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Tomteon Zotero 8

I‘ve been using it as a general bookmark manager (think Pinboard or Raindrop) for a while now. It‘s a bit quirky, but very powerful with all the management and annotation possibilities.

You might say it was just another excuse to curate my thousands of bookmarks and recreate a new tagging structure yet again, but… well, you wouldn‘t be wrong. :-)

Tomteon Ask HN: What are your best purchases under $100?

Me too. I actually bought a selection of freshly roasted beans from a local roaster, and when I came back I said that I could not distinguish the Peruvian one from the somewhere else one. The roaster was shocked.

I‘d love to have better taste, but I‘m saving so much money, I do not really care.

Tomteon Iran report says 16,500 dead in 'genocide under digital darkness'

https://archive.ph/wWZJ7

Tomteon Post-PARA: What survived 4 years of real use

It reads a bit like my current position after two decades of on-and-off-GTD and ~three years of PARA: the project/area/resource distinction is practical, but not earth-shattering.

But what‘s really working is GTD, which the article doesn‘t call out, but implicitly lumps together with PARA: actionable next tasks and collecting everything in some kind of inbox.

I haven‘t found much use for PARA itself in my personal life, but for organizing my work OneDrive it shines.

Tomteon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://www.thomas-huehn.com/

Most interesting, IMO: https://www.thomas-huehn.com/deming/

Tomteon Sampling at negative temperature

It‘s "remove". A common word, but many words are common and not on the list. Lesswrong also lists "prüf" (check), another common word.

Tomteon Why I left iNaturalist

Seek is annoying, because it throws up some kind of „please don‘t disturb nature“ dialog box every time you start it to take a photo. I hve seen that warning hundreds of times, why can‘t i disable it after a few confirmations?

I‘ve moved to the main iNaturalist app, and it does everything Seek does, but better and it’s generally also faster.

Tomteon Crusted Interpreter: The whole typed affair

David Beazley(!) doing the bytecode VM from Crafting Interpreters in a 67 hour(!) livecoding video in ed(!).

Tomteon CSS sucks because we don't bother learning it (2022)

„CSS The Definitive Guide“ or „CSS in Depth.“

Tomteon Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

Your wife’s Python version is quite impressive. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to do the simple thing and just do some string-replacement targeted at a narrow use-case instead of using a complicated templating engine.

Tomteon Ask HN: Who is using Nebula (mesh VPN)?

Back when I used it the mobile app on iOS was broken, but they fixed it real quick. That was encouraging.

Other than that, I mostly stopped using it because it forces you to regularly rotate all certificates, and for my personal purposes it was too much of a hassle.

I still like the project a lot and wish it would be more prominent. Nowadays everyone immediately seems to recommend Tailscale.

Tomteon Ask HN: Replacement for MacUpdater which reached EOL on 2026-01-01

Latest: https://max.codes/latest/

Tomteon Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

Can also be used as a frontend to FreshRSS.

Tomteon My insulin pump controller uses the Linux kernel. It also violates the GPL

> Bradley Kühn's

I saw that spelling for the first time last week, I think.

Did he change his name? Has he always been Kühn, but went with Kuhn, because Umlaute are hard for Americans?

Tomteon Building my faux Lego advent calendar feels like current software development

> Lego is great to assemble and sometimes tricky to detach. But it is always possible.

Set 75313 has a building technique that every fan would have deemed illegal until then, because it cannot be completely taken apart again.

> With Lego, you have all the necessary bricks and none should be left over.

All 1 by 1 parts have a spare in the bag.

Tomteon The entire New Yorker archive is now digitized

Maybe we have different editions? I never got mine to work.

Tomteon Could lockfiles just be SBOMs?

I would expect people to do a lot of manual work in SBOM and licensing, yes. Because that‘s we do now.

Tomteon The entire New Yorker archive is now digitized

Encrypted DjVu, and the viewer doesn‘t run on modern Windows.

Tomteon Is This Normal? My new projector's picture is dull even though I paid for 4K

> blacks are more like dark grays, even in a dim room

A projector cannot take light away. So unless your room is truly dark (no candles even), you cannot expect black. “Dim” is not nearly enough.

Tomteon Could lockfiles just be SBOMs?

But it was the best format for manually creating an SBOM.

Most SBOM use cases don‘t need the ability to put your detailed software architecture in the SBOM.

Tomteon Could lockfiles just be SBOMs?

Or tag-value, which is actually preferred by many practitioners. Nesting is implicit in that format, but SBOMs should be mostly flat, anyway.

Unfortunately, T-V hs been dropped in SPDX 3.0.

Tomteon Could lockfiles just be SBOMs?

Software licensing information is the big use case where SPDX originated from.

In CycloneDX you can also express things like attestations/certifications, possibly down to the code review level (although I think nobody does that).

Tomteon Nabokov's guide to foreigners learning Russian

I learned (an academic expression of) German grammar at university, in computational linguistics. There was a class „Syntax I“, and it had us break down phrases and sentences in a graphs, a (constituent) C structure and a (functional) F structure.

Best class I ever had!

Tomteon FOSDEM 2026 – Schedule

No Java devroom this time?

Tomteon A New Philosophy of Defense (1986)

https://archive.ph/UZyDI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_Europe_Unconquerable

Tomteon Dark mode is essential, not a design preference

Dark mode is fashion. If it were about headaches from bright screens, you would turn down the brightness.

Tomteon Zensical – A modern static site generator built by the Material for MkDocs team

"Material for MkDocs is now in maintenance mode"

Tomteon Can we test it? Yes, was can [video]

I see a difference between the same set of stories being submitted organically, and one VC-driven site basically scraping the smaller site.

Eliminating karma is probably not a bad idea, I don‘t think it will stifle submissions, but it may improve commenting dynamics.

Tomteon Can we test it? Yes, was can [video]

I disagree with aspenmeyer violently on all those fairness issues that came up a few weeks ago in the similar discussion, but I think he‘s right with pushing back on this in general.

I am a very active HN user and was totally surprised by the declaration that submission bots are fine with you. It goes against pretty much all earlier communication (which, in fairness, was usually about comment bots), but I think in the past my submission behavior was repeatedly ruled okay when challenged by other users, because I‘m submitting manually.

I do feel I‘m losing interest a bit when we‘re all just firing scripts. Manual submission at least makes you care enough to spend those seconds, bot submissions mean nobody cares anymore because you can just fling shit and see what sticks. And maybe we high-volume submitters should even be reigned in more.

(Also it feels unfriendly towards lobste.rs, when HN is effectively just bulk copying their submissions.)

Tomteon Ask HN: Advice for Starting a Hacker Space?

Design Patterns: https://github.com/larsweiler/Hackerspace-Design-Patterns/bl...

I like the Tuesday Rule.