dv35z

Experiment concluded - thanks for all who joined the PIANO JAM!

Hey - spent a lot of time in this world (solution / sales engineer, technical account manager to many clients), and thinking about this same problem.

Even experimented with per-client Linux users. Per-client calendars & routines. Per client knowledge-base, etc

Very curious to see what you come up with.

Do you keep a daily journal normally - and for the daily pages, do you have a separate notebook for them, or a folder full of pages, or what?

Thanks for inspiring us!

Give Linux Mint Debian Edition a try (https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php). I am in Latin America (Colombia) and I have been installing LMDE on 5-10 year old computers (former POS systems - old Dell Optiplexes and Latitudes), and its amazing how much it brings them back to life - fast & stable.

I am running - and strongly recommend - Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

For the past several years, I was running Debian stable & XFCE. It is a great combination. However, I started teaching technology (programming, Linux, and maker-space tech, like laser cutters & CNC routers), and I wanted to see how close I could get to an "easy button" interface, paired with a principles-driven, highly stable base. I gave LMDE a try, with an open mind, and was seriously impressed.

Linux desktop environments have come a long way, and Mint - with the "start" button (with application quick search), window management, "sane" defaults - it just works.

I will also mention that the Software Manager perfectly blends Debian source packages, and FlatPaks. From my experience, nearly all software that I want to install on it "just works" by searching for it. Those that aren't available there, it seems that downloading a .Deb to install it "just works" as well.

As background context, I have used Linux for 20+ years (Mandrake, Gentoo, RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, and now LMDE) - LMDE gets my roaring endorsement, and I think more people ought to check it out.

Totally agree.

To others: The book is called "The Artists Way", and is an excellent guide to become more creative and expressive.

Consider using "bubble mapping" and connecting words/thoughts, instead of writing linear text.

I write a daily journal - in this calm relaxed mode, I write linearly (on dotted paper).

When I'm in a business meeting, or taking notes where time is fleeting (a speech / seminar), I use bubble notes - which is effective for quickly getting the thoughts down, and connecting them.

Give it a try!

Adding onto your point #1, you can tap it through rock - which has helped people who are trapped in caves communicate & get rescued!

Got recommendations for specific songs / groups for Lo-Fi beats & jazz? What I've found is that many lo-fi playlists contain songs that have a lot of distracting noises (voices, distorted guitar twang, rain drops, record crackle, etc) - so I've been slowly-but-surely making playlists of study/reading songs.

Thanks!

What has worked for me is (1) Buy 4+ boxes of coconut water (2) remove cannabis from your house, (3) drink coconut water whenever you feel like smoking, (4) get some exercise going (swim, push-ups, gym, sports) - whatever the "MVP" of exercise is to start thinking of your body as fit, athletic & strong.

Anyone aware of an A5 sized (~10 inch diagonal) eInk screen that can use HDMI or USB-C as an input?

OpenCode (TUI and desktop app) can use Qwen local

Here's a list of Pivotal Tracker-inspired tools. https://bye-tracker.net/

Some potentials:

- Lanes: https://lanes.pm/

- Brooklyn Tracker: https://www.brooklyntracker.com/

- Tracker Boot: https://trackerboot.com/

- Story Time: https://storytime.team/

I would love to see an open-source one exist, potentially using open formats like Markdown / SQLite which could run locally or on a network share, and could potentially "live" inside of the repository.

I'm currently in LATAM, and often teach students - so having a no-cost tool which supports agile development would be so valuable (rather than having yet another tool to create a login for)

You can read about China's modern carrier-based, stealth fighter here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35

There is a section about its engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35#Engines

The first engine they used for the J-35 was the RD-33 (designed/built in Russia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klimov_RD-33#RD-93 - It was not efficient enough for the J-35 and generated black smoke trails. China decided to design & build a China-based engine.

This is the engine for the early J-35 prototype, WS-13 built in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guizhou_WS-13

This is the production engine for J-35, the WS-19: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guizhou_WS-19

China has built 50+ J-35 aircraft, and is scaling up production to support their domestic military, and also export orders to other militaries (including Pakistan, and possibly Russia).

Interesting: This is China's latest aircraft carrier, which has electromagnetic catapults, instead of steam-based: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_Fujia...

You can see videos of the J-35 aircraft here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLdCNAUjuRI

Good questions. For some "work" use-cases, it would be starting up Email, password tool (Bitwarden), team chat (Slack), browser (with a few tabs already open).

I am trying to get into a habit of writing/publishing, so I've got my own web-page that pops up at login, along with the code/text editor that allows me to start writing. Every individual will have their own set of "things I click on / open while sipping coffee, getting the computer into a productive state".

In the team / consulting environment (where we would pair-program, often with different people day-to-day), the computer would start with task tracker / backlog (at the time, Pivotal Tracker, now it would be something like Linear), team knowledge base for the project area. Under the hood, it would load up common shortcuts, terminal aliases, etc.

----

I often work with multiple clients, so something I've always wanted to do is have something close to "one Linux user per client", so that there isn't "contamination" between them. I haven't figured a great way to do this, but think of it a system-wide version of Chrome's switchable profiles.

Hoping someone will boot-up an open-source version. Linear seems to be the most popular alternative to Pivotal Tracker. What did you like most about Tracker? Thanks for the kind words!

Some would say "Chaotic evil". Some would say "Always be prepared!!"

I'm curious - has anyone found / created easy-to-use Systemd GUI interface?

A bit of context: My specific case is creating timers (similar to crontab). I'm shuffle-playing music playlists at certain times of day. I'm comfortable with terminal/command-line, however the computers I'm building out are used in maker-spaces, where many people are not super technical. This has got me into the habit of thinking "what's the 'easy mode' for a lot of tools. For example, GitHub Desktop is a great way to slow-roll people into using `git` if they have never used it before. I like tools like that. Let me know what you suggest.

I have a cron job which restarts my computer every day (Linux Mint Debian edition). I like waking up to a "fresh" computer, and since I know that it will restart every day - this is a "forcing function" to (1) be diligent about saving things that are important, (2) treating browser tabs, random notes, etc as ephemeral, and bookmarking the important stuff.

I used to work at an office where we pair-programmed with clients all day (Pivotal Labs), and most of our computers had some sort of "automatically restart / restore from a known-good image". I liked this, as it resulted in less cruft over time, and some intentionality about what getting a computer into a productive state means. It also got me thinking of using automatic routines to accomplish goals, and not being so attached to my open tabs, etc. Let it gooo....

To be more specific about this - for those wanting to get into blogging/publishing, this could mean auto-opening the website project folder using VSCodium upon user login, so its ready to go for the morning coffee. More half the time I just close it - but as a "default", it makes it easy for me to do the thing I want to do.

  sudo crontab -e -u root

  #-----------------------------
  # RESTART COMPUTER DAILY
  #-----------------------------
  00 04 * * * /usr/sbin/shutdown -r +5  "Rebooting in 5 minutes. Run 'shutdown -c' to cancel"

That's a phone - I am looking for essentially an HDMI-compatible e-ink monitor, with a small enough size to fit within an A5 size (https://papersizes.io/a/a5)

Would you (or someone else passionate about this topic) consider answering the question directly? I am curious about this too.

Does anyone know where you can buy an HDMI-compatible e-ink display, which is about the size of an A5 notebook? The idea is that you could have a screen, keyboard, and a small computer zippered up in a case, and could write/code outside in the sun.

Is there a map that shows generally where they are?

What would it take to have trustworthy benchmarks? As with all "targets", they can be gamed - but I am curious about quantifiable quality metrics.

Josh founded Capital Factory, the "YC" of Austin Texas.

You can learn more about Joshua Baer here: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/people/faculty-researchers/joshua-...

I did exactly this and suggest it. Used Dell Latitude (the one I got is one from 2019 - model 5300). I put Linux Mint Debian Edition (https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php) on it. Works absolutely great.

Small Dell Optiplexes are good for desktop computers.

Hey everyone! Earlier today I asked HN to share their AI-driven software development workflow & tools. This is the discussion, worth reading & contributing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48413629

In the spirit of summarizing the knowledge shared, I took notes on all of the comments, and "stack ranked" the tools mentioned (simply be frequency of occurrence in the comments). The reason I did this was to give me an idea on which tools to start exploring.

I have shared these notes here: https://codeberg.org/jro/Knowledge/src/branch/main/2026-06-0...

I am on a learning path, with the intention to run in-person workshops for people looking to "boot-up" their development workflow, feedback and improvements to this document are encouraged and welcomed. Let's learn together.

Feel free to add commentary, improvements, ideas in this thread. Thanks!

Thanks for the great discussion. I went through all the comments, and identified common tools (counting the references in the comments). If you are interested in seeing the summary of this thread, check it out here:

https://codeberg.org/jro/Knowledge/src/branch/main/2026-06-0...

Contributions & improvements are invited and welcome - thank you!

I find the best way to learn something is teach it. My philosophy with workshops & teaching is that we are all learners/students, on different parts of the paths (versus the idea that one person / the leader is the absolute authority). So the idea is to to create a learning environment (a time, place, and people), and help each other out.

A lot of us are doing this stuff solo anyway, and doing it socially is more fun and usually more effective (easily get unblocked).

Would you be open to share your "why's"? I would appreciate hearing diverse perspectives on this, and it sounds like you have experience and learnings which would be beneficial for us (at least me) to hear out. Thank you.