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This week's summary
Night Reader is available on the AppStore!
You can download it from here for €2,99.
It's priced at 1.25 x coffee price in my local coffee shop. I chose the price based on my own usage. I spent ca. 2 hours using it in the past two weeks.
Psst. If you can't pay for it, hit me up and I'll send you a promo code.
Writing, other
I've experimented with much smaller, less technical notes. People seem to like my linguistics related content. Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal ended up on the front page of HN and generated some fun discussions in the comments. I can see that 1 in every 6-8 articles I post gets popular on the orange website, which is surprising given the subject matter. I will not focus on that too much for the same reason untested doesn't use analytics: I want to share the stuff that's important to me in the first place and then do my best job to make it interesting, useful or at least entertaining to you. I find it easier to be earnest when I'm writing to a friend, rather than performing.
Next week
- rename Night Reader as there's a different reading app with the same name. Current contenders: Ink, Night Mode, Moonlit, Lunar, Midnight
- post a follow-up to Communication is Action (working title Stories Help Us Learn, Teach and Remember)
- bite the bullet and market night Reader enough to convert those sweet words and pixels into a bowl of noodles at my local ramen place.
Favourite project(s)
Dobb·E: On Bringing Robots Home — an open-source framework for building household robots, trained via imitation learning. Apparently giving the robot a sock lowers the error rate by 80%.
Ansel— an Open Source alternative to Lightroom. If you're still using Adobe, check out my list of alternatives. Most of them are free and easier to use anyway (speaking as someone who used Photoshop since AD 2000).
Letterbird — my friends at Good Enough designed a simple, private, enshittification-resistant contact form. (I'm not getting paid for this, I just like them.)
Sewer Rave by Autumn Rain — There's a giant rat rave happening in the sewers and you're invited!
Whisky — Whisky is a WINE powered tool allowing you to run PC games on MacOS. It relies on Apple Porting Toolkit, so you should expect pretty good performance. I see it as a free, slightly leaner, rougher around the edges alternative to CrossOver. Also, the guy who wrote it is barely old enough to use Night Reader (17)!
Favourite site
Studio Folly — sharing mostly because of the Gubbins related artwork featured on their main page. Big missed opportunity to use <marquee></marquee> for the top page header!
musicforprogramming.net/latest/— Wake up babe, new musicforprogramming just dropped. If you haven't listened to the older versions, here's my favourite episode(just wait till Alice Coltrane pays a visit).
2D Will Never Die — a blog devoted to arcade games and 80s to mid-90s aesthetic. Sharing mostly because it tickled a few neurons in my thought sponge that haven't been tickled for some time.
Favourite piece of tech
Yashica Mat 124g— my camera, listed in my Default Apps 2023 note. It's 53 years old still works beautifully. Also, one of my favourite visual artists (Francesca Woodman) used it in her work.
https://ggml.ai — a C library allowing to run large ML models on commodity hardware. It powers llamafile and whisper.cpp.
Saxophone Ring Thing — it's a ring thing that helps you learn how to play the saxophone! By Greg.
Make WordArt - Online word art generator — it's a WordArt editor, that's it!
Interesting articles
Why I love the London coding scene — sharing because of saudade. I was looking for places like this when I lived in London, but I'm starting to feel that I needed to leave to be able to find them (Say Hi helped). Visit for links to communities and experiments. If you live in the UK, meet those people, they seem like a cool bunch.
IndieWeb Events | IndieWeb Events — speaking of meeting people, here's a calendar of IndieWeb related events!
iA Writer 7 — last week I published a note on the iA approach to AI assisted writing. iA Writer 7 contains the first LLM-powered feature and... I'm still digesting my thoughts on the implementation, so will refrain from any opinions. Give it a read and let me know what you think.
llamafile is the new best way to run an LLM on your own computer — Simon Willis wrote a 5-minute tutorial on how to set up a offline, perfectly private LLM on your machine, using llamafile. llamafile is a cross-platform executable containing model weights, GUI and a simple web server. It worked as fast as GPT4 on my crappy M1 MacBook Air. I can't wait till we have more offline-first, private, OSS models, Open AI creeps me out.
Get started with technical writing — I don't do much strictly technical writing here, but I think that the article is worth at least a skim, mainly because it focuses more on practice and experiences of authors, rather than prescriptive advice. And, you know my opinion on writing advice.
A Complete Guide to CSS Grid | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks — a (very) comprehensive guide to CSS Grid. If you're struggling with layout in CSS, give it a go. Things are so much easier than they used to be.
Creating a Fluid Type Scale with CSS Clamp — A few months back I shared utopia—an online tool to generate CSS vars for fluid type scales and layout. This article provides some good theoretical foundations behind fluid typography.
Things I wrote last week that people liked
Thanks for reading! See you on Monday!
P.S. Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal reminded me of a different (Sufi) citrus, and this song by Mohsen Namjoo (who I consider the Iranian Bob Dylan)
See you next week!
