cdosborn (u/cdosborn)

cdosborn commented on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell · Posted by u/cvbox

Rendello · 9 months ago

Drawabox is based on doing exercises to improve your mark making (the accuracy of the marks you draw on the page) and eventually leads to you drawing hundreds of boxes in perspective as a consistent exercise. A lot of people swear by it. I enjoyed the first week of it but decided that drawing is not a priority right now.

https://drawabox.com/

cdosborn · 9 months ago

It is a good resource. Drawabox doesn't actually teach you how to rotate cubes. That was pretty frustrating to me.

I created a little game which doesn't explain it, but allows you to practice and get feedback: https://cdsb.itch.io/draw-cube

cdosborn commented on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell · Posted by u/cvbox

PinkPigeon · 9 months ago

https://pinkpigeon.co.uk

Who'd have thought that a CMS could still make money in 2024, but this one is around £500 a month.

It obviously doesn't pay the bills or the mortgage, but it works. All my clients are word of mouth, I do not advertise at all (a combination of costs and insanely opaque / fractured advertising models by Facebook and co...I don't have time to get a phd in your ad platform to see if any of my money is actually doing anything)

I build it originally because I was fed up with Wordpress / Squarespace / Weebly / Wix, because all of their interfaces are slow and don't work on mobile.

This CMS is fast and works on mobile.

It's also pretty cheap nowadays, as I've not been raising prices like everyone else.

It won't do super-flashy websites. It's mostly about having low-JS, good SEO, easy access to information, which can be managed by very inexperienced users (I live rurally and we have a fair few pensioners as clients, they all get along with the system very well).

There are just about a billion things I want to do with it, but it never made enough money to become my full-time job, so it mostly just sits there and does its job.

cdosborn · 9 months ago

> It's mostly about having low-JS, good SEO, easy access to information, which can be managed by very inexperienced users

Nice!

I shared in the parent thread about my tool which spell checks sites, it found a few small issues: https://www.spl.ing/report-card?website=pinkpigeon.co.uk&uui...

cdosborn commented on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell · Posted by u/cvbox

throwthrow4567 · 9 months ago

Forget it. There's very little that can be taught about drawing.

Drawing from model is about being the kind of character that enjoys spending hours tweaking at tiny details and measuring measuring measuring. Anybody willing to sit 3 hours in front of the model every day can learn it, if he understands that he must measure.

Drawing from imagination like Kim Jung Gi on the other hand is about doing that every day most of the day since you were a little kid, and you probably need an innate ability to boot (and that might be some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder / autism...).

cdosborn · 9 months ago

Yeah, I'm not referring to drawing which is copying.

> There's very little that can be taught about drawing.

While drawing from the imagination is largely about using the intuition. The intuition can be trained just like the more analytical side of the brain. I can teach you a few properties of rotation/space, etc, and then give you the right exercises, and then you won't need to use construction to draw.

KJG does have some innate ability, and he was clearly obsessed, but it's not actually the bulk of his method. He has a video about drawing scissors. He can articulate nearly everything he is drawing, specifically the function which guides the design. There are others who can draw like him. Look up Tom Fox.

cdosborn commented on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell · Posted by u/cvbox

ck1992 · 9 months ago

Have you heard of carapace? Its a tool to create spatial lines for drawing

cdosborn · 9 months ago

Taking a look. For the past two years I've been thinking about drawing. Why it's difficult, how its possible for people like Kim Jung Gi to draw from their imagination. My theory is that it's a learned thing (as opposed to innate ability), but that it's not taught from primitives well. For example, rotating a cube is something that you cannot really find an explanation for. I think the actual difficulty in drawing (representational-ly) boils down to preserving the identity of objects through rotation. This difficulty is preserved in the presence of perspective or not (orthographic projection).

cdosborn commented on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell · Posted by u/cvbox

nspeller · 9 months ago

I built an interactive Music Theory course 8 years ago over a winter break and it continues to bring in enough to pay my rent each month.

I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives.

It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos.

I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that initial spike in traffic has been fairly consistent over the past 8 years.

It uses Stripe for payments and for the first few years it was only Stripe. 3 years in I decided to add PayPal support... revenue doubled overnight, mostly from international customers.

https://www.lightnote.co/

cdosborn · 9 months ago

Cool project. I have a dream to make something like this for drawing spatially.

Came to the parent to share my current project which spell checks websites. It found a few small typos on your site. https://www.spl.ing/report-card?website=www.lightnote.co&uui...

cdosborn commented on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell · Posted by u/cvbox

cdosborn · 9 months ago

I created a website spellchecker/proofreader (https://spl.ing). We use aws step functions for the actual processing, it's very cool tech! Reply with your websites, and I'll run a few checks!

cdosborn commented on Be Kind boz.com/articles/be-kind.... · Posted by u/austenallred

stonogo · 10 years ago

Having never heard of this person before, I've done about ten minutes of research into who he is and why (in the words of his own about page) I should care.

I've come up empty. It seems like he's got enough money now that he feels like engaging in some verbal philanthropy. That's fine, but does anyone have any concrete reasons I should prioritize reading his output over others?

cdosborn · 10 years ago

Perhaps, just judge the content.

cdosborn commented on Scheme SRFI-1 (1998) srfi.schemers.org/srfi-1/... · Posted by u/pmoriarty

patrickmay · 11 years ago

Olin Shivers also authored the best Acknowledgements page of any reference manual ever: http://scsh.net/docu/html/man.html

"Who should I thank? My so-called ``colleagues,'' who laugh at me behind my back, all the while becoming famous on my work? My worthless graduate students, whose computer skills appear to be limited to downloading bitmaps off of netnews? My parents, who are still waiting for me to quit ``fooling around with computers,'' go to med school, and become a radiologist? My department chairman, a manager who gives one new insight into and sympathy for disgruntled postal workers?

My God, no one could blame me -- no one! -- if I went off the edge and just lost it completely one day. I couldn't get through the day as it is without the Prozac and Jack Daniels I keep on the shelf, behind my Tops-20 JSYS manuals. I start getting the shakes real bad around 10am, right before my advisor meetings. A 10 oz. Jack 'n Zac helps me get through the meetings without one of my students winding up with his severed head in a bowling-ball bag. They look at me funny; they think I twitch a lot. I'm not twitching. I'm controlling my impulse to snag my 9mm Sig-Sauer out from my day-pack and make a few strong points about the quality of undergraduate education in Amerika.

If I thought anyone cared, if I thought anyone would even be reading this, I'd probably make an effort to keep up appearances until the last possible moment. But no one does, and no one will. So I can pretty much say exactly what I think.

Oh, yes, the acknowledgements. I think not. I did it. I did it all, by myself."

cdosborn · 11 years ago

That is so fucking great.

cdosborn commented on Show HN: Lit – a modern literate programming tool github.com/cdosborn/lit... · Posted by u/cdosborn

thristian · 11 years ago

From the description in the README I feared that the entire source-code of the program would appear twice in the resulting document; first under the definition of the "" macro and again wherever each code-fragment was defined. Looking at the contents of the "examples" directory, however, I can see that the "" macro works more like a table-of-contents.

That's reasonable, in a minimalist kind of way, but it's a bit unfortunate that Lit syntax winds up unmodified in the output document; I'd wind up having to put a paragraph at the top of each document explaining what Lit was and why all the "<< >>" tokens throughout the code weren't actually part of the code.

Also, the resulting HTML doesn't actually validate: http://validator.nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent...

cdosborn · 11 years ago

validator passes, thanks.

cdosborn commented on Show HN: Lit – a modern literate programming tool github.com/cdosborn/lit... · Posted by u/cdosborn

porker · 11 years ago

I don't know if this counts as literate programming, but one of my favourite outputs for learning about code is Docco: http://jashkenas.github.io/docco/

Sample output: http://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html

cdosborn · 11 years ago

Literate programming requires that there is freedom in ordering content in the literate file. Otherwise, you are restricted to the execution order of the computer. The intent of literate programming is to circumvent that requisite. Otherwise the tool is just a pretty printer of sorts.