Random on yoav.blog

You're absolutely right!

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 14:28:40 +0000

I had some fun a couple of nights ago creating a silly website that tracks how often Claude Code tells me “You’re absolutely right!” during coding sessions.

I open-sourced it (of course) and posted it to Hacker News, thinking some people might enjoy the joke.

Turns out I was absolutely right! 🤣

It hit number 2 on the HN front page and got over 100k page views in less than a day. I really enjoyed seeing how people noticed some of the small details I obsessed over.

Keeping tabs on visual changes in PRs

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 14:28:40 +0000

Being involved in projects with lots of PRs from AI coding agents, I realized that no matter how thoroughly I review the code, I still need a quick way to validate any visual changes.

Out of that need, I built a small GitHub Action now available on the marketplace: auto-pr-screenshots.

Once it’s set up, it uses Playwright to generate screenshots and post them as a comment on the PR.

Here’s an example of how that looks:

The perfect music for cooking pasta

Sat, 02 Oct 2021 07:21:47 +0000

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

Ride into the sun

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 18:31:28 +0000

Looking for another place
Somewhere else to be
Looking for another chance
To ride into the sun

The Velvet Underground

Thank you for paying attention, Grammarly

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 05:39:35 +0000

From Grammarly’s weekly insights email.

Personal Weather Station

Thu, 20 Feb 2020 17:38:09 +0000

I had fun installing a personal weather station on our roof. I’ve set it up to share data automatically to a number of online services. See the station’s live data on Weather Underground.

The half-life of WordPress code

Tue, 06 Dec 2016 12:00:51 +0000

Inspired by Erik Bernhardsson post The half-life of code & the ship of Theseus, here are the results of running Erik’s scripts against the WordPress git repo.

Cohorts

Code decay over time

Old Neil Young and young Neil Young sing Old Man

Wed, 04 Feb 2015 06:49:19 +0000

From The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon:

Time Magazine Doing Open Source

Tue, 13 May 2014 09:09:33 +0000

A couple of days ago, Time Magazine published “How Popular Will Your Name Be in 25 Years?” – it’s a fun and interesting analysis of the US Social Security Administration’s baby name data. The part I loved most?

The source code for this project is available on Time’s GitHub page.

Amazing.

Same Ikea product, 30 years apart

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 06:20:16 +0000

While going through my Mom’s old toolbox a few weeks ago, I found this:

Probably from around 1980, it’s the Patrull drawer safety catch from Ikea. The funny thing is that just a couple days before that, I bought this:

Same product, 30 years later!

It’s so interesting to see the two products side by side: the differences in style, packaging, and in the product itself are really telling. For example, notice how the old packaging has a textual description in a few languages, which I guess made sense since Ikea was only active in Europe in the early 80’s. Imagine if the current packaging had a description for every country Ikea operates in now!

And on that farm he had a hippopotamus!

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 08:02:24 +0000

I’m not sure what to think of this. Jonathan’s tractor toy has a hippo instead of a pig:

Here’s the original:

When you press the hippo, it still sounds like a pig though.

I guess we got the middle eastern version, pigs being considered impure and all.
I wonder if it’s also the version sold in large Seventh-Day Adventist communities.

How I Watched the F1 Race Today

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 18:37:44 +0000

To watch the opening race of the 2012 F1 season, I had to set up a VPN connection to a server in Italy (for Rai’s live TV feed), and a virtual machine running another VPN connection to the UK (for BBC Radio’s audio commentary). The VPN service only costs $10 a month, but I’ll pay 4 times that to get a proper legal direct feed, if anyone will sell it to me.

I tried to watch Game of Thrones and this is what happened

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:30:22 +0000

Great comic on the Oatmeal.
This is ten times worst if you don’t live in the U.S.

(Not) working from home

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:44:06 +0000

Working at the local college. These library cubicals are really helping my concentration. Props Paolo for the awesome [Foursquare -> WordPress ifttt recipe.][1]

How France’s Free will reinvent mobile

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 19:57:35 +0000

I’m a huge fan of how France’s “Free” has been revolutionizing the french telecommunication market in the past decade. An article I wrote about them was published on Ynet back in 2006. Now they’re also getting into mobile.

TV Recommendation – Black Mirror

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 16:33:23 +0000

I recently watched the 3 part british mini-series called “Black Mirror“. Each part is a different brilliant simulation of a dark technological future. Just fantastic – don’t miss it.

Via Yuval Dror (Hebrew)

Enough with the non-existing digital frontiers: Louis CK experiment a tremendous success

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 10:53:39 +0000

“I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58)”

https://buy.louisck.net/statement

Louis CK is selling a professionally produced show for $5 with no DRM or regional restrictions. Success.

I steal content when I’m not allowed to buy it legally. If I can, I make the effort to connect through a proxy to buy some music, or change the country setting of my phone to buy an app, but if it takes more than 5 minutes to work around some stupid rules, I’ll just get the torrent.

How Do People Use Apple TV?

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:47:09 +0000

John Gruber:

Only 30 percent? That seems crazy to me. 70 percent of Apple TV owners don’t rent any movies or TV shows?

From How Do People Use Apple TV?.

Well, in most countries movies and TV shows aren’t even available in iTunes. We (I) just use the AppleTV to run XBMC, my 2nd favorite open source project.

The Quicksort Algorithm, Hungarian Style

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 09:52:52 +0000

A rendition of the Quicksort Algorithm with Hungarian folk dance:

And there’s more.

Hat tip: Jorge

The Future

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:46:52 +0000

So we bought this fairly difficult to assemble product the other day, and on the package was a big QR Code. I scanned the code with my phone, and Android detected a link to a YouTube video and offered a few choices for playing it. One of those was “Play on XBMC”, thanks to the XBMC remote app (XBMC is the software that runs on our living room HTPC).

Drums Mics Shootout

Thu, 13 May 2010 16:32:16 +0000

If you’re into either drumming or music recording, check out this great series of drum mics shootout by my brother Kobi. Watch on YouTube for the HD versions

Wall painting at the kindergarten

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:31:59 +0000

Spent the day at the kindergarten where my family is sponsoring after hours activities for kids from a rough neighborhood . We’ve repainted most of the outdoor equipment and helped Liron Ben-Arzi draw a huge wall painting:

Add pictures to your contacts in Gmail and Outlook

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:36:26 +0000

A few tools to add pictures to your contacts in Gmail and Outlook

From Gravatar to Gmail: Arikfr’s Gravatars to Google Contacts Importer
From Facebook to Gmail: GoogleFacebookSync
From Facebook to Outlook: OutSync

Great apps for Symbian s60v3 smartphones

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 13:33:14 +0000

Keeping track of all the apps I’ve got installed on my phone is not an easy task. Here’s a quick list of the most important ones:

amAze GPS - Worldwide GPS Turn By Turn navigation
Fring - IM and VOIP with skype/gtalk etc.
Gmail - Useful when I need to make a search for an old email message.
Gravity – The best symbian twitter client.
Mecanto – Streams all your music collection.
Mobbler - Couldn’t live without it. Scrobble and streams music to and from last.fm. Good review @ symbian-guru.
Nokia Location Tagger - Tags the camera phone pictures with location data.
Nokia Messaging - Push mail from my Gmail account.
Nokia Sports Tracker - Great combination of mobile app and web service. Uses the GPS to track speed, distance and course while running/walking etc.
Opera Mini - While the phone native web browser is quite good, Opera Mini is useful for a quick Wikipedia search from time to time
Qik - A great video stream that’s really easy to install and run.
Skyfire - Another web browser, but the only that can display flash/silverlight/whatever on a symbian phone. Hopefully will get faster and more stable with future releases.
Telmap Nav - Another TBT navigation app. I’m currently beta testing the new version. Really cool stuff.
WirelessIRC - A prefect IRC client.
Wordmobi - Awesome WordPress blog editor.

(Updated: August 2009.)

Wordmobi – WordPress on your symbian mobile phone

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:49:56 +0000

Finally, a free mobile app for WordPress that works on my E71. This post is written with Wordmobi a great and full featured WordPress client and editor.
It even snaps pics and includes them directly into your posts.

Posted by Wordmobi

Using Google for OCR

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 02:52:10 +0000

Amit Agarwal has posted a tip on his blog about using Google to convert PDF to text. For some reason, he suggest putting all your PDFs documents on the web:

Create a folder in your website (say abc.com/pdf) and upload all the PDF images to that folder. Now create a public web page that links to all the PDF files. Wait for the Google bots to spider your stuff.

Once done, type the query “site:abc.com/pdf filetype:pdf” to see the PDF documents as HTML.

Business Books for the Poor

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 14:36:50 +0000

CC License. Photo credit: Marcus Q

Read, Read, Read. That’s probably the best piece of advice I ever got. Recently it’s all about business books and unfortunately, these are quite expensive around here.

So, how did my business bookshelf grew from a handful to more than 30 books in less than a year? One word – BookMooch.

It’s an amazing book swapping site where you list books you want to give, get points for mailing them to others and use those points to get books you want. I’ve mailed and received books from almost 20 countries around the world, Including Tahiti.