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€” It's gettin' hot in here …

Tjeerd Royaards "Hot. Cartoon from last year." Tech Stuff DevCleaner Free space on your Mac that's currently used by the caches of Xcode, npm, Cursor, Claude, et al. Runs local, minimum memory footprint, and there's a free version. Cotypist Text auto-complete that runs

Read more 7 min read

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
June 1st, 2026 5 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'

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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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