Labnotes

πŸ”₯ Weekend Reading

I write a weekly email for people in tech.

Tools and products you should know about, tips about UX, management, infosec; random and funny stuff

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Weekend Reading β€” A sourdough finisher

CrankGPT The human-powered, local-first, private AI. Tech Stuff Lettera Based on Bear's remarkable Markdown editor, a standalone app for editing Markdown files from your file system. I like Bear's Markdown editing, so I think Lettera is an interesting idea. Currently beta release, so no

Read more 7 min read

Weekend Reading β€” Future-proofed like there’s no tomorrow!

Neil "Just because you can...." Tech Stuff OfficeCLI A CLI to help AI create/read/edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. Open source and doesn't require a Microsoft Office license. I just installed this for the benefit of my 3 AI agents that have to deal

Read more 11 min read

Weekend Reading β€” Little Bobby ignore all previous instructions

Frechrotz_Pix 'Lego- bzw. Klemmbausteine' Tech Stuff pitchfork A devilishly good daemons manager: start/stop daemon, automatic restarts, health checks, file watching, cron scheduling, and many more useful features. Greg Wilson OH: "Their version of agile is, we can keep changing our mind until it's

Read more 7 min read

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'

Read more 5 min read
May 30th, 2026 9 min read

Weekend Reading β€” 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

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May 23rd, 2026 8 min read

Weekend Reading β€” 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

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May 16th, 2026 8 min read

Weekend Reading β€” 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

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May 14th, 2026 2 min read

coolify-deploy β€”Β Vercel-style deploys on your own hardware

Introducing coolify-deploy β€” 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 β€” simple enough that it spoils you fast. When I outgrew the free tier I upgraded

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May 9th, 2026 8 min read

Weekend Reading β€” 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 hostname

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