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Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

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Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

#431

I'm working on pure.md[1], which lets your scripts, APIs, apps, agents, etc reliably access web content in markdown format. Simply prefix any URL with `pure.md/` and you get the unblocked markdown content of that webpage. It avoids bot detection and renders JavaScript-heavy websites, and can convert HTML, PDFs, images, and more into pure markdown. pure.md acts as a global caching layer between LLMs and web content. I…

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Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

#432
post #422
post #45

https://github.com/Tombert/swanbar https://blog.tombert.com/posts/2025-03-22-swaybar/ I wanted some extra functionality for the Swaybar in the Sway Window Manager. I got a basic thing working with Bash, but I wanted more stuff, and so I rewrote it in Clojure with GraalVM. I think it's kind of cool, I ended up with a fairly elaborate async framework with multimethods and lots of configuration, and the entire thing has…

Really interesting. I'm bookmarking your comment for later. One thing you can do is separate the information fetching from your bar completely. I have a service that runs every minute or so to fetch available updates from the arch repositories (including aur), it writes its output to a file and then my bar regularly updates it's displayed information based on that file. I don't have the service definition uploaded an…

Yeah, the current design is kind of an iterative process; I started with a considerably simpler thing that just had the clock and date and currently selected program, and then I thought it might be neat to try and add add some async stuff and it ballooned from there.

I do have the state persisted in a msgpack binary, but the data fetching is done within the app. I don’t know that separating it out would necessarily be better, I kind of like that I have the pipeline set up on such a way that the fetching for sync and async stuff can be reused.

I am debating rewriting this to use the slightly lower level NIO selector class instead of core.async, but the memory on this is low enough to where I am not sure that it’s worth it.

I have been writing a lot of helper apps in Rust for Sway as well, mostly as an excuse to play with Rust more [1] [2].

I will take a look at your stuff. I have wanted an excuse to learn a bit more about Qt.

[1] https://github.com/Tombert/rs-new-sway-workspace

[2] https://github.com/Tombert/sway-workspace-indexer

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

#433
High quality translation app powered by ChatGPT:

High quality translation requires context. Mainstream translation apps (Google Translate) guess based on probabilities based on what the user would commonly mean, but this can results in confusing translations.

web: https://app.698expat.com

ios: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/698-expat/id6642713544

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

#437
I've got a self-hosted personal library management app more or less done here: https://github.com/seanboyce/ubiblio

An electronic board game similar to Settlers of Catan (https://github.com/seanboyce/Calculus-the-game), just received the much better full sized boards. Will assemble and test over the next few weeks, then document properly. I got the matte black PCBs, they look really cool.

A hardware quantum RNG. Made a mistake in the board power supply, but it still works well with cut trace and a bodge wire. Will probably fix the bug and put the results up in a few weeks. Can push out ~300 bytes of entropy a second, each as an MQTT message.

A hardware device that just does E2E encrypted chat (using Curve 25519). Microcontrollers only, no OS, and nothing ever stored locally. HDMI output (1024x768), Wi-Fi, and USB keyboard support. I originally designed it to use a vanilla MQTT broker, but I'm probably going to move it to HTTP and just write a little self-hosted HTTP service that handles message routing and ephemeral key registration. Right now the encryption, video output, and USB host works -- but it was a tangle of wires to fix the initial bugs, so I ordered new boards. Got to put those through testing, then move on to writing the server.

Iterating on hardware stuff is pretty slow. I try to test more than one bugfix in parallel on the same board. Iteration time is 2-3 weeks and 8$. If I have all the parts in stock. I don't have very much free time right now due to work, so this suits me fine. A rule I live by is that I must always be creating, so I think this is a reasonable compromise.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

#439
I am trying to finish the first draft of my whodunnit novel, before I hit the two-year anniversary from when I started out. I've had good periods with streaks where I write 45 minutes in the morning, but also longer periods where the project lies dormant. 100 pages in so far.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)

#440
I've been working on an alternative to JSON called XferLang, and along with that a "CLI construction kit" that will let the user create a CLI for interacting with RESTful APIs (and, eventually, more).

https://github.com/paulmooreparks/Xfer https://github.com/paulmooreparks/Xfer/tree/master/ParksComp...

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