It also means circle in Czech and sounds like crew. When I happened upon the word, I was very proud of myself! I'm usually not great at naming projects.
Built a free product (https://heymeta.com) to solve my own problem and posted it here on HN and Reddit as well as Product Hunt (that was in 2018 when it was still relevant).
Currently getting 15k/unique/month (it has dropped a bit less, but steadily getting up after the rewrite and bigfixes).
When the website doesn't have sponsors, I promote my other free macOS tool (https://dockey.publicspace.co) (with a donation option) that get quite a nice flow of visitors from it.
I'd call this a success, although it's not enough to pay the bills or anything :)
Working out some smaller bugs of my meta tags checker / builder HeyMeta, which I've rebuilt in Svelte (prevously used Node.js for both FE and BE and it was buggy as hell)
Also revisited and updated Let's see, an eye trainer, which is basically a PWA you can "install" on your tablet/mobile/e-reader. I'm not a scientist, but have had some success training my eyes with this technique and wanted to make a simple app that I can share with my friends to try.
It seems like the website is region locked?
I haven't seen an 405 error mentioning a specific country yet though, it seemed interesting.
https://imgur.com/a/AiY9xMJ
Really good writeup and insights, thanks for this.
A friend of mine convinced me to enable kind of "donations" if you will for a free macOS app I've made a some time ago. I was not really trying to sell it or anything as it's a simple tool which you setup once and then that's it. But I figured that some might want to support my work and so I setup a Gumroad page with a suggested price of $2.99 and kinda forgot about it. The first $1 email that came through that felt very validating
It's PC with Calibre app + USB cable + Kindle = books transferred (not just drag and drop if you thought this as the old fashioned way).
It's a step between but think of Calibre as your own book "store". It's an ebook management app that can automatically convert almost any ebook format into the one your device needs but at the same time also gives you the option to edit the ebook details and stuff like that. It's honestly great, I'd totally recommend it.
Quite honestly I particularly don't care if we stick to summer or winter time.
As long as I can wake up consistently at the same time and not have my sleep schedule destroyed for a couple of weeks twice per year. This clock changing business really messes me up and I see no actual benefit of it today.
It's better to have the most sunlight during you waking hours, which tend to be later in the day. People don't wake up at 6am and go to bed at 6pm, more like wake at 7 and go to bed at 11.
Maybe you and your social circle. I get to work at 6:30 AM; despite being fairly far south in the US, I wake up in full night and drive to work in nautical twilight around the winter solstice.
Even in summer, I wake just before the beginning of civil twilight.
While I'd love to use free tools, these really don't compare to the paid tools like the Affinity suite or Figma for example.
Especially in a professional setting as a designer, the tools I use are chosen to make my life easier and enable me to work more efficient, and these really don't yet. From what I see, they aren't build for this setting in mind and cannot keep up with paid tools that have significantly more of a financial backing.
The one open-source outlier for me is PenPot, but even they aren't there yet in my opinion, at least not for my needs (and preferences).
When I got my dad's old Series 3a, it was one of the coolest things I ever saw. We had a computer at home, so I knew MS-DOS and then Win 3.1, but it was another thing to have a computer in your pocket!
Then, when I was in high school, my dad was developing applications for the national gas and water utility companies and they used Psion Workabouts with printer attachments, since they were rugged and basically only device approved for working in places with gas. He wanted to get out of the business, so he basically said if I would take over the devleopment and clients, which I did. I rewrote the code for the Psions and wrote an app in Visual Basic for windows machines (I cannot recollect which database I used) so they could download the client readings via the serial port and print it out.
I never really got into "professional" development after that, sticking mostly to product design, but I still like to dabble in code. I guess the thrill of working on a product from start to end and have it used by so many people still gets fills me with joy.
Fun times and to think that this has to be more than 20 years ago is crazy!
