HN user
- Hobbyist developer - Personal site: https://nadh.in - CTO @ Zerodha: https://zerodha.com
Deploying and tinkering with Matt's scripts was a very formative exercise in my early teenage years. I rememher offering public FormMail and guestbook hosting services (on underlying10MB shared hosting plans!)
- https://dict.press - A (language) dictionary publishing and management system.
- WIP: A FOSS, self-hosted Luma alternative (for use across our community initiatives)
Once you have managed to get the data out and structured, you may want to check out dict.press. It's a dictionary publishing and management tool (which I maintain). Multiple widely used Indian dictionary projects run on it.
The delay is on our side while we wait for regulatory approvals (India) for cross-border disbursements, I must clarify. The issues are described in the post I linked [2].
We've allocated $60,000 to NTP from FLOSS/fund [1]. It happened in May, but the disbursal is pending owing to paperwork [2]. We hope it'll go through in the next couple of months.
[1] https://floss.fund/projects/2025/
[2] https://floss.fund/blog/second-tranche-2025-anniversary/#wha...
Been self-hosting for a while. Amazing set of features and web and mobile apps work flawlessly.
Weather over DNS
dig london.weather @dns.toysYep, all tools return formatted strings as TXT records.
This is quite cool! I just added this to dns.toys [1]
dig iss.sky +short @dns.toys
I wrote about something tangential a few months ago; the need to have curation-based alternate forms of discovery on the WWW.
Pretty much exactly what I have been thinking lately. Write about it recently here: https://nadh.in/blog/decentralised-open-indexes/
I hope Kagi succeeds. But personally, I think the web is dead. And no search engine can save it.
I concur. Maybe now is the time to seriously think about alternate visions for "search". I have been toying with an idea[1] along those lines myself out of sheer annoyance at the state of WWW and web "search" in general.
Omeka-S[1] is an open source publishing platform (for museums, libraries, artifact collections etc) that has first class support for Dublin Core.
Dublin Core “clicked” for me when we started using it in Omeka to publish a collection of digitised books online[2].
Techno-philosophical ramblings.
Related: I've written a Python tool (CLI) that exports Telegram channels to static webpages.
Daily Thunderbird user for about 17 years. Has always worked well. The recent UI improvements are nice (on the eyes), but, I’m so used to the UI/UX, it just blends into the background.
Adding new features to listmonk (mailing list / newsletter manager), preparing for its next release.
https://github.com/knadh/listmonk
Setting up and playing around with Omeka, a brilliant document publishing system, to help publish an archive of digitised physical books and documents.
I’ve a simple static HTML+JS page that renders a translation UI by reading a JSON i18n file from a GitHub repo (can be any URL).
Demo: https://listmonk.app/i18n/
Source: https://github.com/knadh/listmonk-site/tree/master/i18n
Huge sense of entitlement showing up on project forums is inevitable. I think it is okay to be open and blunt (and civil) when responding to such posts.
I had ended up codifying [1] my stance around this to a contrib document to quickly link to annoying issues when closing them. Saves the headache of having to write fresh explanations.
[1] https://github.com/knadh/listmonk/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.m...
The Norwegian Meteorological Institute has an excellent free HTTP/JSON weather API that covers the globe. No signup required.
Thunderbird has been my primary mail client since ~2006. It has been rock solid and fast. Way faster than popular web mail UIs today.
Use viper with care. It has some dangerous fundamental flaws [1]. We got bitten hard, submitted a PR [2] and followed up for a year and a half to no avail, before I went ahead and reinvented the wheel and wrote koanf (plug), specifically to avoid viper's flaws.
Most importantly:
- Breaks JSON, YAML, TOML etc. language specs by forcibly lowercasing all keys internally. Dangerous because it can silently merge differently cased config keys into lowercase.
- Hard codes big unnecessary dependencies into the core, significantly bloating build sizes. No separation or abstraction.
Writing software is a hobby I enjoy unconditionally. Seeing people find utility in the software I write makes me happy. Seeing people derive happiness from it, for free, makes me happier. Been doing it for about two decades now.
Thankfully, I don’t need to make a living from my hobby FOSS projects. If I had to, maybe it wouldn’t feel like a hobby.
We self-host Postal and it’s worked quite well for us. We are a heavily regulated organisation and have to send several millions of transactional emails every day (as mandated by financial regulations).
IP reputation has nothing to do with Postal and has to be managed separately; have the records setup properly, don’t send spam, and keep an eye on public blocklists regularly.
Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran.
Blew my mind (pun intended) and changed my perspective on pretty much everything forever.
That's strange. Apart from the fact that the dictionary website renders utf8 Kannada text, there's nothing else to it. Can't imagine how the browser managed to switch its language based on text found on a webpage!
https://alar.ink (Kannada-English dictionary) was built using https://github.com/knadh/dictmaker
It addresses some of the things you’ve mentioned.
That the package is downloaded 7 million times a week exacerbates the impact significantly. The CI/CD trend of pulling everything from upstream over and over for builds (despite caching, as the absurd NPM download counts indicate) ensures that any upstream issue is distributed widely and frequently.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment of vulnerabilities.