Sign up

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin)

Not verified No WebSub updates Supports Webmention Not yet validated

🔥 All about software design, development, and culture. A mix of insightful and funny. Goes great with coffee. ☕

Generator
Ghost 6.65
Public lists
I ♥ RSS
Fetched

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

I Got $4.84 From a Class Action Settlement and They Really, Really Didn't Want Me to Have It

I Got $4.84 From a Class Action Settlement and They Really, Really Didn't Want Me to Have It

So here's the thing. When a company loses a class action lawsuit and has to pay millions to regular people, they don't just write you a check. They go out of their way to make sure you never actually get to spend your cut. I'

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — How to lose 2 hours

Weekend Reading — How to lose 2 hours

geekysteven


Tech Stuff

Zed I really like using Cursor but it's a huge IDE (basically VS Code) which takes forever to load and eats up too much memory and sometimes I have to restart it just to fix a broken extension. I started using Zed for the occasional

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — I do not think, therefore I do not am

Weekend Reading — I do not think, therefore I do not am

Natasha "Fragile Handle With Care" by Roman Pankoy (2020) Oil on canvas


Tech Stuff

Animata A collection of React + Tailwind animations and effects to enhance your UI. A pretty substantive collection of animated elements. You'll likely find a few for the marketing website, a handful that

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — Low-maintenance passive traffic calming

Weekend Reading — Low-maintenance passive traffic calming

Sophie Schmieg "Work moved to a new building. I didn't expect to take SAN damage from facilities."


Tech Stuff

Magic Notebook A free app, simple and elegant UI, no cloud sync, just open a folder and get working. Can handle DOCX, Markdown and text files. I

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

coolify-deploy — Vercel-style deploys on your own hardware

coolify-deploy — Vercel-style deploys on your own hardware

Introducing coolify-deploy — git push to your own server with the simplicity of a platform.

I used to host everything on Vercel and honestly it was great. Connect a repo, push, your app is live — simple enough that it spoils you fast.

When I outgrew the free tier I

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — Locally hosted torment nexus

Weekend Reading — Locally hosted torment nexus

John "Posted today by Lego on their official Instagram account. Well done, Lego, well done. 😁"


Tech Stuff

portless HTTPS for npm dev using .localhost URLs instead of port numbers:

Portless runs an HTTPS reverse proxy on port 443 by default. Each app registers a route mapping its

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — The background noise of the AI bubble

Weekend Reading — The background noise of the AI bubble

Fake Metro Trains "Due to ongoing delays with the delivery of our new Xtrapolis 2.0 trains, we've implemented some temporary measures to keep our network running."


Tech Stuff

What's actually new in JavaScript (and what's coming next) This is a helpful

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — Dream of bigger things

Weekend Reading — Dream of bigger things

GeriAQuin


Tech Stuff

Tolaria I just added this app this to my repertoire. I didn't get a chance to use it much yet, but it looks interesting — build a knowledge you can share with your AI that's version controlled and doesn't require an

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — Penguin drama

Niki "Most useless sign in the universe"


Tech Stuff

ShowMD The Markdown space is heating up 🔥 Today I installed a Markdown editor (Scratch), upgraded my Markdown viewer (mud), and setup this Markdown QuickLook previewer (ShowMD).

erictli/scratch Minimalist, offline-first markdown note-taking app for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — Look Away

Weekend Reading — Look Away

Someone Turned an Old Ford Van Into a Mini Semi and It’s Fantastic


Tech Stuff

LookAway This is one app I have to run on my Mac. It forces me to take a break every 45 minutes — not a Pomodoro break (which I never got the hang

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — For entertainment purposes only

Weekend Reading — For entertainment purposes only

Natasha "Perfect for Easter, EGGO is a two piece construction toy"


Tech Stuff

PopTask As a concept I find this super interesting — a task list that lives in the menu bar and understands human inputs like "evry tue thu 7 30 n sat mrng". Supports

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — The paperwork flood

Holeintheheadesign


Tech Stuff

HopTab Open source app switcher and tiler to replace Cmd+Tab. If you Cmd+Tab a lot you may find this app quite useful.

Number, currency, and unit formatting

Did you know that the mathematical value 1234.56 looks different in Boston, Berlin, and Bangalore? Hardcoding formats

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — First roll back, then debug

Weekend Reading — First roll back, then debug

Lady Laura "Pack of Dogs by John Littleboy"


Tech Stuff

Infisical I'm trying this service as a replacement for Doppler. Seems to have more capabilities plus it's an open-source project you can self-host (if you so care). Does feel overwhelming at first with all

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — Happy π day!

Weekend Reading — Happy π day!

Mina "It's PiDay!"


Tech Stuff

How to Do Code Reviews in the Agentic Era I've been working on open-source for over 25 years, I suspect that's why I accept The LLM as just another project contributor:

My “unpopular” take: I

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — Go forth and prompt

Weekend Reading — Go forth and prompt

cliff538 "What a great artistic reuse of old license plates!"


Tech Stuff

Shepherd "Stay focused. Grow your sheep." Chrome extension that auto-categorizes thousands of sites as productive, neutral, or distracting—keep using productive sites and watch your sheep grow. If Pomodoro timer did nothing for

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — Sunlight with ads

Weekend Reading — Sunlight with ads

ConnectionWithWonder "Knitted bollard-warmer Weymouth"


Tech Stuff

UNF* Records every version of a file and can easily rewind back without having to manually commit changes. Perfect if you're working with AI agents and don't trust them. Also perfect if you're just prone to

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — Known to cause boys in yards

Weekend Reading — Known to cause boys in yards

Marcel "It's embarrassing how quickly a bit of sunshine can change my mood."


Tech Stuff

Current is a new RSS reader that’s more like a river than an inbox If you want to enjoy RSS give Current a try. $9.99 as a one-time

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — The Cone of Uncertainty

Weekend Reading — The Cone of Uncertainty

Dinosa Labs "Bueno, ahora sí, os presento a CLOROPLASTO, la minúscula ciudad de la fotosíntesis 🪄✨🌱😌"


Tech Stuff

npmx If you search for npm packages frequently, give npmx a try. It's much faster and the UI is an

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — Load bearing post

Weekend Reading — Load bearing post

David Zinn "Jen’s response to winter is to wear big boots and keep on stomping."


Tech Stuff

pandoc for the people The pandoc wasm web-app is now available and allows to run any kind of document conversion that pandoc supports in the browser. The documents never

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — A very British problem

Weekend Reading — A very British problem

Stéphane Bortzmeyer


Tech Stuff

Craft Agents Claude Cowork is the Claude Code brains for working with office documents (Word docs, presentations, etc) which I think is a powerful idea. Yet, I just started using Craft Agents and I like it much better—similar in spirit to Cowork,

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — Universe closed, use Rainbow

Natasha In "Albuquerque, NM, Rainbow road runs parallel to Universe blvd."


Tech Stuff

Pencil The demo looks amazing, basically an MCP server that can design your product with pixel-perfect precision. Let Claude Code be your canvas. (via Vinicius)

Ian Betteridge

Then, in 1999, Adobe InDesign was released, and

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Rentail.space Launches AI-Powered Marketplace Connecting Businesses with Short-Term Retail Spaces

Rentail.space, an AI-powered specialty lease marketplace, today announced its official launch, transforming how businesses discover and secure short-term retail spaces in shopping centers across the United States and Canada.

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — A server raclette

Weekend Reading — A server raclette

MTV Rewind If you miss MTV from back when it was a TV station that plays music, aka the good old days.


Tech Stuff

dbreunig/whenwords This is seriously cool. A library that provides timeago ("in 3 days"), duration ("2h 30m"), parse_duration, human_date ("

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — So close to the end of the world

Weekend Reading — So close to the end of the world

Laura Manach


Tech Stuff

Convert & Compress When you need to process a batchload of files: convert them to a different format, limit their width/height, compress with specific quality loss, etc.

(* To make sure my webapp is performing well, I run a script that goes through all files in

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — Sparkling spaces

Weekend Reading — Sparkling spaces

ARGVMI~1.PIF "Well, you can't say you weren't warned."


Tech Stuff

How I wrote JustHTML using coding agents

Yes. JustHTML is about 3,000 lines of Python with 8,500+ tests passing. I couldn't have written it this quickly without the

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — This heater is from space

Weekend Reading — This heater is from space

Street Art Utopia "Painted Octopus! By Lumen Street Theatre in Limerick, Ireland."


Tech Stuff

Building a Toast Component This is the story of Sonner, why they came up with that name, how they managed animation and stacking, momentum-based gestures, and more. I love Sonner, the API is so

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — The “Can that wait till January?” club

David Zinn "Claude’s secret to surviving winter is having a grandma who knits."


Tech Stuff

W4G1/multithreading The missing standard library for multithreading in JavaScript. Supports modern browsers, Node.js, Deno, and Bun.

voici.js Print tables on the terminal — more evolved than console.table

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — Torment Nexus is financially sound

Slirt "Don't forget to save enough SPACE for dessert... Nanu-nanu!"


Tech Stuff

Respinner For when you need React spinner components.

Rebane 🤯

cursed CSS trick: use the Q unit instead of px, it looks almost the same and saves a character

doxx You can now view

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — Increase time in the bathroom

Real Life Bog Person "My SIL has informed me that this exists in Auburn WA. I have a new place to visit!"


Tech Stuff

Grila If you calendar a lot you're going to love this app: a keyboard-driven calendar.

Pure CSS Tabs With Details, Grid, and

Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Supports Webmention
Text • Assaf Arkin

Weekend Reading — 404 bragawatts

John S Russell "Where I post from."


Tech Stuff

Zod + TypeScript: Schema Validation Made Easy Learn how to use Zod, a TypeScript schema validation library that allows you to validate external data at runtime.

abbiistabbii

ftw you realise that pacman is short for Package Manager and you start