Saturday, 14 December 2024

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I Track My Health Data in Markdown: Lessons in Digital Longevity
5 by biohackerking | 3 comments
I’ve spent years tracking my sleep, diet, and exercise with apps and wearables. But here’s the problem: when an app gets discontinued or stops syncing, the data—and all the insights—disappear. That’s why I’ve adopted a “file over app” philosophy for health tracking. Instead of relying on apps, I save everything in open, accessible formats like Markdown or CSV. These files are local, portable, and universally readable—ensuring my data outlives any app or platform. Here’s how I do it: • Workouts, meals, and sleep logs go into plain text notes. • Trends and averages (e.g., weekly sleep hours) are calculated in Google Sheets. • Files sync to the cloud (Google Drive) and back up locally. For example, my sleep log might look like this: ### Sleep Log (December 2024) - 12/01: 7.5 hrs (11:00 PM - 6:30 AM) - 12/02: 6 hrs (12:30 AM - 6:30 AM) - Felt tired, adjusted bedtime. - 12/03: 8 hrs (10:30 PM - 6:30 AM) Why this matters: • Plain text lasts. It’s universally accessible and won’t be rendered useless if an app shuts down. • You stay in control. Apps come and go, but your files remain intact and usable for the long haul. If you’re curious about the latest insights on health and longevity, I share them weekly in my newsletter "longer." https://ift.tt/KfgtFzZ

Sunday, 10 November 2024

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Western Digital SSDs and Legacy Macs
7 by Sevan777 | 2 comments


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Show HN: I made a tiny device for automatically recording digital pianos
53 by chipweinberger | 21 comments
Hey HN! A few years ago, I left my cushy big tech job to make hardware. And made the device I always wanted - an automatic piano recorder! I usually play piano improvisationally, and manually hitting record never meshed well with that. But there are always moments I wish I recorded, and now they are! Hopefully it scratches a similar itch for some of you as well! A few of the tech details: * built on an esp32-s3 * custom injection molded enclosure * BLE comms, sd card storage, DS1302 RTC * android & ios apps with Flutter * Shadertoy vfx support for video sharing - Chip

Thursday, 17 October 2024

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DigitalRiver/MyCommerce stopped paying vendors since July
47 by grujicd | 14 comments
We're a small family company and the $20k MyCommerce owes us is a big deal. For those who don't know MyCommerce is a platform for selling software online. They're merchant of record, they handle taxes, generate license keys, etc so they're a bit higher level than Stripe or PayPal. We're with them since 2005. Things started going south in August. July payment was due on August 15 but never came. Few days afterwards they sent and email that they're changing contract terms and that payments will now be sent 60 days instead of 15 days after the month. Sadly, I didn't switch to another payment processor immediately that day - accountants were on holiday, we were investigating our options, and we were generally happy for 20 years with them. We switched only in September, where they worsened contract terms even more, introducing monthly fee, hourly fee for support, increased payment thresholds, etc. By the time we switched, MyCommerce already sat on entire revenue from July, August, and half of September. Their support is not helpful. This is not only about us, it's about myriad other vendors, mostly small ones. Unfortunately, we didn't have online space to share our findings and experiences. I only found today that it was discussed on kvraudio forum, and a bit on LinkedIn. There are many small vendors who are now in a hole for tens of thousands of dollars/euros. It looks pretty much that MyCommerce / DigitarRiver Gmbh are in financial trouble. There are news of layoffs and new management. It's questionable whether we'll see any of our money and when. But the troubling part is MyCommerce still operates and takes orders. If there are vendors who still only know about what MyCommerce officially told them and wait for delayed payments - please reconsider your position. https://ift.tt/bm5nwFH https://ift.tt/efHVa4M https://ift.tt/BXvV1Rg

Tuesday, 17 September 2024

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Show HN: Waulog – A digital companion for dog owners
3 by xyborg | 4 comments
I've built Waulog ( https://waulog.com ), a web app to help dog owners track their pets' health and activities. It features: - Activity logging (walks, meals, etc.) - Health monitoring (weight, vomits, feeding schedule) - Family sharing for coordinated care - QR code profiles for lost dogs - 100% Free As a dog owner, I created this to solve my own pain points. I'd love feedback from the HN community, especially on: 1. Additional features you'd find useful 2. UX improvements 3. Privacy concerns and how to address them Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated!

Saturday, 14 September 2024

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Show HN: I made a digital circuit drawing and simulation game
6 by rafinha | 0 comments
Inspired by games like Turing Complete/Virtual Circuit Board/Logic World, I tried to make a mix of aseprite and wiredworld/wired-logic, the idea being the user can build a digital circuit using a "fullstack" pixelart creation workflow. The circuit is just an image. The primitives are (i) connected wires which have undefined, 0 or 1 state during simulation (displayed brighter or darker in function of the state) and (ii) NANDs, which are little pixel triangles. During simulation the user can interact with any wire by clicking on it, toggling its state, which is cool for messing around when learning. The simulation uses a unit-delay event driven algorithm. Then, on top of that there are little wire interfaces on the left side of the image that communicate with an external system. This external system is defined in lua and is simulated together with the main circuit (they alternate until convergence). By default there's a sandbox mode with a clock and a power-on-reset signal. The user can choose other "levels", where the API change and there are some problems to solve, from finding if a number is multiple of 3 to solving hanoi tower to finding if a number is prime. The idea is that if the user want to learn but not sure what to do they can try to solve these puzzles, or they can change the lua scripts to add their own stuff/interface for a custom project. I've also included a small wiki (circuitopedia) with some basic digital concepts to guide those who are new or are a bit rusty. It's not super detailed but I guess it can at the very least present the concepts so the user can dig further on more serious material if they want to. I developed the game in C with raylib, with scripting in lua/luajit. I've put the game on steam (for windows) and released the source code on github under GPLv3. There's also a web demo version on itch.io, even though it's a bit laggy: https://ift.tt/vYRTsAJ... . Feedback is appreciated!

Friday, 12 July 2024

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Show HN: Daminik – An Open source digital asset manager
8 by poolie | 5 comments
Hey guys! We just published our little open source project on GitHub and would love to get some feedback. It's a very early release (alpha) but we thought it would be better to do it earlier so that we could get direct feedback. Over the last 10 years we have built small to large web-projects of all kind. Almost every project involved managing images and files in one way or another. How do we manage our images and where? What happens if an image or logo changes, does it get updated across all sites? Which Host/CDN to choose? Is everything we do GDPR-compliant? With Daminik, we are trying to build a simple solution to solve these problems. One DAM with an integrated CDN. That’s it. You can check it out at: https://ift.tt/BDIK2wd (hackernews being the invitation code) Repo: https://ift.tt/Dzly3bU We would love to get your guys feedback on our alpha.

Sunday, 19 May 2024

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Show HN: Digital player board for Terraforming Mars
3 by sakerbos | 1 comments
My cousin and I love the Terraforming Mars board game. But we'd often get overly excited and knock our pieces off of our boards, losing track of our progress. So I digitised it. It comes with a few cool features like resource conversions (e.g. converting plants to greenery), production phase, offline, mobile-friendly and keeps track of the history using the browser history itself. Sharing this here in case there are any other TM fans that could also find some use in this :)

Saturday, 9 March 2024

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Show HN: Digital Superpowers, a free book highlighting various FOSS tools
14 by acidburnNSA | 2 comments
I wrote this intermediate-level book as a showcase of various FOSS, mostly command line tools. I'm a nuclear engineer and found myself teaching other nuclear, mechanical, and electrical engineers these tools again and again, so I wanted to package them into book form. I attempted to make it even broader interest, so it's not just about engineering. In the end, it's a fairly eclectic set of topics. Anyway, after selling for a few years, I just decided to release a slightly updated version of it in full for free. You'll find full HTML, PDF and ePub versions (all built with Sphinx) at the link.

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Digital Audio Mixer Pt.2
5 by bo0tzz | 0 comments