Hacker News: Instantnoodl

New comment by Instantnoodl in "Sales and Dungeons: Thermal printer TTRPG utility"

Instantnoodl — Sun, 24 May 2026 05:36:49 +0000

For daily to-dos a generic 58mm Chinese ones is probably enough. For pen and paper stuff I highly recommend going with anything 80mm, as 58mm can be too narrow...

Search "58mm usb thermal receipt printer esc/pos" on Amazon and you will find various generic models

New comment by Instantnoodl in "Sales and Dungeons: Thermal printer TTRPG utility"

Instantnoodl — Sun, 24 May 2026 05:33:53 +0000

Thanks for posting my project! was wondering where the influx of GitHub stars came from :)

New comment by Instantnoodl in "Show HN: Thermal Receipt Printers – Markdown and Web UI"

Instantnoodl — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:24:31 +0000

That's the approach I used for my thermal printer based project. Render HTML/CSS to B/W Image and then print it on the thermal printer.

https://sales-and-dungeons.app/

New comment by Instantnoodl in "Advancing AI Benchmarking with Game Arena"

Instantnoodl — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:11:27 +0000

Cool to see core war! I feel it's mostly forgotten by now. My dad is still playing it to this day though and even attends tournaments

New comment by Instantnoodl in "ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering"

Instantnoodl — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 08:08:21 +0000

Isn't your problem more about Color quantization than about dithering? If you have big character cells like in a terminal dithering won't help you much. For each cell you want to find the best shaped cell and a foreground and background colour that are the closest to a colour from the supported palette.

But maybe I didn't understand your real problem yet

New comment by Instantnoodl in "ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering"

Instantnoodl — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 12:23:08 +0000

Sorry for the confusion. The use-case is a little difference because the goal is to display the image as close to the original as possible with the limitation of only being able to use a forground color, background color and character per cell. The character is selected based on it's shape just like in the article. So if you get rid of the colors in Chafa you end up with something similar to the article. That's what I wanted to say :D

New comment by Instantnoodl in "ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering"

Instantnoodl — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 06:49:37 +0000

In the "Image to Terminal character" space this is also a known solution. Map characters to their shape and then pick the one with the lowest diff to the real chunk in the image. If you consider that you have a foreground and a background colour you can get a pretty close image in the terminal :D

https://hpjansson.org/chafa/

My go version: https://github.com/BigJk/imeji

New comment by Instantnoodl in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)"

Instantnoodl — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 07:09:59 +0000

"90s black metal Pokémon" aka a first person roguelike dungeon crawler with monster collection elements. C++ with no engine :)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3460840/Gloamvault/

New comment by Instantnoodl in "Sales and Dungeons"

Instantnoodl — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 18:28:32 +0000

Thank you for posting my project :D

New comment by Instantnoodl in "Guten: A Tiny Newspaper Printer"

Instantnoodl — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 21:54:39 +0000

You can often times find them for really cheap on the secondary market. Like old ones from a restaurant. I got quite a few for very cheap over the years. One was 20$ for a 80mm one.

So maybe that's a low budget option to tinker for you? Or is the problem buying one at all?

New comment by Instantnoodl in "Guten: A Tiny Newspaper Printer"

Instantnoodl — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 21:51:17 +0000

Always happy to see other thermal printer projects :D

I have my own project for using these for TTRPGs: https://sales-and-dungeons.app/

New comment by Instantnoodl in "Ask HN: What's Your Morning Routine?"

Instantnoodl — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 20:10:39 +0000

Always stand up at 07:00 am. Take supplements against my migrains with a good amount of tap water. Eat the same oatmeal with some cacao powder and oat milk just to get some food in my system. Then I do about 45 - 60 min of Japanese language reviews. At 08:00 I sit down in my work area and start working. No coffee/caffeine.

This is how 90% of my workdays go for the last 1.5 years :)

New comment by Instantnoodl in "Λ-2D: An Exploration of Drawing as Programming Language"

Instantnoodl — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 13:01:07 +0000

That looks like a fun project to build!

New comment by Instantnoodl in "SSH Remoting"

Instantnoodl — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 11:02:27 +0000

I switched from Goland to Zed. Works really well. Only missing debugger support... After that it would be perfect for my usage :)

New comment by Instantnoodl in "SSH Remoting"

Instantnoodl — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 10:59:35 +0000

I tried to use zeds SSH remoting for a work project. Typescript with big codebase and sadly the performance is a rollercoaster. Types sometimes load so slow that it's unusable. VSCode remote doesn't seem to have this problem, although I'm not sure yet if it's really just a zed problem. I would need to try it with some more isolated use-case. Still happy to see the progress! I switched to zed for a lot of my private dev work already

New comment by Instantnoodl in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (October 2024)"

Instantnoodl — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 08:13:09 +0000

Thanks a lot! Thermal printer as DIY thingy are quite a niche, but they are very fun to play around with

New comment by Instantnoodl in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (October 2024)"

Instantnoodl — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 06:11:50 +0000

The same project I'm working on since about 5 years. Using thermal printer as TTRPG utility :)

https://sales-and-dungeons.app/

New comment by Instantnoodl in "Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer"

Instantnoodl — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 18:01:23 +0000

I use Thermal Printer for a different use-case (TTRPG stuff). Feel free to check it out :)

https://github.com/BigJk/snd

New comment by Instantnoodl in "Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?"

Instantnoodl — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 05:02:20 +0000

Thermal Printer as D&D / TTRPG utility: https://github.com/BigJk/snd

New comment by Instantnoodl in "Role of Deliberate Practice in the Development of Creativity (2014)"

Instantnoodl — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 15:00:47 +0000

This! Most of my creativity in private projects stems from having build a broad space of knowledge/experiences. Having tinkered with a lot of different disconnected things really helps me find interesting bits to combine in a new and creative way that I never had imagined before :)