Camera, code, coffee

I have a soft spot for Kanban-like tools. Every now and then I'd trawl GitHub for new Kanban applications, I'd try the ones that piqued my interest, and... I go back to my all-time favorite Nullboad. Not only because it ticks all the right boxes for me, but also because I really appreciate its elegance and simplicity. The entire application consists of a single HTML file, a jQuery plugin, a font, and, well, that's it. You can use the application with pretty much any modern browser, and you can master Nullboard's functionality in a matter of minutes. In fact, the default board in the application provides clear and well-written instructions on how to use everything that Nullboard has to offer.

Nullboard packs all the features you'd expect to find in a decent Kanban application. Support for multiple boards, user-defined columns (called lists in Nullboard), drag-and-drop operation, keyboard shortcuts — all are present and accounted for. There are even a few creature comforts like dark theme and additional fonts.

The application stores all its data in the browser's internal storage, but you can also export and import boards manually. Don't want to back up the data manually? nbagent got you covered. When up and running, it quietly keeps Nullboard data backed up in a dedicated directory. Not only that, it also keeps previous versions of every board.

Compared to fully featured Kanban applications, Nullboard looks decidedly minimalist. But that's exactly the point. Nullboard does what it's designed to do, it's easy to master, it doesn't stand in your way. What's not to like?

I can't code to save my life, but that doesn't stop me from trying. One of my latest creations is a case in point. Since stuff tends to disappear unceremoniously from the Web, I usually save local copies of interesting articles. Up until recently, I used the SingleFile Firefox add-on for that, but the process involved too many manual steps for my liking. After several failed attempts to make Archivebox work, I decided to roll out my own tool based on monolith. The latter a simple command-line utility that saves complete web pages as single HTML files. It took me a few hours to cobble together a crude but usable tool that I named Hako (it means box in Japanese, and it sounds a bit like hacky, which I find somewhat appropriate).

I love Bing's daily photo feature, but I don't use Bing. So I whipped up Tiny Page, a simple landing page written in PHP. The operative word being simple. The PHP script pulls the URL of the current Bing photo and its title out of a JSON file and fetches the current weather conditions from the wttr.in service. A dash of CSS styling helps to make the page look not too terrible. That's all there is to it. Wait, actually, the page also shows whatever link you specify as favorite.