like AdSense, Taboola, Outbrain, Vidverto (to name a few) or other local ad networks that do some sort of header bidding, ad injection, sponsored content display, in-read ads/videos and so on.

I don't see why some won't abuse this spec to force-inject their stuff earlier than other ad networks and of course at the expense of a site's performance...

fevangelou··on Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
I hope you don't live in the US buddy... If you don't, you're probably fine. If you do and Netlify decides to go after you, it's probably gonna be tough and costly.

Which is crucial Netlify is called out for this. Hiding behind the "fine print" is pathetic, not a way to do business.

fevangelou··on What We Need Instead of "Web Components"
That's a great writeup.

As someone who's worked primarily on news/media sites for the last 15 years, I can totally relate and agree on all your points.

I would also argue that there are non-code issues that could easily be resolved. Bundling fonts for example. Decide on the top 100 with support for all or almost all characters, based on usage etc., and bundle them in the browser. That would shave possibly hundreds of KBs of each page's size.

On the flip side, stuff like lazy loading could become standard and use the attribute only to force-load content. Or stuff that is used on every freaking site (eg togglers as native html tags).

I'm hopeful though.

fevangelou··on DeskHop – Fast Desktop Switching
I read some months ago that tinypilotkvm.com is doing JUST fine.

So yeah, sometimes niche markets can be profitable. And it doesn't have to be millions of dollars in VC money obviously to be invested.

fevangelou··on DeskHop – Fast Desktop Switching
Seriously, if any VC is reading this, get this man some funding to make it a real project. Even at double or triple what it costs, it's still cheaper than any other commercial competitor.
fevangelou··on Darling: Run macOS Software on Linux
Spot on ;)
fevangelou··on Mail-in-a-Box: a mail server in a box
I'd say Mail-in-a-Box, along with Modoboa and iRedMail, are perhaps the only serious open source email server setups right now, that are not based on Docker. Commercial ones do exist in the form of cPanel and Plesk (if you need some sort of support), although the underlying software is pretty much the same.

The only downside with MiaB is it is unnecessary complicated to update (both the software AND the server OS). This shouldn't be too hard to address in the future...

References:

https://modoboa.org/en/

https://www.iredmail.org/

fevangelou··on Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
It's oh so weird the article does not mention any of these though...

- https://twitter.com/phuckfilosophy/status/163570439893983232... (SA's sister - also have a look at her recent posts)

- Also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman... (utterly distressing)

- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1727096607752282485 (check the comment with snapshots of the letter - "strangely" that Gist was deleted)

fevangelou··on Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor
You don't need to manipulate all employees. Just key ones ;)
fevangelou··on Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
100M users perhaps?
fevangelou··on Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down
From my understanding (not part of the SF tech bubble), S.A. had his shot as the CEO of a company that came to prominence because of a GREAT product (and surely not design, manufacturing or marketing). Just consider WHEN MS invested in OpenAI. He probably went too far for reasons only a few know, but still valid ones to fire him...

His previous endeavor was YC partner, right? So a rich VC turning to a CEO. To make even more money. How original. If any prominent figure was to be credited here beyond Ilya S., well that would probably be Musk. Not S.A. who as a YC partner/whatever played Russian roulette with other rich folks' money all these years... As for MS hiring S.A., they are just doing the smart thing: if S.A. is indeed that awesome and everyone misses the "charisma", he'll pioneer AI and even become the next MS CEO... Or Satya Nadela will have his own "Windows Phone" moment with SamAI ;)

fevangelou··on Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down
100% spot on.

The world is filled with Sam Altmans, but surely not enough Ilya Sutskevers.

fevangelou··on NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
The cumulative patch.
fevangelou··on An Internet of PHP
As the "Pitch Meeting" producer guy would say: PHP is tight!
fevangelou··on All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped
The PinePhone guys must be marketing geniuses then to sell a true open source device for 150 USD.
fevangelou··on All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped
I have a hard time understanding how regular people in need of "security/privacy" would pay 1200+ USD for this device. I'm not even touching on specs etc. The only ones I can think of needing such "security/privacy" would probably make a great sidestory in Breaking Bad or get their own post-mortem show on Netflix.

Kudos for using Linux, but that alone (and the hardware gimmicks) is really not enough to justify the cost.

P.S. For comparison the (somewhat) similarly spec'ed PinePhone costs 150-200 USD.

fevangelou··on Show HN: Extract an RSS feed from almost anything
Shameless plug on something similar: https://feedreader.xyz

Comes as a bookmarklet and it will not only find a page's feed, it will also display it nicely directly.

Demo on Verge's feed: https://feedreader.xyz/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2... (you just visit the site, hit the bookmarklet & there you go)

This was primarily built after realizing that the official Google RSS plugin for Chrome was never gonna be updated and was "stuck" to that annoying layout while displaying a page's feed.

fevangelou··on Putin’s Cinema Fund Rejects Movie Piracy, Fuming Cinema Boss Demands Barbie
Seriously, who writes article titles like this?
fevangelou··on Arc Browser 1.0
As YouTuber Chris Titus would very eloquently say, "it's pointless". Chrome with a bunch of plugins could probably replicate the same experience.

It's also kinda patronizing to say "here's how the browser should work" as if people are morons in 2023 and have no clue how to use a browser, let alone their supposed target audience. I'm not even touching the "sign up to continue" issue others mentioned...

The news should actually be they got $18M in funding for this (FFS).

fevangelou··on The future of AlmaLinux
Tomayto, tomahto.

P.S. for other commenters. A fork is NOT a distro. If someone forks a project (as the shape of a fork implies), they go their own way. So if Oracle and SUSE fork RHEL, good luck on standardizing "enterprise" Linux.

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