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hs86on Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

Obsidian is my favorite app, and my only missing feature is to enable better PDF support, similar to Logseq.

Logseq allows me to embed the PDFs inside the app and annotate them with all the bells and whistles enabled by markdown. Area highlights, math notation, all these things are not possible with classical PDF readers, and I think Obsidian would fit well here.

hs86on iPhones and action discoverability

I moved to iOS over a year ago after using Android exclusively, and I agree that this was a discoverability downgrade. Editing text with various multi-finger gestures, shaking the device, or even putting the entire Photos app into a different mode to select multiple items are outright downgrades to what Android does.

The iPhone innovated finger-touch-based on-screen keyboards while everyone else was still typing with a stylus on a tiny keyboard, but since then, they seem to stagnate. iOS 16 just got haptic feedback on its keyboard in 2022(!), and I am still making more typing errors compared to Android with Gboard.

hs86on Tauri vs. Electron – Real world application

Those RAM usage comparisons should consider the shared memory among those processes. Aren't those renderer and zygote processes forks of each other?

I don't think that tools like htop or Process Explorer give us an easy at-a-glance answer to how much RAM multi-process browsers or Electron apps need. My current approach is to monitor the currently free RAM while at the same time closing the entire application. That delta at that moment is a more accurate representation of the app's memory consumption than summing up RSS values or working sets.

hs86on Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

No, it is not booting up very fast, but it is still ok as I usually don't reboot that often. I remember one severe increase in the user login duration, and this was caused by the high number of files in a temp folder which Disk Cleanup somehow did not delete.

Manually deleting those solved this issue, and over the years, I have only used the standard tools included in Windows to maintain the system. No tuning or cleaning tools that defrag the registry, download some RAM or do some other magic.

hs86on Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

My last clean Windows installation was in 2007 with Vista, and since then, I ran in-place upgrades to get to the next immediate version. It survived multiple mainboard changes and moved from MBR IDE HDDs to GPT SATA SSDs. (With the help of Acronis/Macrium images)

The next big move would be to change to a Mainboard+CPU with Windows 11 support and an NVMe disk. I wonder how feasible this will be.

hs86on SL(1): Cure your bad habit of mistyping

Run `sl | lolcat` for maximum productivity.

hs86on Ask HN: Developer Workstation Backups

Arq backup + GSuite/Workspace as a target. Needs fewer resources than Backblaze, and is (was?) cheaper than it. I had to exclude Dropbox etc. folders from Arq because of the warnings about these online-only placeholder files, and I would prefer it if we could silently ignore those.

Additionally, I recommend a solution that can restore entire volume images in case of boot drive failures. Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner on Mac and Macrium on Windows are nice choices in my experience. Acronis was also very reliable in the past, but since then, they have shifted to yearly nonsense upgrades with questionable value. It reminds me of the transition of Nero Burning ROM into the Nero Media-whatever-center-thingy, where the core functionality remained unchanged while more and more auxiliary features were added.

hs86on Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

If he uses it for work, and clearly, most shared links he creates are of copyrighted media content, how would this work in practice? Does Google Drive/Dropbox have some flag for "creator" accounts?

hs86on Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen3 Review – with Linux

With such issues, don't expect Ubuntu to fix it while staying at the same kernel version. Instead, either try their HWE-stacks or upgrade to the intermediate non-LTS releases.

Fedora, for example, will always use the latest upstream kernel while keeping the rest of the packages reasonably stable. Usually, this plays nicer with new hardware.

hs86on Ask HN: Do you believe in GNU's Free Software?

I don't particularly appreciate how a group of nerds from the 80s have some supposed interpretational sovereignty over what "free" software means. The added restrictions on the GPL don't make the software more "free" than BSD/MIT, and I don't like how this is falsely presented as additional user freedom while most users would never look inside the source code or make modifications to it.

I prefer developers release their source code because they want to and not because an overengineered LICENSE.txt compels them. That looks more like free software to me.

The GPL isn't that bad per se, but I don't like the notion of making a folder of textfiles more "free" by adding restrictions on its usage (by people). It feels contrary to that advertised user freedom. The GPL looks like the attributed freedom of that folder with some textfiles is more important than people's freedom. That is still fine for lots of use cases, but its whole framing by the FSF is what irks me.

hs86on Zotero 6

How good is Zotero as a bookmark manager similar to Pinboard.in or Raindrop.io? Both have a paid feature that stores a permanent copy of a site, but these are stored only on their servers, and Pinboard's archive download feature never worked for me.

hs86on Otter.ai has saved reporters hours transcribing interviews. Caveat emptor

If you are looking for a self-hosted Grammarly alternative, LanguageTool [0] might be for you.

I use LTeX [1] for VSCode, which sets up a local LanguageTool server, and its resource usage is quite significant. (I use it together with their n-gram data sets [2])

[0] https://dev.languagetool.org/

[1] https://github.com/valentjn/vscode-ltex

[2] https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-dat...

hs86on Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

They also changed how it loads new tweets for logged-in users. Now it shows something like "Show 36 Tweets" and jumps back to the top of the timeline by clicking on it.

They crippled Twitter on the web with these changes because going back to the old position on my timeline has become too tedious. Consequently, I spent less time on Twitter.

hs86on Ask HN: How often do you make a fresh OS install?

Initially Acronis, but then they dumped down their home version and started to make marginal paid upgrades every year. I am currently on Macrium Reflect, and so far, I have had no issues with it.

hs86on Ask HN: How often do you make a fresh OS install?

Never. On my Windows PC, my last fresh install was on Vista, and since then, I have made in-place upgrades and image restores when switching to new system drives. On macOS, I also never needed to clean install.

hs86on Why Electron Is a Necessary Evil

Especially, most of these chat apps have functionally similar web/PWA apps. In those cases, I prefer to install them as desktop PWAs or use Chrome's "Create shortcut" feature to get them into my Dock/Taskbar.

One little bonus is that my browser extensions also apply to these installed PWAs. For example, the Todoist PWA now shows me the Toggle icon next to each task as an easy shortcut to start the time tracker.

In my case, I have these running as Chrome PWAs:

  - Raindrop.io
  - Grammarly Editor
  - Todoist
  - Discord
  - Element
  - Whatsapp
  - Twitter

And these are still running as regular Electron/CEF apps:

  - 1Password
  - Obsidian
  - VSCode
  - Gitkraken
  - Slack
  - Spotify

Whenever the web alternative catches up with the Electron app, I move to the PWA. Probably the biggest drawback of this is that Firefox is not a suitable alternative for me anymore :( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407202

hs86on Show HN: Cleanvoice – Automated Podcast Editing

Reminds me of https://auphonic.com/

Their pricing is also similar, but Auphonic allows both subscription and prepaid "credits".

hs86on Error 404 (Not Found)

https://toggl.com/ is also affected.

hs86on Apple’s iOS versus Google’s Android

In the context of Don Norman's book, this is a bad design with hidden affordances and missing signifiers. How should a new user discover that they have to shake their phone to undo some text editing?

hs86on Apple’s iOS versus Google’s Android

My bias is ten years of Android before I switched to iOS, and I failed spectacularly to select multiple images in the Photos app and delete them. It seemed to work sometimes, and sometimes it would only drag the picture under my finger until I noticed a "Select" button in the upper right corner. Doing the same thing in the Google Photos app for iOS is so much easier, and it just works.™

Text input and editing are still my biggest hurdle on iOS. I make more typos than on Android, and editing text in input fields is always a strange experience. Selecting single words and correcting some letters still feels "alien" after over a half year on iOS.

hs86on Dropbox Sync does not natively support Apple Silicon

This feature is not available on Linux: https://www.dropbox.com/en/smart-sync

hs86on Dropbox Sync does not natively support Apple Silicon

My guess: Porting their kernel extension to ARM is not that trivial.

They were one of the first who offered these 0-byte placeholders, and they rely on a kernel driver, which is only available on both Windows and macOS (but not Linux).

OneDrive [0] and Box [1] are moving away from their implementations and switching to Apple's File Provider API. Their motive might be less development effort, and the official API might be good enough. Still, I wonder whether the deprecation of 3rd party kernel extensions might also be a reason to switch to such a "thin client".

Interestingly, Apple did something similar on Windows [2]: They are now using Microsoft's OneDrive implementation for their iCloud file sync client.

Now I am wondering what Dropbox will do. Is maintaining their kernel extension still feasible on macOS?

[0] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-bl...

[1] https://blog.box.com/get-more-secure-seamless-box-drive-expe...

[2] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2019/06/11/apple...

hs86on Kanidm: A simple, secure and fast identity management platform

Isn't the name also working in Turkish? https://translate.google.com/?sl=tr&tl=en&text=kan%C4%B1tlam...

The kanıdım conjugation is basically like "I did [verb]".

hs86on OpenSSL 3.0

For their next release, they should rename the project into OpenTLS and go back to version 1.0.

I think the advantages (it's funny) would heavily outweigh the disadvantages (everyone would hate them).

hs86on 1Password for Mac Moving to Electron

1Password and the Tower git client were somewhat similar: They started on native Mac first and years later introduced a native Windows version that lacked behind in features and polish.

1Password for Windows slowly(!) caught up, and even after all this investment, they decided that going for a web-based UI across all desktop OSes is the better solution.

Tower did not change this: Their Windows version is still lacking, and I am still confused by their website about which features are Mac-only and which are also on Windows.

Are they in a better position now for sticking with native apps? I stopped using them and moved to GitKraken that has the same UI across OSes. It is not as pleasing as that mature macOS version of Tower, but it is still better than constantly switching between an awesome and a "meh" app.

Maybe cross-platform consistency is more important than having one main attraction and multiple sideshows.

hs86on Show HN: Open-Source Chrome Extension for auto-grouping tabs by URL patterns

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...

This Chrome extension allows you to name and annotate your entire browser session in a tree structure, and unlike TST on Firefox, it is not limited to a single window. In addition, it allows you to unload entire subtrees, and you can restore subtrees (or the whole session) on another computer.

hs86on Custom domain names are coming to iCloud mail with iCloud+

I don't trust them. Apple's privacy efforts might be admirable, but I don't trust them to deliver a reliable service in the long run, especially on platforms that aren't their own or in platforms they declared as deprecated.

For example, most parts of iCloud are missing on Android, and their iCloud client for Windows has been broken for months or even years. Its log complains about launching iCloudDrive-AppX.exe while the install directory doesn't contain any executables with a "-AppX.exe" suffix. So no file syncing for me on Windows, I guess.

Having client site updates tied to major macOS/iOS releases is also sometimes causing strange issues if I still want to use older versions of macOS and iOS.

The happy path is only using devices from Apple and always staying on their latest OS release. No idea how attractive this new feature is for people who already use custom domains because they don't want to be tied to a single provider.

hs86on Apple brings Safari web browser extensions to iPhone and iPad with iOS 15

AdGuard for iOS offers both Safari Content Blockers and a local VPN/DNS for 3rd party apps. The significant difference is that Safari can apply cosmetic filters, while other browsers like Chrome leave ugly placeholders where the ads would have been.

Interestingly, AdGuard for Android allows full ad-blocking + cosmetic filtering in Chrome by installing a certificate that enables local MitMing of your TLS connections. I am both impressed and creeped out by this hack and how reliable it seems to work. :)

hs86on Twitter confirms Twitter Blue

With the old 3rd party clients I enjoyed using a linear timeline with a synced timeline position via Tweet Marker [0]. I would pay for their subscription if they enabled this for their official clients + web app.

[0] https://tweetmarker.net/

hs86on Hetzner has banned crypto mining and Chia farming

Operating a datacenter for crypto mining is a bit more than just having suitable GPUs for it.

If you rent out your servers at a fixed price and they can mine crypto on them for a profit, then there is a high chance that your flat-rate pricing is not high enough. They would need to consider their missed earnings from not mining themselves as an opportunity cost of renting out servers instead.