More from Abishek Muthian
After using the $200 and $100 Anthropic monthly plans for Claude, I have now settled on $20 Anthropic + $20 OpenAI + $10 OpenCode Go monthly plans for coding and design work. I also use local AI occasionally for non-coding-related tasks. By using multiple entry-level AI plans from different providers, I can assign different tasks to different models based on their strengths and also hedge against service disruption by not relying on a single provider.
Discover and invoke UI elements near your cursor, without precise mouse targeting. A Logi Actions SDK plugin for MX Creative Console and Actions Ring. Buttons, checkboxes, menus, tabs, dropdowns: tap to interact with whatever is nearby. The problem with precise clicking Every toolbar button, checkbox, and menu item demands pixel-perfect mouse aim. For everyone, it is slow. For people living with conditions that affect motor function, such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, essential tremor, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, ALS, repetitive strain injury, spinal injury, arthritis etc. precise mouse targeting can range from difficult to impossible.
Inspiration Many teens are turning to AI chatbots for friendship and emotional support and online AI chatbots are harnessing their data. As an alternate, I propose Epictetus- A 100% offline chatbot built on the wisdom of Epictetus-- A Stoic philosopher who taught ~2000 years ago that true freedom and happiness are found by focusing solely on what is within our power (our judgments, intentions, and responses) while calmly accepting everything else as beyond our control.
I wanted to add some frills in Memory Hammer app1 when the user completes review of their flashcards. I decided to add a simple 2D animation where a brain is sulking and after being hit by the hammer (memory hammer's mascot) the brain becomes happy and jubilant. I made a simple animation with Lottie first, When I imported the .lottie file for the animation into my flutter app, I noticed that it's skipping frames. There's no official Lottie library for flutter, I saw someone else facing the same issue2 with the 3rd party Lottie library.
After yet another Mastodon drama1 and tired of migrating from one Mastodon instance to another I have decided to self-host a Mastodon instance. But Mastodon is an overkill for a single user instance, Luckily GoToSocial2 an ActivityPub social network server written in Go serves my needs perfectly. I deployed GoToSocial on Railway, The developer of GoToSocial patiently helped me to fix few quirks with my deployment. Thanks to the federated nature of ActivityPub protocol, I was able to migrate my existing Fosstodon account to my new GoToSocial account3.
More in technology
I love Letterboxd, but I hate how they show you the cast on the web app. Here's the cast of The Batman on the web. I mean, that's them, but I'm often going to this page wondering who played someone, and that is an
If you visit, someone someone will inevitably tell you: “The Day of the Dead parade isn’t a real tradition!
In short: I use iOS Shortcuts to run a Mastodon bot. I run a Mastodon bot that posts random quotes from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. (The writing in that game is so charming!) I used to run it off a server, but for the past few days, it’s used an iOS Shortcut on my phone. How it works The bot is called Ulrira, named after a beloved Link’s Awakening character. Ulrira (the bot, not the character) samples a line from the text dump, then makes an HTTP request to post it. Here’s a screenshot of the full thing: As you can see, everything here is hard-coded, from the server credentials to the file name. (It probably wouldn’t be hard to make this more generic, but I didn’t bother.) This used to be a short, hand-written Bash script. I used the new AI-powered Shortcut creator and prompted this into existence. I said something like, “Here’s a Bash script. Turn this into a Shortcut.” Like a lot of LLM output, it wasn’t quite right, but it was useful for getting started. Shortcuts doesn’t seem to have an elegant way to express something like “run this every 6 hours”, so I created four additional scheduler Shortcuts that call the main one. They run at 12am, 6am, 12pm, and 6pm. That means there are five shortcuts in total: one to actually make the post, and four to schedule the main Shortcut at different times. Why do it this way? I didn’t want to pay for my server anymore, nor did I want to maintain it. When I went looking for alternatives, they either (1) cost money (2) had some significant limitation (for example, GitHub Actions requires me to update the repo every 60 days). This solution runs on a device with high uptime and is effectively free. If you’re a pro software genius, you might complain that this is not reliable! It doesn’t work if my phone is offline, for example. Or what if I change timezones? But in the words of Link’s Awakening: You’re good! You’re a pro, aren’t you? ………… Well, beat it! Pros aren’t allowed in here! Follow the bot here.