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peterbhnews

85 karma · joined October 13, 2019

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peterbhnews··on Ferrari Luce
You can configure it in 3 different shades of red, including the traditional Rosso Scuderia.
peterbhnews··on Programming FPGAs on macOS
The common wisdom is that you need a VM to program FPGAs on MacOS. If you're willing to make compromises about which platform you're targeting, the common wisdom is wrong. In this video I show two different workflows to target Lattice ICE40 based FPGAs from native MacOS.
peterbhnews··on Show HN: Invoice Dragon – An open source app to create PDF invoices
A lot of the complexity of invoicing isn't in the PDF generation (which this tool does a wonderful job of doing, nice work!) but on the side of tracking which invoices are open vs. paid, which ones are aging, whether there are discounts that can be applied for early payment, and of course integration with whatever accounting tools you're using.

But this looks like a great, simple tool for people who need to occasionally send an invoice or two. Thanks for sharing it.

peterbhnews··on Real World Divorce
Yes.
peterbhnews··on Real World Divorce
I knew this article was written by Greenspun within 2 paragraphs. It's really sad to see someone otherwise talented and intelligent devolve into the conspiracy-theory laden mindset of a man broken by his own relationship mistakes.
peterbhnews··on GnuCash – Open-source personal and small-business accounting software
I have. All of the plain text accounting packages are optimizing to solve the exact wrong problem. The reality is that even if you are using a commercial package, it's generally not hard to get a CSV (or something like it) OUT of the software. What you actually need for a sufficiently complex financial life is input validation, and that's exactly the problem that plain text accounting software punts on.

Gnucash has a lot of cruft and definitely feels like it was written in 2003, but it does address this issue and provides the basic input validation you need to minimize errors.

The other issue with plain text accounting software is most of it only flags errors after you 'compile' your books (or, more properly, run them through some sort of command-line tool), which is far too late to make data entry convenient. (Some of them have web-based tools, like beancounts "fava" package, that act more like Gnucash...but at that point the term "plain text accounting" loses all meaning IMO, you're just using another client, so why not use a better one?

peterbhnews··on The Plain Text Project
You say this but I bet most of the people who style themselves plain text purist really do mean ASCII.