Spent about 2 years improving printing and scanning stack of Linux: CUPS, SANE, AirSane, as well as some legacy drivers, and also x86 proprietary driver emulation on ARM with Box86.
Even that "modern" printing stack in Linux is 20+ years old, there's still such an unbelievable amount of basic bugs and low-hanging-fruit optimizations, that it's kinda sad.
Not to mention that it still maintains ALL its legacy compatibility, as in supporting ≈5 different driver architectures, 4 user-selectable rasterizers (each with its own bugs and quirks).
The whole printing stack is supported by 4 people, 2 of whom are doing that since the inception of CUPS in 1999. Scanning is maintained by a single person.
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is expected to be the last version with CUPS v2. CUPS v3 drops current printer driver architecture and introduces proper modern driverless printing with the wrapper for older drivers. Many open-source drivers are already use this wrapper, but expect a huge disarrangement from the users, as none of the proprietary drivers would work out of the box anymore.
This is awesome, thank you for doing this work; it’s not glamorous but it’s a key feature to making computers productive.
I know it’s not a popular opinion here but I think that Windows has two killer features that are always overlooked- the standard print dialog (and all the underlying plumbing), and the standard file dialog (at least until Windows 8).
The ability to print and to interact with files, that just works, without having to retrain people every time a new OS comes out, and without having to reprogram your apps or write your own drivers and/or UI, is incredibly important.
Yes, I know Linux and Mac have the same, but IMO Windows was light years ahead for decades, and is still more consistent and easy to use.
Mac has always had print to PDF from the start, I'm not sure if even the latest windows comes with that OOB. I'm sure Linux is the same (as in the same as Mac).
Was going to say the same thing, I'm not a big fan of Windows but the printing Just Works. Having read the OPs explanation of why CUPS is the way it is, yeah, now it makes sense.
Maybe CUPS needs a Heartbleed-scale problem to motivate more support.
Great initiative. I wonder, how likely is it for a complete beginner to break their own printer or scanner by making a mistake in driver implementation? Or is it possible to work on hardware support without having a physical device? I assume it is impossible to test each and every one printer and scanner, so there is probably some clever tricks there, right?
I work mostly with the old microcontroller-based cheap consumer ("GDI") USB models circa 2000-2010, these are hardly possible to brick with software, as some of them even don't have a firmware and expect the PC to upload it on each power on sequence.
The hardware safety mechanisms are usually robust (USB communication is handled by "Formatter Board", all the mechanical stuff is in the "Engine Controller" power).
Newer Linux-based models have filesystems, software, and vulnerabilities, printer hacking on Pwn2Own is an every year common occurrence. These could be permanently bricked by the software in a common sense, and would require a firmware reflash using the bootloader or external means.
>Or is it possible to work on hardware support without having a physical device?
Absolutely, but for me this is very inconvenient—like the debugging over the phone.
>I assume it is impossible to test each and every one printer and scanner, so there is probably some clever tricks there, right?
Not much, unfortunately. There's ongoing work on modern (driverless) printer behavior emulation, but it is under heavy development and not ready yet: https://github.com/OpenPrinting/go-mfp
Nothing for the older printers and scanners which require it's own driver, of what I'm aware.
You're not actually telling a modern printer: "step this motor so many times to move some assembly so far this way", or "turn on so much current in such and such circuit" or whatever. The driver doesn't have enough responsibility for such things to be able to break anything.
A printer driver is something like a protocol converter. Roughly speaking, it binds some printing API's in the some kind of printer framework or service on the host to the right language (which may have vendor-specific nuances even if it is some kind of standard0.
Nah, I got into printing because nobody made a commercially available print server, and I ended up making my own, with all the involvement in the stack in the process.
I wish Openprinter luck, as it has been announced in the end of September but nothing out there yet, not even the crowdfunding campaign.
> Thank you. I have thrown printers out the literal window.
I have literally thrown one of those "winmodems" [1] out of the window back in the days. I then went out and drove with my car on it. I then put it in a bench vise until its PCB shattered to pieces. Utter destruction, much to the amusement of my brothers.
These were the days.
And big thanks to GP for his work of CUPS / Linux printing.
Over the holidays I was building a wooden birdhouse with a Unifi Protect camera and a small web interface that automatically identifies the birds and shows me a simple overview over which type of bird visited how many times.
Indeed, that was one of the posts I stumbled upon when I started building this. There's also another one which I found interesting (https://hawksley.org/2025/02/20/my-ubiquiti-unifi-protect-bi...) as it documented the way to mod a G5 camera to set the focal length as someone on Reddit also documented before.
I've thought about it and it would make the whole project even cooler with actual stats of "birdhouse regulars" not just in aggregated form but I don't know if it's possible and if bird faces have enough unique features to differentiate them?
Right now I only use it so that my thumbnails of pictures from the camera are centered on the head in the UI as I couldn't find a pre-existing model that does it for animals. I'm thinking that maybe having this data set of a few hundred bird faces will allow me to train a small one in the future to do it more automatically. If not...I at least learned something new about building models!
Thanks, it's named after a similar commercial project called Birdbuddy but I didn't want to pay for a subscription and potentially have some e-waste on my hands in a few years. I also wanted to have it integrated in my existing Unifi setup.
My meta side project for building other side projects: https://bodge.app/
I've always had a bunch of small side projects that I want to do that aren't worth the overhead required to actually put them together & keep them maintained. So, I built a small Lua-based FaaS platform to make each individual project less work whenever inspiration strikes. So far I've built:
Very very cool! Just signed up. Reminds me of Val Town which I'm a big fan of. Did you choose Lua because you love using it, or for some other pragmatic reasons?
Do you think a service like yours with support for many variety of languages a good idea? Not in order to meet user demand but purely because I think it would "just" require running the program on the server using a different interpreter/compiler, assuming code sandboxing has been achieved to make the initial language work.
For example, I love the long list of languages supported by Code Golf: https://code.golf/wiki.
> Did you choose Lua because you love using it, or for some other pragmatic reasons?
A bit of both, though I'm literally drinking out of a coffee mug with the Lua logo on it that was given to me after playing a big part in making Lua a thing at a prevoius job. That might speak to my love of Lua.
> Do you think a service like yours with support for many variety of languages a good idea?
From a technical perspective, it would be relatively easy to add support for other languages, the biggest problem would be UI and documentation complexity. Each added language would either require a completely seperate set of documentaion or would require the docs to describe everything one layer of abstraction removed from the code people would actually be writing. Both of which would be less than ideal for my goal of extreme simplicity.
I think it can be a good idea, but to support something like that _well_ would require a pretty large team of people.
I do plan to support some level of 'other languages' for libraries, at a minimum some subset of native Lua libraries (ie. libs written in C). That means it would be possible to find a way to use pretty much any other language interpreter. However, I'm not sure that will ever be a top level feature, there'll probably always be some level of Lua glue code holding everything together.
This is great. One thing that is not immediately obvious to me is what kind of authentication it supports. Needing to authenticate the caller is the #1 piece of boilerplate that gets in the way of me completing mini-projects. It’s not hard, but it’s definitely a nonzero amount of effort. And this is coming from someone who has implemented many, many auth flows professionally.
It doesn't say because there's no special support for any auth protocols. Long-term I want to have out-of-the-box support for things like OAuth (for user-facing auth) or mutual TLS (for device/service auth). _Technically_ there's currently support for the cryptographic primitives required to do JWT (I added that because I wanted to support WebPush w/ payloads for myself), but those aren't documented because I intend to remove the current slightly-hacky custom APIs and replace them with some off the shelf libraries, but I'm still figuring out user-added libraries (and on top of that I'll also need to figure out support for native libraries).
Are there any auth protocols / flows you think would be important to support?
> My meta side project for building other side projects
Looks cool, congrats on putting it out there as priced service!
And, same!
Except, it's just a repo organisation system (structure, conventions, and tools) that lets me share common "parts" across multiple "projects". No monolithic frameworks here.
Libraries are functions. Apps are objects.
However, normally, we use these as distinct artefacts, eventually leading to the "diamond dependency" problem (and lots of other annoying development-time stuff caused by libs / code that is "over there" (elsewhere)).
My "meta side project" solves, essentially the Expression Problem as it manifests in source code management (particularly, cross library / service / project feature development).
Thanks for sharing! I signed up and tried it for something simple (storing a message via POST and displaying it in HTML via GET) and it was delightfully easy & approachable.
Great to hear! And thanks for saying so. I've definitely tried to make it as simple and straight forward as possible, but I really didn't know if it would be simple and straight forward to anyone but me.
I know the homepage needs way more answer to "WTH is it?", I just don't really enjoy doing the 'marketing' side of things. I hadn't really considered just throwing something informal up there, but I guess I don't really know _why_, so, thanks for the suggestion.
I’m genetically engineering yeasts to make subtly flavored breads. I’ve already done grape aroma, now working on wintergreen.
Also working on a red chamomile (using beat red biosynthesis). Just for fun. Red chamomile tea!
The idea is to have niche invite-only genetically engineered flavors that I can bring to parties around SF :) what’s more special than a genetically engineered organism that you can ONLY get if I’m there? Good calling card
Loosely related: my new hobby project is growing and nuturing sourdough that's optimized for gluten free bread, and I'm cultivating a couple of different kinds to find out which taste I like the most.
It kind of escalated a bit once I realized that different mixtures of bacteria cultures produce differently tasting dough/bread and that you can strengthen the grow rate by optimizing the external variables.
This is so cool. Also, it sounds like a cheeky plot to a zombie apocalypse or global contagion movie.
How subtle are the flavors? Unsubtle enough that an oblivious taster might ask, "Does this bread taste like grapes to anyone else here?" Or does one need guidance to search for the flavor?
I’ve only done grape so far. It’s on the verge of subtle vs unsubtle. If you’re real used to smelling yeast OR are a woman who has a strong sense of smell, you can smell it. Otherwise it’s just bread.
It’s kinda unfair how much better women were at smelling it (empirically)
I really need to do a write-up. I kinda just whip up the easiest path and do it.
For example for the grape, I needed to knock out some tryptophan synthesis genes so I could redirect the bioflux. Problem is that in bakers yeast they have a whole buncha copies of their chromosomes, so I had to knock out one of the genes and replace it with a different gene from grapes. Did that with a quick lil CRISPR switch.
Had to electroporate tho because the transformation rates on wild/bakers/non-lab yeast are so garbage
Since the last time I posted on HN it's gained a decent amount of traffic and users. I'm particularly happy with the jobs section, which is growing into a high signal-noise source for European tech jobs: https://techposts.eu/jobs
The reason I started this website is because so much incredible innovation and growth in Europe flies under the radar. If you ask Americans many will say it's just "banks and museums", stagnant, or worse. But the reality is there is a huge spectrum of exciting companies starting and growing here. We have space launch companies, battery companies, AI companies, and a whole bunch of other interesting stuff. It's an exciting time to be a European in tech!
"Ask TechPosts.eu: Is there an EU Cloudflare alternative? I'm interested in CDN, DDoS mitigation and basic web security." Links to https://techposts.eu/post/153
After years of wondering what the post-UNIX paradigm of computing could look like, these past few months I've been prototyping a software platform built around capabilities and message passing, targeting Linux and bare-metal RISC-V. The big ideas I'm pursuing is a stackless design running on a flat address space with lightweight processes to minimize message-passing latency, and all the benefits of capabilities so every process is sandboxed and has only access to capabilities they have been explicitly passed via message passing.
I've also built a RISC-V emulator to integrate with this platform, so eventually it'll be able to run native binaries written in any language, completely sandboxed, completely built around message-passing. Basically a native, low-level BEAM-like platform to build an entire operating system and user-space.
While my day job is writing boring applications, this is the stuff that keeps me awake at night, and I would love so much to talk and write more about this, about the trial-and-errors I'm facing, but it's still so much in flux every week I'm exploring a new approach. Most of my work has been around the stackless scheduler, and I have a plan to achieve preemption for long-running or misbehaved tasks without having to compromise on memory usage (i.e. without giving each process its own stack and allocate memory for context switching).
Eventually I'd like to layer on top either Cap'n Proto or another high-performance serialisation system to create a distributed, introspectable environment of object-capabilities that are sending typed messages between each other, achieving the ultimate goal of creating an unholy hybrid between Smalltalk and the Erlang VM.
God, how I wish I was paid to work on this type of problems :-)
If this sounds close to your area of interests, please send me an email and I’d love to chat.
The end goal is to provide user-space memory isolation on CHERI-enabled hardware, where I won't need the RISC-V VM/sandbox any more. Anything as long as I can run on a flat address space and not have to waste countless CPU cycles swapping out page tables every message send. I admit my knowledge of CHERI is superficial and have not spent too much time reading the specs until I can play with off-the-shelf CPUs that support it.
Singularity/Midori from MS Research have a lot of good ideas but I feel we don't completely have to compromise forcing a managed environment or language in userspace. I want to run native binaries in this platform, which of course would look a bit different than one is used to (no _entry, no dedicated stack, just a message handler that's called directly by the scheduler, no concept of syscall, just sending messages to a capability)
When the code is ready to be opened and I have settled for a design; right now it's very much in flux and I want to see where the vision takes me, and which challenges I encounter along the way.
I'd like to apply for funding by the end of this year, when I'll have saved enough money from contracting to dedicate myself fully to this project.
Script to auto-rename screenshots with Claude Code
I'm sure there are a ton of other projects out there that do this, but I couldn't find one that fit my needs exactly, so I threw this together in a few hours.
claude-image-renamer uses Claude Code CLI to analyze screenshots and rename them to something actually usable. It combines OCR text extraction with Claude's vision capabilities, so instead of "Screenshot 2025-12-29 at 10.03.10 PM.png" you get something like "vscode_python_debug_settings.png".
A few things it does:
Handles those annoying macOS screenshot filenames with weird Unicode characters
Uses OCR to give Claude more context for better naming
Keeps filenames clean (lowercase, underscores, max 64 chars)
Handles naming conflicts automatically
If you're on macOS, you can also set this up as a Folder Action so screenshots get renamed automatically when they are saved to a folder, typically ~/Desktop. This is useful if you take a lot of screenshots and hate digging through "Screenshot 2025-12..." files later.
Very interesting! This inspired me in making something similar to clean up my old "Download" folders from 10 years ago that are full of screenshots and random images, but I would also need it to preserve the "last-modified" of the file otherwise when I sort by date it would show me all the renamed images.
Very cool, I do something similar! except I don't rename the image, but I have the LLM create a matching text file in a separate folder with a description of everything in the image and a guess of the possible reasons why I took a screenshot.
I use screenshot on my phone to remember stuff, so this way it's super easy to search those text files if I'm trying to find something that I only vaguely remember.
Remembering specific words is hard for me, but I can get neighboring words and get in the ballpark, and simple text search or claude code gets me the rest of the way.
The screenshot gets uploaded from my phone to Dropbox, then on my desktop at home a script just periodically checks if there's any new screenshots. It's been running since Jan of last year, so coming up on a year now.
I'm doing it with gemini-cli:
1. analyze '/Users/YOURNAME/Movies/' and for each mp4 file give a meaningful name base on the content of the video
2. analyze '/Users/YOURNAME/Pictures/' and for each image file give a meaningful name base on the content of the image
I bet you are running some personal server or tinkering VM.
Why not use a dedicated, coherent tool like Immich to manage all your image organisation needs? I don't see how this renaming would help me in any way, to make use of old screenshots left in random places.
Maybe instead of shooting people down in “What are you working on” threads (I see you have priors), you can instead share something cool that you’re working on.
Built a parking garage occupancy tracker for my city (https://www.parkeergaragesdelft.nl/) after a city council decision on car-free city center policies got delayed due to missing data. The city only publishes real-time availability with no historical record, so I started logging it. The site now shows historical data plus analysis of weekly patterns. (Note: website is in Dutch, but the charts should be self-explanatory.)
Now working on a second tool that monitors public reports on illegal dumping, broken streetlights and more. It tracks how long the municipality takes to resolve them
Lately, I've developed an interest in local politics and started reading policy documents, following city council meetings and even lobbied for a local park. Presenting public data clearly can help shape opinions and keeps the city council accountable, especially important with the upcoming city council elections.
This is very cool. And I can imagine sometimes it's not even about keeping them accountable, but demonstrating how easy a solution is to a problem that council bureaucrats would not have the capability to solve - likely have to outsource to a vendor that would charge for 'out of scope'.
Readit News
Even that "modern" printing stack in Linux is 20+ years old, there's still such an unbelievable amount of basic bugs and low-hanging-fruit optimizations, that it's kinda sad.
Not to mention that it still maintains ALL its legacy compatibility, as in supporting ≈5 different driver architectures, 4 user-selectable rasterizers (each with its own bugs and quirks).
The whole printing stack is supported by 4 people, 2 of whom are doing that since the inception of CUPS in 1999. Scanning is maintained by a single person.
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is expected to be the last version with CUPS v2. CUPS v3 drops current printer driver architecture and introduces proper modern driverless printing with the wrapper for older drivers. Many open-source drivers are already use this wrapper, but expect a huge disarrangement from the users, as none of the proprietary drivers would work out of the box anymore.
Do you care about printing? Want to improve printing & scanning stack? Contact OpenPrinting! https://github.com/OpenPrinting/
I know it’s not a popular opinion here but I think that Windows has two killer features that are always overlooked- the standard print dialog (and all the underlying plumbing), and the standard file dialog (at least until Windows 8).
The ability to print and to interact with files, that just works, without having to retrain people every time a new OS comes out, and without having to reprogram your apps or write your own drivers and/or UI, is incredibly important.
Yes, I know Linux and Mac have the same, but IMO Windows was light years ahead for decades, and is still more consistent and easy to use.
Maybe CUPS needs a Heartbleed-scale problem to motivate more support.
The hardware safety mechanisms are usually robust (USB communication is handled by "Formatter Board", all the mechanical stuff is in the "Engine Controller" power).
Newer Linux-based models have filesystems, software, and vulnerabilities, printer hacking on Pwn2Own is an every year common occurrence. These could be permanently bricked by the software in a common sense, and would require a firmware reflash using the bootloader or external means.
>Or is it possible to work on hardware support without having a physical device?
Absolutely, but for me this is very inconvenient—like the debugging over the phone.
Sometimes the bug is as low-level as in the USB stack: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-usb/3fe845b9-1328-4b40-8b02-61...
>I assume it is impossible to test each and every one printer and scanner, so there is probably some clever tricks there, right?
Not much, unfortunately. There's ongoing work on modern (driverless) printer behavior emulation, but it is under heavy development and not ready yet: https://github.com/OpenPrinting/go-mfp
Nothing for the older printers and scanners which require it's own driver, of what I'm aware.
A printer driver is something like a protocol converter. Roughly speaking, it binds some printing API's in the some kind of printer framework or service on the host to the right language (which may have vendor-specific nuances even if it is some kind of standard0.
I wish Openprinter luck, as it has been announced in the end of September but nothing out there yet, not even the crowdfunding campaign.
I have literally thrown one of those "winmodems" [1] out of the window back in the days. I then went out and drove with my car on it. I then put it in a bench vise until its PCB shattered to pieces. Utter destruction, much to the amusement of my brothers.
These were the days.
And big thanks to GP for his work of CUPS / Linux printing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmodem
Deleted Comment
Birdhouse: https://img.notmyhostna.me/cRQ1gJfZCHjQKwFrgKQj
UI:
- https://img.notmyhostna.me/Hnw4qcvbg1ZQCrFxzGMn
- https://img.notmyhostna.me/62TFwSXSRRbCfxDz297h
- https://img.notmyhostna.me/40qhgHmSqQsrGr8BC7Db
- https://img.notmyhostna.me/9bgz4GYsjQH33n3MtWKp (Face labeling, so I can show thumbnails of the actual birds that visited and train a ML model on it in the future)
My wife said 'you look bored you should build a bird table'
'Now shes not speaking to me as she found out shes 5th on the list'
https://github.com/dewey/birdhomie
Right now I only use it so that my thumbnails of pictures from the camera are centered on the head in the UI as I couldn't find a pre-existing model that does it for animals. I'm thinking that maybe having this data set of a few hundred bird faces will allow me to train a small one in the future to do it more automatically. If not...I at least learned something new about building models!
I've always had a bunch of small side projects that I want to do that aren't worth the overhead required to actually put them together & keep them maintained. So, I built a small Lua-based FaaS platform to make each individual project less work whenever inspiration strikes. So far I've built:
* A current-time API for some hacked-together IoT devices: https://time.bodge.link/
* A script for my wife that checks her commute time and emails her before it's about to get bad.
* An email notification to myself if my Matrix server goes down.
* A 'randomly choose a thing' page. https://rand.bodge.link/choose?head&tails
* A work phone number voicemail, the script converts the webhook into an email to me.
* An email notification any time a new version is released for a few semi-public self-hosted services.
* Scrapers for a few companies' job listings that notify me whenever a new job is posted matching some filters.
* A WebPush server that I eventually want to use for custom notifications to myself.
* An SVG hit counter: https://hits.bodge.link/
Since I'm already maintaining it for myself, I figured I might as well open it up for others. It's free to play with, at least for now.
Do you think a service like yours with support for many variety of languages a good idea? Not in order to meet user demand but purely because I think it would "just" require running the program on the server using a different interpreter/compiler, assuming code sandboxing has been achieved to make the initial language work.
For example, I love the long list of languages supported by Code Golf: https://code.golf/wiki.
> Did you choose Lua because you love using it, or for some other pragmatic reasons?
A bit of both, though I'm literally drinking out of a coffee mug with the Lua logo on it that was given to me after playing a big part in making Lua a thing at a prevoius job. That might speak to my love of Lua.
> Do you think a service like yours with support for many variety of languages a good idea?
From a technical perspective, it would be relatively easy to add support for other languages, the biggest problem would be UI and documentation complexity. Each added language would either require a completely seperate set of documentaion or would require the docs to describe everything one layer of abstraction removed from the code people would actually be writing. Both of which would be less than ideal for my goal of extreme simplicity.
I think it can be a good idea, but to support something like that _well_ would require a pretty large team of people.
I do plan to support some level of 'other languages' for libraries, at a minimum some subset of native Lua libraries (ie. libs written in C). That means it would be possible to find a way to use pretty much any other language interpreter. However, I'm not sure that will ever be a top level feature, there'll probably always be some level of Lua glue code holding everything together.
Are there any auth protocols / flows you think would be important to support?
Looks cool, congrats on putting it out there as priced service!
And, same!
Except, it's just a repo organisation system (structure, conventions, and tools) that lets me share common "parts" across multiple "projects". No monolithic frameworks here.
Libraries are functions. Apps are objects.
However, normally, we use these as distinct artefacts, eventually leading to the "diamond dependency" problem (and lots of other annoying development-time stuff caused by libs / code that is "over there" (elsewhere)).
My "meta side project" solves, essentially the Expression Problem as it manifests in source code management (particularly, cross library / service / project feature development).
[0] https://github.com/adityaathalye/clojure-multiproject-exampl...
Also working on a red chamomile (using beat red biosynthesis). Just for fun. Red chamomile tea!
The idea is to have niche invite-only genetically engineered flavors that I can bring to parties around SF :) what’s more special than a genetically engineered organism that you can ONLY get if I’m there? Good calling card
It kind of escalated a bit once I realized that different mixtures of bacteria cultures produce differently tasting dough/bread and that you can strengthen the grow rate by optimizing the external variables.
I’ve been thinking about trying this since my mom is gluten free
When the Yogurt Took Over https://lovedeathrobots.fandom.com/wiki/When_the_Yogurt_Took...
Wait, that means a glorious period of peace and prosperity for all is nigh.
How subtle are the flavors? Unsubtle enough that an oblivious taster might ask, "Does this bread taste like grapes to anyone else here?" Or does one need guidance to search for the flavor?
It’s kinda unfair how much better women were at smelling it (empirically)
For example for the grape, I needed to knock out some tryptophan synthesis genes so I could redirect the bioflux. Problem is that in bakers yeast they have a whole buncha copies of their chromosomes, so I had to knock out one of the genes and replace it with a different gene from grapes. Did that with a quick lil CRISPR switch.
Had to electroporate tho because the transformation rates on wild/bakers/non-lab yeast are so garbage
Since the last time I posted on HN it's gained a decent amount of traffic and users. I'm particularly happy with the jobs section, which is growing into a high signal-noise source for European tech jobs: https://techposts.eu/jobs
The reason I started this website is because so much incredible innovation and growth in Europe flies under the radar. If you ask Americans many will say it's just "banks and museums", stagnant, or worse. But the reality is there is a huge spectrum of exciting companies starting and growing here. We have space launch companies, battery companies, AI companies, and a whole bunch of other interesting stuff. It's an exciting time to be a European in tech!
So much going on in Zurich. Lots of robotics startups. I passed through in the summer and never knew...
"Ask TechPosts.eu: Is there an EU Cloudflare alternative? I'm interested in CDN, DDoS mitigation and basic web security." Links to https://techposts.eu/post/153
"3 comments" below it links to https://techposts.eu/post/154
It looks like the latter is correct.
I would have sent feedback direct, but I can't see an about page or anything.
EDIT: There is indeed a bug: clicking on a title which is an internal link sends you to the wrong page -- you have to click on the comments count.
Any plans for a simple way to search for posts?
I've also built a RISC-V emulator to integrate with this platform, so eventually it'll be able to run native binaries written in any language, completely sandboxed, completely built around message-passing. Basically a native, low-level BEAM-like platform to build an entire operating system and user-space.
While my day job is writing boring applications, this is the stuff that keeps me awake at night, and I would love so much to talk and write more about this, about the trial-and-errors I'm facing, but it's still so much in flux every week I'm exploring a new approach. Most of my work has been around the stackless scheduler, and I have a plan to achieve preemption for long-running or misbehaved tasks without having to compromise on memory usage (i.e. without giving each process its own stack and allocate memory for context switching).
Eventually I'd like to layer on top either Cap'n Proto or another high-performance serialisation system to create a distributed, introspectable environment of object-capabilities that are sending typed messages between each other, achieving the ultimate goal of creating an unholy hybrid between Smalltalk and the Erlang VM.
God, how I wish I was paid to work on this type of problems :-)
If this sounds close to your area of interests, please send me an email and I’d love to chat.
Singularity/Midori from MS Research have a lot of good ideas but I feel we don't completely have to compromise forcing a managed environment or language in userspace. I want to run native binaries in this platform, which of course would look a bit different than one is used to (no _entry, no dedicated stack, just a message handler that's called directly by the scheduler, no concept of syscall, just sending messages to a capability)
Did you apply for funding? Any subsidies?
I'd like to apply for funding by the end of this year, when I'll have saved enough money from contracting to dedicate myself fully to this project.
I'm sure there are a ton of other projects out there that do this, but I couldn't find one that fit my needs exactly, so I threw this together in a few hours.
claude-image-renamer uses Claude Code CLI to analyze screenshots and rename them to something actually usable. It combines OCR text extraction with Claude's vision capabilities, so instead of "Screenshot 2025-12-29 at 10.03.10 PM.png" you get something like "vscode_python_debug_settings.png".
A few things it does:
If you're on macOS, you can also set this up as a Folder Action so screenshots get renamed automatically when they are saved to a folder, typically ~/Desktop. This is useful if you take a lot of screenshots and hate digging through "Screenshot 2025-12..." files later.GitHub: https://github.com/jftuga/claude-image-renamer
I use screenshot on my phone to remember stuff, so this way it's super easy to search those text files if I'm trying to find something that I only vaguely remember.
Remembering specific words is hard for me, but I can get neighboring words and get in the ballpark, and simple text search or claude code gets me the rest of the way.
The screenshot gets uploaded from my phone to Dropbox, then on my desktop at home a script just periodically checks if there's any new screenshots. It's been running since Jan of last year, so coming up on a year now.
Dead Comment
Now working on a second tool that monitors public reports on illegal dumping, broken streetlights and more. It tracks how long the municipality takes to resolve them
Lately, I've developed an interest in local politics and started reading policy documents, following city council meetings and even lobbied for a local park. Presenting public data clearly can help shape opinions and keeps the city council accountable, especially important with the upcoming city council elections.