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pchm commented on My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)   jeffhuang.com/productivit... · Posted by u/yarapavan
pchm · 2 years ago
I have a TODO.txt and it’s the only productivity system that I’ve ever been able to stick with. Just a list of stuff I need to do, what’s done gets moved down or deleted. Maybe there’s value in having an archive (a DONE.txt?) but I’ve found that after a while most notes/items lose the context and often it’s hard to decipher what they were about.

One thing I haven’t figured out yet: I’d love to be able to keep this file open at all time, have it pop up with a hotkey. Currently it’s just a TextMate window that I often close by accident.

pchm commented on How does Base32 (or any Base2^n) work exactly?   ptrchm.com/posts/base32-e... · Posted by u/pchm
gnabgib · 2 years ago
Hey Piotr/pchm, I'm not sure I follow your argument that Base32 is less popular because it's not a standard (there is a standard - RFC4648 as you mention).

Not implementing the RFC, is not implementing Base32, changing the order, or using 32 emoji does not make it Base32. Put another way, you can change the order of characters in Base64, or use a different dictionary, and indeed there are several variants of that too (BinHex4, Uuencoding, Base64Url, B64) - there are specific implementation detail concerns there too.

Base64 won out as a reasonably dense way to encode binary data in 7-bit safe ASCII for use in email, and later http headers (where spacing and line length may be modified in transit, and some ASCII characters are prohibited - eg 0x00/null). Part of the reason is; bit-grouping makes encode/decode simpler (you can use bit shifting). Something like ASCII85/Base85 which is a more dense encoding, and close to the maximum you can get in 7 bit safe ASCII (94 characters 33-126 if space is important, 95 if space quantity can be preserved) but you have to use multiply/divide instructions. The union of bit-shift speed (power of 2) and 7-bit safe ASCII characters (max 94 values) is: binary, base4, octal, hexadecimal, base32, and base64.

For human readability, especially verbal communication, hexadecimal or base32 are advantageous in that they are more dense than decimal, can be generated via bit-shifting vs more complex processor instructions, but you needn't also communicate the character's case (unlike Base64).

pchm · 2 years ago
You make some good points. What I was trying to say is that even though there is the RFC, it's quite common to modify the alphabet or use other variants like Crockford's (mainly to avoid random profanity, e.g. in the URL identifiers).

When you see a Base64 string, you can be pretty certain that it's the standard version. With Base32, it's not obvious which variant was used.

Many languages don't provide a stdlib Base32 implementation (Ruby doesn't), but Base64 is pretty much always included. Maybe this influenced my perception of the lack of a universal standard.

Anyway, I should work on that section to communicate my point better.

pchm commented on Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?    · Posted by u/max_
pchm · 3 years ago
I run https://pixelpeeper.com on the side.

It's a micro-SaaS for photographers who edit in Lightroom. Lets you reverse-engineer Lightroom edits from JPG files and download them as presets that you can apply on your own photos.

Took a month or two to reach $2k/mo, riding the wave of instagram's popularity in 2017-2018, plus the project went viral initially. However, the niche is ultimately too small to grow the revenue significantly. Still chugging along, almost 6 years later, though.

u/pchm

KarmaCake day705August 17, 2011
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