Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

Cool project. A couple of years ago I was gifted "One-Plank Woodworking Projects" by Andy Standing for Christmas (which is great). It's a book of plans for things you can build with, obviously, one standard plank of wood. That might be a decent addition to the filters: rather than project type or tools available, what wood does the user has to hand.

Larger puzzles in my puzzle game[1].

And some yak shaving in the form of selective zoom, where only the board would zoom in but the clues around the board would still remain visible.

[1]: https://lab174.com/nonoverse

I'm building an uptime monitoring service, in Elixir, called https://larm.dev. It's a tough field because for some reason people vibe coding apps think this is very easy to do, and there are new apps coming out pretty much every day. I'm still figuring out how to effectively stand out in the noise.

I really enjoy working on the app though. The backend is Elixir, with a Phoenix LiveView dashboard. I've got a cluster of 3 nodes running, talking to each other. The probes that check the monitoring targets are tiny go binaries, spread across hosting providers across the world. I've also got synthetic probes now, running in little playwright sandboxes.

A lot of the challenges have been around how to distribute work across the probes, with different strategies for the basic TCP/HTTP probes vs the synthetic workers, and how to effectively store large amounts of events (Clickhouse).

I have a keyboard I bought in 2020 called the Makerdiary M60 keyboard. It runs Python, and over the years I've coded in various functions. But it was somewhat buggy, and the upstream firmware was never upgraded.

I love the hardware because it's the only keyboard I've been able to find that keeps a live Bluetooth connection and lets you toggle back and forth between USB and Bluetooth instantly using only a keyboard shortcut. That means you use two computers, and switch back and forth as fast as you can type. Years ago I also added a feature that changes the backlight color based on the active connection, so you can instantly tell which computer your typing will go to. I haven't been able to find any other keyboard that's quite as nice.

Lately I've spent weeks using an LLM to update the extremely old keyboard firmware to the latest firmware of its components (e.g., Circuitpython, the BLE firmware, the boot loader) and implementing all of my dream keyboard features that I never had the gumption to spend hours implementing pre-LLM. I finally resolved years-old bugs, and I added things like layer-based backlighting (so that the individual keys with relevant functions are lit), a better battery gauge, better sleep/suspend timing, backlight calibration, better debounce, and so on.

I've also upgraded the hardware and added batteries to each of the keyboards (I have three of these, one at home, one in the office, and one for travel).

It has been a very satisfying project, finally scratching a years-old itch.

Looks great, I would like to try it out. Can you recommend any OBD2 adapter? I’m driving a Ford from 2019.