brandonkal
Re:Vivaldi 8.0
on Thursday May 21, 2026 @11:25AM (#48224362)
I was also a huge fan of Vivaldi. I’d recommend Helium or Orion (desktop only). People knock on Edge but it actually is a nice browser. When on a Windows box I don’t own I use it instead of Chrome. Edge has the best text-to-speech engine in reader mode which I reach for even on macOS on occasion. That’s the only reason I have it on macOS.
Re:Vivaldi 8.0
on Thursday May 21, 2026 @11:13AM (#48224160)
Great job on the design refresh! I was a heavy Vivaldi user and especially liked the integrated tiling and tab grouping. But over time it got more and more bloated and performance suffered so now I just use vanilla Safari (didn’t expect that) for most browsing plus Helium when I need to test in Chromium.
I use Aerospace for tiling everything now but it breaks Safari scrolling performance so when that becomes annoying I force the Safari window to floating mode.
Re:The 49MB Web Page
on Tuesday March 17, 2026 @01:36AM (#47409042)
GDPR cookie banners, GTM Bloat, Z-index warfare, and bloated SPAs etc created the perfect storm where ChatGPT is a better interface for most internet users. If I hit a web page I shouldn’t have to click through a labyrinth of junk to read the content. Even with the LLM hallucinating it is a better experience. Text in and text out. Like the internet was originally.
We put up with the nonsense because we had to. But the irony is content creators are actively driving their audience away.
Re:Show HN: Executable Markdown files with Unix pipes
on Thursday January 08, 2026 @10:34PM (#46549772)
This is cool. Executable markdown files are an underutilized concept.
I built https://github.com/brandonkal/inkjet to make building CLIs super simple. All of my private repos have an inkjet.md file for common tasks and documentation. I use code blocks for the executable section and the language determines the runtime. I realize now inkjet could be extended to support an LLM executor by default. PRs welcome.
Re:I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)
on Saturday December 20, 2025 @02:23PM (#46338797)
It does make it easier. IPv6 pinholes are simpler than port forwarding. My IPv4 is not static but my IPv6 prefix is. So I don’t need dynamic DNS. I have no IPv4 port forwards, instead I run snid on a VPS to support legacy internet clients and call it a day.
Re:Makefile.md – Possibly Use(Ful|Less) Polyglot Synthesis of Makefile...
on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @05:25AM (#44234507)
I built something like this. A quick markdown file = custom CLI for each project.
https://github.com/brandonkal/inkjet