Hacker News: merelysounds

New comment by merelysounds in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

merelysounds — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:07:59 +0000

Nonoverse[1], a nonogram puzzle game.

I’m prioritizing user experience and QoL features, I’d like to build something calming and user friendly.

I recently added support for user generated puzzles - here’s a nonogram that I drew just now[2].

[1]: https://lab174.com/nonoverse/

[2]: https://lab174.com/nonoverse/play/custom/N4IgbiBcCMA0IGcogHR...

New comment by merelysounds in "Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses"

merelysounds — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:09:58 +0000

> Every reasonable variation of the company name as a .com/.net/.org was taken, including company.com

Even then it seems better to come up with a different prefix, or suffix (or both!), just to stay with ‘.com’.

Of course hindsight is 20/20 and I did the same, my personal homepage used to have a ‘.xyz’ address.

New comment by merelysounds in "Retro-Tech Parenting"

merelysounds — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 10:52:59 +0000

> I’ve curated some sites about how to (...), or different ways to tie your shoes.

Perhaps Ian's Shoelace Site[1], a very informative and user friendly website that has been continuously updated for two decades at least. I'm now curious what are the other curated websites.

[1]: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/

New comment by merelysounds in "GoPro warned it may not survive"

merelysounds — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:31:32 +0000

I hope they are working hard on the xpro4!

Retro styled cameras are only gaining in popularity; the competition is increasing, but Fujifilm has a big head start.

And still many concepts to try out. We have yet to see true manual focus confirmation in stills mode (something a retro nikon zf has been praised for), or an autofocus capable lens with a distance scale (leica q style).

New comment by merelysounds in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

merelysounds — Mon, 11 May 2026 07:29:07 +0000

An image logic puzzle game about nonograms[1] called Nonoverse[2].

I’m automating App Store media creation; both screenshots and app preview videos can now be recorded automatically; this way they should stay up to date and show correct content for a given locale.

I’m also adding translations; if anyone would like to help (with translating or testing new locales) let me know!

Early results are already live in the App Store page.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonogram

[2]: https://lab174.com/nonoverse/

New comment by merelysounds in "Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected"

merelysounds — Mon, 04 May 2026 07:52:46 +0000

Surprisingly, there were DRM games praised for good UX, only these were hardware releases.

When Switch 1 launched, it got re-releases (eg: Diablo 3) that were: 1. complete editions with DLCs, 2. came on a cartridge that one could swap between devices or sell, 3. supported offline play.

Online game stores were supposed to offer better UX than hardware releases. I find it interesting, and perhaps a sign of how bad the online experience can get, that the opposite can happen too.

New comment by merelysounds in "Auto Polo"

merelysounds — Fri, 01 May 2026 08:50:06 +0000

I guess the modern day equivalent (technology that’s relatively new, unsafe and unregulated) would be electric scooter polo? I found no sign of a sport like this though.

I think kick scooter polo exists. And bike polo[1] is well known.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcourt_Bike_Polo

New comment by merelysounds in "Apple reports second quarter results"

merelysounds — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:40:52 +0000

I couldn’t find information about discontinuation in the article - did I miss it or is there another source?

Edit, I found this: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/29/apple-vision-pro-m5-flo... - seems like rumors; but perhaps as close to an announcement as we’ll ever get.

New comment by merelysounds in "London to Calcutta by Bus (2022)"

merelysounds — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 07:05:56 +0000

This bus route has its own Wikipedia page, well deserved too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London%E2%80%93Calcutta_bus_se...

New comment by merelysounds in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

merelysounds — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 08:55:20 +0000

I guess we don’t know what the agent would do after seeing these warnings and a request for extra action.

Perhaps it would stop and rethink, perhaps it would focus on the fact that extra action is needed - and perform that automatically.

I suppose the decision would depend on multiple factors too (model, prompt, constraints).

New comment by merelysounds in "Self-updating screenshots"

merelysounds — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 07:14:34 +0000

Fastlane is a local, open source CLI tool.

> 100% open source under the MIT license

See: https://docs.fastlane.tools/

It doesn’t support App Preview automation, this is something that I had to script myself.

New comment by merelysounds in "Self-updating screenshots"

merelysounds — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 03:24:10 +0000

This is very useful in mobile projects.

App stores require screenshots, but generating N images for NUMBER_OF_SCREEN_SIZES times NUMBER_OF_LOCALIZATIONS can be a chore.

In the past I wrote my own scripts for that, today tools like Fastlane[1] help.

I use Fastlane for my logic puzzle game Nonoverse[2], you can see sample screenshots in its App Store page.

I also automated App Preview video recording, complete with multiple scenes. If anyone wants to read more let me know, perhaps this is a good topic for an article.

[1]: https://fastlane.tools/

[2]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6...

New comment by merelysounds in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

merelysounds — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:11:56 +0000

Bonus: reasonably accessible replaceable batteries double up as a hardware off switch.

New comment by merelysounds in "A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”"

merelysounds — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:15:30 +0000

Looks like there is also a client side solution for that, at least in Firefox; it's possible to prevent a page from modifying browser history:

> Open the about:config page in Firefox

> Search for "pushstate"

> Double-click "browser.history.allowPushState"

source: https://superuser.com/a/1688290

New comment by merelysounds in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

merelysounds — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:36:26 +0000

UI for image logic puzzles (nonograms), I’m working on making them prettier and more user friendly.

Some prototypes are already live in my app. Screenshots in the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6748... (the patterns in the puzzles in the dark mode screenshots, i.e. 4th and 7th).

New comment by merelysounds in "Some iPhone Apps Receive Mysterious Update 'From Apple'"

merelysounds — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:16:01 +0000

Speculation for fun: I always thought popular apps can use private apis or are handled in a special way by the OS itself. If yes, perhaps this is related.

Then again I found no source for that - and some certificate rollover seems more likely.

New comment by merelysounds in "OpenScreen is an open-source alternative to Screen Studio"

merelysounds — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 09:55:46 +0000

Same, only praises; I used pixijs 10 years ago in a resource constrained mobile focused project and I keep using it today.

New comment by merelysounds in "Trying for 1 month but can't learn pixel art still"

merelysounds — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:30:17 +0000

Oh no, that one has proper pixel art. Mine just has pretty puzzles (nonograms that turn into pixel art images when solved) and an occasional pixel art level. I plan to add more levels like this later.

I also plan to update screenshots but some are here: https://apps.apple.com/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6748...

New comment by merelysounds in "Trying for 1 month but can't learn pixel art still"

merelysounds — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:30:32 +0000

It’s a completely opposite scenario for me, I accidentally shipped a pixel art game.

It’s actually a game about nonograms. My first attempts at pixel art were bad but it didn’t matter that much, the focus was elsewhere anyway. With time the art improved; far from perfect but it’s still one of the things I like most about that game.

So I guess: practice, room for failure, achievable goals and time.

New comment by merelysounds in "A school district tried to help train Waymos to stop for school buses"

merelysounds — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:23:19 +0000

Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

Sounds like the tickets should be at least more expensive than the cost of equivalent QA (and if not, self driving companies might offload QA to the police).