sjdegraeve

I lost 15 lbs on a well-known subscription weight loss program, let the subscription lapse, and gained all the weight back. The method works and I'm cheap, so I built my own version.

Every food gets a "pip" value: (calories × 0.0305) + (sat_fat × 0.275) + (sugar × 0.12) − (protein × 0.098). Protein pulls the number down, sugar and saturated fat push it up. Vegetables, fruits, eggs, and lean proteins are always 0 pips so you can eat them freely.

You get a daily pip cap based on your body stats (Mifflin-St Jeor with a 500 calorie deficit). Stay under the pip cap to lose ~1 lb/week.

There's also an analysis page that looks back 90 days and tells you which specific foods are causing your over-cap days. It's often things like rice portions, alcohol, or honey - not necessarily the things you'd expect.

The tech stack is PHP/MySQL because I'm a gray beard and boring old tech still ships.

foodpips.com - free, no subscription, no ads

I rebuilt my old logo generator as a full brand kit generator. You type a business name, pick a style direction, and get a wordmark SVG and PNG in multiple variations, a color palette, font pairings, and a downloadable brand guide PDF. LAMP stack, Stripe, $29 one-time. The core insight was that people don't need a logo, they need enough brand consistency to look credible. Curious what the HN crowd thinks about the positioning and whether $29 one-time is the right model versus subscription.

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Google Street View of the interior of an Emirates A380 from 2013:

https://www.google.com/maps/@25.242676,55.3718716,2a,75y,38....

via: https://www.wired.com/2013/08/google-street-view-a380/

In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Richard Feynman recounts a similar "drifting" of the location of the ego while in a sensory deprivation tank:

"I tried and after a while I got my ego to go down through my neck into the middle of my chest. When a drop of water came down and hit me on the shoulder, I felt it "up there," above where "I" was. Every time a drop came I was startled a little bit, and my ego would jump back up through the neck to the usual place."

https://pastebin.com/42YhjjYg

Volunteer in your community.

The Mote in God's Eye (sci-fi, first contact story) helped me accept sudden and drastic changes in my life and the impermanence of the world around me.

* #plottertwitter (twitter.com/landscapeartbot)

* a book of thousands of loglines to inspire writers with writer's block

* a vacation itinerary generator (started months ago, completely useless today)

I've worked from home since 2009. Here's what has worked for me:

- Have a dedicated work space that can be closed off from the rest of the family / roommates / distractions. Bedrooms / kitchens can only work for so long. A dedicated office at home works best.

- Headphones can act like a chain (in a good way) and keep you productive at your desk.

- Keep strict work hours, 8-5 or whatever. No work communications outside of those times.

- Do not set up your work email or messaging on your phone to further enforce strict work hours and differentiate "work" from "life".

- I found no good way of keeping the casual / social in-person environment alive. The reality is that working from home is often lonely and you lose the casual office chit chat. I have filled that newfound spare time with side projects.

For those who want a daily concise version of the New York Times, check out https://timesdigest.com/.

It's not free, but I've found it to be a great way to read the NYTimes.

Example of the 10-page daily PDF: https://timesdigest.com/samples/timesdigest

If you're wondering what people (teen girls) used to put in their away messages, I've been running a site since 2003 that has acted as a database of these "witty profiles".

https://web.archive.org/web/20030416074540/http://www.wittyp...

Ah memories. Twenty years ago I worked a few cubicles away from the guy who runs this site. He had a handmade Rube Goldberg machine made from cardboard perched on the edge of his cube wall that accepted coins as payment for candy he kept in a dish.

AIM will always hold special place in my heart. It had an ecosystem that allowed me to build two very successful (and profitable) side projects in 2002 and 2003: a Buddy Icon generator and a database of Witty Away Messages for AIM profiles that eventually grew into a little social network. BRB.

Website Yellow Pages. Take a look at the categories list for an idea of how sites were cataloged: http://rdf.dmoz.org/rdf/categories.txt

The goal is to get the landscapes to resemble sci-fi/fantasy environment concept art. Rough plans include adding clouds, vegetation, buildings, human figures, and foreground elements.

... and here I thought the landscape art bot I started yesterday was good. I've got a long way to go. https://twitter.com/LandscapeArtBot

Nice. It's remarkably similar to an ancient unfinished project of mine: http://www.degraeve.com/letterpress-invitations/ which was inspired by this post from 2009: https://mingaling1.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/and-then-it-was-...