Hacker News: thederf

New comment by thederf in "Ditching Obsidian and building my own"

thederf — Mon, 19 May 2025 19:40:17 +0000

Here's a video I did for the Directus Changelog that shows how my system works: https://www.youtube.com/live/SZg6hYMA3yo?si=Qi-E5NGeoQicnpR_...

It's highly eclectic, but might give you some ideas?

New comment by thederf in "Ditching Obsidian and building my own"

thederf — Mon, 19 May 2025 15:50:12 +0000

About a year ago I did the same migration: Obsidian to self-hosted Directus.

My main reasons were:

- Straightforward queries. I have a lot of structured data in my notes and lesson plans, and being able to work with SQL was ideal.

- A web app was much more reliable than Obsidian's third-party sync platforms.

- I could extend Directus to do all sorts of other things. I eventually built my wedding planner and website backend on the same Directus instance that holds my notes.

  (I also built a set of scripts on my Hackberry Pi that let me write text files on the go that saved to Directus)

The biggest disadvantage is that the writing and saving experience isn't as fluid.

New comment by thederf in "A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen"

thederf — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 20:56:57 +0000

Niice, giving me hope! My '06 is showing its age, but I hope it's got another 100k in her!

New comment by thederf in "A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen"

thederf — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 20:55:27 +0000

Hah. Fair point. I'm around 210k miles and aiming to squeeze as many more out of it as I can.

New comment by thederf in "A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen"

thederf — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 19:32:25 +0000

I compared the dimensions of the Slate with my '06 Pontiac Vibe hatchback, and it's only a few inches longer. I suspect the Slate + Fastback kit will be pretty close to a hatchback in size and function.

New comment by thederf in "A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen"

thederf — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 19:30:12 +0000

I'm quite excited about this. Ticks all my boxes for "low" tech, simple, moddable, useful, and cheap. I'm hoping my aging Pontiac Vibe holds out long enough to upgrade to one of these, if they succeed. I put in a preregistration!

New comment by thederf in "Directus – real-time REST and GraphQL API of any SQL database"

thederf — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 13:23:30 +0000

At work we have two applications in production with Directus, a CMS and a CRM, both highly specialized (~35 custom extensions) for our use-cases.

We've had our teething issues, mostly with migrations and the UX in some areas, but overall it has saved us a ton of dev time and been a great force multiplier for us.

I also use it at home to manage my notes, tasks, and such as structured data.

New comment by thederf in "W2UI is a JavaScript UI library for building rich web applications"

thederf — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 16:04:37 +0000

Ooof, 115kb gzipped. That's not exactly featherweight.

New comment by thederf in "The 8bit Keyboard"

thederf — Sun, 26 Jun 2022 16:49:01 +0000

These "because why not" projects are my favorite sort. I'd love to build something like this with four keys representing bit pairs (00, 01, 10, 11) where you could type bytes by repeatedly pressing keys. Bonus points for mounting it on the back of a phone for one handed typing.

New comment by thederf in "Little rant about GNOME's file manager (a.k.a. Nautilus)"

thederf — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 19:15:04 +0000

I've used GNOME for so long that anything other than Nautilus feels clunky to me. Though to be fair I almost never search for anything, so those pain points don't bother me. I just want a file manager that gets out of my way.

New comment by thederf in "Lumber rally cools with transport snarls easing, buyers balking"

thederf — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 16:58:06 +0000

Rockmart GA, pretty much the same story here. Wonder if consumer prices are delayed relative to futures.

New comment by thederf in "Is the madness ever going to end?"

thederf — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 02:34:54 +0000

As I see it, the cause isn't industry-specific, it's just incredibly apparent because of how fast our industry repeats the cycle of:

- Make thing - Thing becomes ubiquitous and widely used - Thing has warts and limitations - Make new thing on top of old thing, because old thing can't be reworked without major consequences because of its ubiquity. Repeat.

If you've worked in any job with reasonably complex processes, there's likely a few procedures that no one really understands, but when people try to change them or build on them, they only break things or get more confusing.

Not sure what can be done about it, but I have a hard time blaming anyone or anything.