Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)

Even that "modern" printing stack in Linux is 20+ years old, there's still such an unbelievable amount of basic bugs and low-hanging-fruit optimizations, that it's kinda sad.

Not to mention that it still maintains ALL its legacy compatibility, as in supporting ≈5 different driver architectures, 4 user-selectable rasterizers (each with its own bugs and quirks).

The whole printing stack is supported by 4 people, 2 of whom are doing that since the inception of CUPS in 1999. Scanning is maintained by a single person.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is expected to be the last version with CUPS v2. CUPS v3 drops current printer driver architecture and introduces proper modern driverless printing with the wrapper for older drivers. Many open-source drivers are already use this wrapper, but expect a huge disarrangement from the users, as none of the proprietary drivers would work out of the box anymore.

Do you care about printing? Want to improve printing & scanning stack? Contact OpenPrinting! https://github.com/OpenPrinting/

Birdhouse: https://img.notmyhostna.me/cRQ1gJfZCHjQKwFrgKQj

UI:

- https://img.notmyhostna.me/Hnw4qcvbg1ZQCrFxzGMn

- https://img.notmyhostna.me/62TFwSXSRRbCfxDz297h

- https://img.notmyhostna.me/40qhgHmSqQsrGr8BC7Db

- https://img.notmyhostna.me/9bgz4GYsjQH33n3MtWKp (Face labeling, so I can show thumbnails of the actual birds that visited and train a ML model on it in the future)

I've always had a bunch of small side projects that I want to do that aren't worth the overhead required to actually put them together & keep them maintained. So, I built a small Lua-based FaaS platform to make each individual project less work whenever inspiration strikes. So far I've built:

* A current-time API for some hacked-together IoT devices: https://time.bodge.link/

* A script for my wife that checks her commute time and emails her before it's about to get bad.

* An email notification to myself if my Matrix server goes down.

* A 'randomly choose a thing' page. https://rand.bodge.link/choose?head&tails

* A work phone number voicemail, the script converts the webhook into an email to me.

* An email notification any time a new version is released for a few semi-public self-hosted services.

* Scrapers for a few companies' job listings that notify me whenever a new job is posted matching some filters.

* A WebPush server that I eventually want to use for custom notifications to myself.

* An SVG hit counter: https://hits.bodge.link/

Since I'm already maintaining it for myself, I figured I might as well open it up for others. It's free to play with, at least for now.

Also working on a red chamomile (using beat red biosynthesis). Just for fun. Red chamomile tea!

The idea is to have niche invite-only genetically engineered flavors that I can bring to parties around SF :) what’s more special than a genetically engineered organism that you can ONLY get if I’m there? Good calling card

Since the last time I posted on HN it's gained a decent amount of traffic and users. I'm particularly happy with the jobs section, which is growing into a high signal-noise source for European tech jobs: https://techposts.eu/jobs

The reason I started this website is because so much incredible innovation and growth in Europe flies under the radar. If you ask Americans many will say it's just "banks and museums", stagnant, or worse. But the reality is there is a huge spectrum of exciting companies starting and growing here. We have space launch companies, battery companies, AI companies, and a whole bunch of other interesting stuff. It's an exciting time to be a European in tech!

I've also built a RISC-V emulator to integrate with this platform, so eventually it'll be able to run native binaries written in any language, completely sandboxed, completely built around message-passing. Basically a native, low-level BEAM-like platform to build an entire operating system and user-space.

While my day job is writing boring applications, this is the stuff that keeps me awake at night, and I would love so much to talk and write more about this, about the trial-and-errors I'm facing, but it's still so much in flux every week I'm exploring a new approach. Most of my work has been around the stackless scheduler, and I have a plan to achieve preemption for long-running or misbehaved tasks without having to compromise on memory usage (i.e. without giving each process its own stack and allocate memory for context switching).

Eventually I'd like to layer on top either Cap'n Proto or another high-performance serialisation system to create a distributed, introspectable environment of object-capabilities that are sending typed messages between each other, achieving the ultimate goal of creating an unholy hybrid between Smalltalk and the Erlang VM.

God, how I wish I was paid to work on this type of problems :-)

If this sounds close to your area of interests, please send me an email and I’d love to chat.

I'm sure there are a ton of other projects out there that do this, but I couldn't find one that fit my needs exactly, so I threw this together in a few hours.

claude-image-renamer uses Claude Code CLI to analyze screenshots and rename them to something actually usable. It combines OCR text extraction with Claude's vision capabilities, so instead of "Screenshot 2025-12-29 at 10.03.10 PM.png" you get something like "vscode_python_debug_settings.png".

A few things it does:

    Handles those annoying macOS screenshot filenames with weird Unicode characters
    Uses OCR to give Claude more context for better naming
    Keeps filenames clean (lowercase, underscores, max 64 chars)
    Handles naming conflicts automatically

GitHub: https://github.com/jftuga/claude-image-renamer

Now working on a second tool that monitors public reports on illegal dumping, broken streetlights and more. It tracks how long the municipality takes to resolve them

Lately, I've developed an interest in local politics and started reading policy documents, following city council meetings and even lobbied for a local park. Presenting public data clearly can help shape opinions and keeps the city council accountable, especially important with the upcoming city council elections.

For a couple of years now, I’ve wanted to build a service that lets you subscribe to new version notifications for any kind of software—desktop apps, drivers, packages, and more. As a Unity developer and consultant myself, I’ve always wanted to know the moment a new version becomes available. I value being at the bleeding edge, especially since a large part of the value I bring as a consultant comes from both the breadth and depth of my knowledge of the Unity engine.

That’s why I’m currently working on a niche version of the broader VersionAlert idea specifically for Unity, which is why the domain currently redirects to https://versionalert.com/unity .

The only other service I’ve found that really addresses this need is https://newreleases.io . I actually spoke with the very nice husband-and-wife team behind it and even offered to buy the whole project, but their asking price was about 10× higher than what I was offering—which I understand, no hard feelings. I still wish them the best of luck.

If anyone is aware of other projects or services in this space, I'd be happy to learn about them and chat.

https://valtima4.com/

It's the Survival Crafting RPG you would have played on your Apple II back in the 80's.

You can think of it as Valheim's gameplay crammed into the tile-based ui of the old Ultima games.

It has a procedurally-generated open world with towns and NPCs to talk to, all the resource gathering, mining, crafting stuff you'd expect in a modern survival game, and some good old fashioned dungeon crawling to boot.

I've been working on it off and on for the last several months. Let me know what you think!

For the past several years I would look up the day lengths and sunset times for my location and identify milestones like “first 5pm sunset”, “1 hour of daylight gained since the winter solstice”, etc. But that manual process also meant I was limited to sharing updates on just my location, and my friends only benefitted when I made a post. I wanted to make a site anyone could come to at any time to get an optimistic message and a milestone to look forward to.

Some features this has:

- Calculation of several possible optimistic headlines. No LLMs used here.

- Offers comparisons to the earliest sunset of the year and shortest day

- Careful consideration of optimistic messaging at all times of year, including after the summer solstice when daylight is being lost

- Static-only site, no ads or tracking. All calculations happen in the browser.

While the official data is technically public, it's practically inaccessible (buried in XML feeds and legacy sites).

Phase 1 was building a modern ingestion engine and freeing the information to make it more accessible. The goal is to make legislative data as accessible as sports stats.

I'm almost ready to launch the MVP; I'm just doing some bugfixes and testing the database now! (If you want an early look at the MVP, my email is in my profile.)

The next phase is what I'm most excited about: visualizing this data and using LLMs to provide insights.

It’s a modern way to navigate and find home care providers in Australia. We built it after working in the industry and seeing families struggle a lot with navigating the complex aged care system (at a time in their lives which is already very stressful).

It’s very early days but it has been very enjoyable to think back on all the issues and pain points we saw in our careers and build solutions around these.

Hopefully it helps some Aussies and their parents with staying in their own home, and in feeling more confident with the decisions they make through the journey.

The stack is: Nuxt for the front-end, Postgres, and FastAPI for the backend. We set up Zoho instead of Microsoft or Google Workspace and it’s been very smooth so far (and more cost effective).

One fun part of the dev work has been learning all the magic of PostGIS - if you ever have an idea that involves geospatial data or maps, go ahead and try build it with PostGIS in the db.

It's been approx. an year since we are up and running, and we helped 100+ businesses in the US and world-wide to understand the value and savings of automated route planning, and prepared tens thousands of optimized routes for companies operating from 1 to 50 vehicles. All this keeping our operational expenses low and flat, thanks to our local-first route optimization engine working in the browser, and reliance on OpenStreetMap.

You get to choose the genres you're interested in, and it creates playlists from the music in your library. They get updated every day - think a better, curated by you version of the Daily Mixes. You can add some advanced filters as well, if you really want to customise what music you'll get.

It works best if you follow a good amount of artists. Optionally you can get recommendations from artists that belong to playlists you follow or you've created - if you don't follow much or any artists, then you should enable that in order for the service to be useful.

https://riffradar.org/

We delivered our first 500 units last month and got positive reviews, but lots of small issues to straighten out.

[0] https://getbrighter.com/

Started when I was struggling to read books in English. Pushed an open source version back then (https://github.com/baturyilmaz/wordpecker-app), later added more features, and now working on a mobile app.

Recently started testing alpha version, fixing bugs and introducing new features right now (https://alpha.wordpeckerapp.com/).

My end goal is to build: an AI language learning companion that knows what you read, listen, and watch, knows you as a friend (real life, who you are), then helps you improve using that context. If you're B1 at language, it creates a personalized path to get you to B2, then C1, and so forth using your context.

https://wordpeckerapp.com/

This is an HID ReMapping device, things like converting keyboard input to joystick input, or adding macros to specific inputs.

The usage is:

- It has 1 USB in and 1 USB out.

- In programming mode it's a USB drive you can put LUA scripts on (or pull out log files).

- In run mode you can select a LUA script to run.

- Scripts can read incoming mouse/joystick/keyboard data and generate outgoing mouse/joystick/keyboard data or even just log events onto a CSV file.

The code is functional, I still want to polish it and add fun animations and stuff, but for now it works as described above.

This month has been mostly mired in a PCB rework and assembly in the US. Assembly with JLCPCB is too expensive for now, so I have been spending the last few weeks sourcing components in an attempt to keep costs down. I changed the PCB a bunch as well to make assembly and case design easier

While I don't really plan on selling this, I wanted to challenge myself and make it sell-able by keeping costs really low. This has been the real challenge and time sink recently.

It is fully open source, once complete I will export a parts list and Gerber files so people who wanna make one can just use those files.

Doors lets you explore URL addressable 3D rooms that link together seamlessly via portals. The idea is that people would upload rooms to the internet (to github, S3, whatever) and connect them together to form one giant inter-connected space that would be a real trip to explore.

Right now rooms consistent of a: - Manifest JSON file that points to requisite resources and configures portals - An optional skybox - An optional background music track - A .vox file containing voxel terrain data

Here is a video I filmed on my phone of flying through a room that links back to itself: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BCqOYTISS_k

Portals can be arbitrarily sized and everything is prefetched/loaded seamlessly in the background.

I'm nearly done - I just need to add in a very lightweight interface and give the code a bit of a spit shine (I will open source it - so I want it to look pretty)

EDIT: As an aside, I finally decided to give this whole Claude Code thing a go - I purchased a max subscription and I'm trying to write as little code as possible. I certainly wouldn't call what I'm doing "vibe-coding". I discuss a feature in plan mode (incl. how I want to implement it in high level terms) iterate on the plan 2-3 times until I'm satisfied and then let it rip. I'm both very impressed and quite frightened by the productivity boost...

With Codebox, you can define workspace templates or load workspace configurations directly from Git repositories. At the moment, it supports Dev Containers and Docker Compose, with plans to expand to additional configuration methods in the future (for example, Terraform).

Below are some resources where you can learn more about the project, including an article that explains how Codebox works and the source repositories (mirrored on both GitHub and GitLab):

* Medium article: https://medium.com/@dadebianchi2003/introducing-codebox-an-o... * GitHub repository: https://github.com/davidebianchi03/codebox * GitLab repository: https://gitlab.com/codebox4073715/codebox

Features:

- No Sign-Up Required + Instant PDF download

- Live PDF Preview

- Shareable Links

- Multiple Templates (incl. Stripe-style)

- Flexible Tax Support (VAT, GST, Sales Tax, and custom tax formats with automatic calculations)

- Multi-Language (Support for 10+ languages and all major currencies)

- Mobile-Friendly

GitHub: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf

On holidays finished adding flexible tax support + other improvements: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf/pull/163

Would love feedback, contributions, or ideas for other templates/features =)

The problem that I am repeatedly facing is that I am trying to build a home server and I keep asking chatgpt questions, but it is hard to keep all the little details in one place. The way I see it is that I can just text my assistant bot and ask it something like "hey, can you research which NAS setup would be the best for me given x and y". It will offer some setup and I would say "can you add it to the plan" and "can you plan the next steps for me?". The bot will also update the knowledgebase and version control it.

You might also want to use it for something like planning a trip to Paris, where at some point you might say "hey, given my schedule, can you squeeze a tour to top5 croissant places in the center of Paris".

The whole thing sound really vague and sounds like something solved long ago, but I cannot find solutions that will be guaranteed to stick to a very precise plan that I can review at any given moment. If you happened to know existing solutions, please let me know. I really don't want to build this thing.

I moved last year and started a bunch of DIY projects, and each one turned into a bunch of drawings on napkins and backs of receipts to figure out how much wood/material I needed to buy to avoid "one more trip to store". It tells you how much of a stock material you need, and shows you how to cut it, to minimize waste or minimize cost.

A few details

1D: works for boards, pipes, bars, etc. You enter lengths and quantities; it details the cuts onto the stock material.

2D (coming soon): will work for plywood and sheet goods and lets you see how your parts tile onto sheets.

Apparently the software engineer to woodworking pipeline is actually just a circle

It's already working, but it requires so many tweaks and adjustments that make the project hard to finish-finish.

It's controllable by an ESP32, can run automated cooling benchmarks (to find the power vs temp sweet spot) and is pretty much all made out of metal, not 3D-printed – I've learned a ton about working with metal, especially around drilling, cutting, and tapping/threading. Who knew precise drilling a solid copper block could be so tricky at times (saying this as a person who has never drilled anything except wood/concrete before)!

What are those? You know… open, freedom, and privacy respecting technology. Recent products are the Starlite tablet, Furilabs and Fairphone. We've been waiting for these products, well over fifteen years since the introduction of the iPhone and iPad.

We wrote our full thoughts on the subject at: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/

Despite posting many times, we haven't been able to start a discussion here. Maybe we don't know the right key words, or posted too late in the day, not sure. But I know someone is interested in the subject because there have been three huge discussions this week about how "Linux is good enough now."

That has been true for a decade in my experience, but no one seems to be talking about the new mobile hardware available. I hope to work on bringing these efforts together.

https://github.com/iszak/jpeg2000

I wanted to learn about wavelet transforms. I also wanted to use Rust in a non-trivial capacity. Since jpeg2000 uses discrete wavelet transforms[1] and doesn't have a Rust implementation it caught my interest.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_wavelet_transform

I'm around 99% coverage of the US. Learned a lot about land records and GIS along the way.

The core idea is a visual DAG where each transformation (filter, join, aggregate, pivot) creates a view node. Nothing materializes until you need it, DuckDB executes the full chain on demand so you can build deep pipelines without copying data at each step.

Input files can be CSV/Parquet/Excel (Excel might not work great). There's a SQL editor with schema-aware autocomplete, pivot tables with drill-down to underlying rows, and sessions can be exported as files or shareable URLs (the entire pipeline gets encoded in the hash).

Sharing can be granular and you can choose not to embed the files or if files are too big they will not be embedded and the user when opening the link will have to upload the files to restore the session.

The part I find most useful: you can replay pipelines on new data. Share your January analysis, and a colleague runs the same transformations on February's data with schema validation.

Privacy-first since files never leave your browser, it's a static website actually. I will open source soon, and make it probably MIT licensed.

Also it's a WIP and so it may be buggy (there's not even images on the homepage) https://repere.ai

It started as a way to fix audio drift in my multi-room setup without using large jitter buffers, but it turned into a standalone project where I started learning more about NIC driver latency. I found that if you isolate a specific CPU core (isolcpus), disable all interrupt coalescing and busy-poll the RX ring buffer with a custom AF_XDP socket, you can characterize the PHY and PCIe bus latency jitter to within a standard deviation of few ns on generic realtek hardware.

I'm using this disciplined clock to do TDOA (time difference of arrival) triangulation of RF signals inside my home. I have three anchor nodes running this stack connected to SDRs. I can currently track the physical location of my dog's collar to within 15cm in 3D space by correlating the signal peaks. The hardest part is writing the solver for the multipath interference. I'm implementing a custom unscented kalman filter to reject the signal reflections bouncing off my refrigerator and radiators. I know what you're thinking. Yes, it sounds totally excessive but getting sub-microsecond synchronization without an FPGA switch feels like magic.

https://github.com/otsaloma/news-rss

So I converted the PDF form into modern, browser-friendly web forms - and kept every field 1:1 with the original. You fill the form, submit it, and get the official USCIS PDF filled.

https://fillvisa.com/demo/

As a hardcore AI chat user, I'm often frustrated with the single-agent workflow, where a single context window is used for even very long conversations. If I want to change the topic, open a thread, or go on a tangent, I often end up compromising the main thread and I'm forced to copy context over if I want to dive into something.

To solve this, I'm working on a collaborative AI agent orchestrator that models the solution as a group chat with humans and AI agents, including an agent orchestrator.

You can spawn participating agents with the orchestrator who will decisively route messages to the existing agents, or spawn new agents if needed. Also, you can open agent details and send messages directly to existing agents, similar to threads in slack.

So far, I have MCP integrations working with Linear and GitHub, but plan to add many more.

I've been working on this just over 2 weeks, making heavy use of 4+ concurrent Claude Code agents. This would have been impossible otherwise.

If you're interested, feel free to DM on X.

https://x.com/jon_ator/status/2010370649147998459?s=20

Most of my work so far has been on the actual music-making interface, but I'm beginning work on the backend now. I've only worked with Django before (for a school project at Georgia Tech), so I'll be deep in the `sqlx` documentation for a while.

There's no manual, so use at your own risk (it's similar to tracker programs like FastTracker and OpenMPT): https://mondobe.com/tracker

A hobby project I started putting together late last year; a little spot on the internet for prayer and reflection.

https://dugnad.stavanger-digital.no/

A pro bono tech consultancy for local non profits. The idea is to help them use tech to better deliver on their mission.

Im launching a new word game next week which I’m super excited about. If you do play it and have any feedback do shoot me message!

Overall, Minifeed keeps chugging along, fetching new posts every day from almost 2k feeds. I'm hoping to find some nice and ethical monetization strategy for it this year.

[0] https://cloud.typesense.org/

[1] https://github.com/bfritscher/typesense-dashboard

Recently, I've been very motivated to make one niche crafted service after another. For myself, family and friends. But struggled to find a compelling hosting solution for projects that only has and will have only a single user for years. I bought the cheapest mac mini M4 on sale, put it in basement and started working on some cli+daemon to help me automate all things around it. The biggest risk is security, so probably gonna rely a lot on Cloudflare at start.

Nottawa's a free macOS app for making live audioreactive visuals. I'm trying to position it as a 100% free, batteries-included alternative to Resolume and TouchDesigner.

Not a tonne of users yet, but I'm hoping to get some traction in 2026. Would love love love to hear some feedback!

https://nottawa.app/ https://x.com/joe_crozier

    MetalLB - https://metallb.io/ load balancer

    Traefik - https://doc.traefik.io/traefik/getting-started/quick-start-with-kubernetes/ ingress

    Local Path - https://docs.apps.rancher.io/reference-guides/local-path-provisioner storage