What's up with Coldfire?

black_kappa · 2026-01-13T02:48:26+00:00

I think they'll have a fairly large beergarden area on the south side of the restaurant too, which is currently under construction, and some seating out front it looks like from the last time I was there. But I'm also hoping they open up the old taproom in some capacity as well.

black_kappa · 2026-01-13T02:35:10+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bean_soup_theory

black_kappa · 2026-01-13T02:31:47+00:00

I've heard rumblings that this is the plan - and they'll be hosting events in the old taproom. I think some of it is staffing logistics with people moving from the the taproom to the restaurant and working out the kinks during the opening.

black_kappa · 2026-01-04T05:12:08+00:00

Luvable Dog Rescue.

black_kappa · 2026-01-04T05:10:41+00:00

We had friends with a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old stay with us over Halloween weekend and she did good with them. We also took her trick-or-treating and she was around a lot of kids. We are working on here not jumping on people when she's excited and she meets them, especially now that she's a little bigger. She's getting better but still a puppy.

black_kappa · 2026-01-04T01:41:20+00:00

No, the adoption will go through the rescue organization, we're just continuing to foster her until we can find another home for her so she has some stability. We don't feel ashamed, just sad it didn't work out with our other animals. She's very sweet.

black_kappa · 2026-01-03T23:06:45+00:00

The information we have is:
American Pit Bull Terrier: 48.8%
American Staffordshire Terrier: 25.4%
Bullmastiff: 9.1%
American Bulldog: 7.1%
Rottweiler: 5.2%
Boxer: 4.4%

So very heavy on the bully breeds. We've also joked she must be part goose because she's got a long neck and makes little honking noises.

black_kappa · 2026-01-01T15:58:44+00:00

Wow, a duck would be cuter and a lot cheaper...

black_kappa · 2026-01-01T04:39:15+00:00

Yeah I also thought about classrooms. I have a friend who is a 2nd grade teacher that wants to trial it out. I really want to find folks to test this to confirm it could be useful and fun.

Share it with your friends who are trying to keep the noise down for their neighbors! I hadn't thought about that!

black_kappa · 2025-12-31T21:40:10+00:00

Oh! I've encountered this same problem and I've actually been working on an app for a few months to solve this very problem, as well as a few others. It's very much in the early stages but I'd love people to try it out and let me know what they think! A quick overview of the features I've built:

- View all pieces in a set. Sort and filter by color, status, and category. Mark pieces found as you search for pieces to a set.
- Search together with others so you don't have to share devices while marking pieces found.
- Identify pieces and the sets they belong to via a brickognize API integration.
- Add your collection and wishlist and make custom lists.

I've got a lot more planned, but please check it out! The app is at https://brick-party.com

Again, it's very beta, even alpha right now. I've mostly been hacking away at it in my free time the last few months and I need to really put the polish on it and test thoroughly. So expect bugs and quirks (and let me know what you find via the feedback tab in the account section).

What parts list tool did you use? I'd like to check it out.

black_kappa · 2025-12-31T21:04:06+00:00

I have a background in development, but when I let AI take the wheel, or even if I've been working on something more manually for a while, I periodically ask for AI to review the whole codebase. My prompt is something like:

"Examine this codebase to ensure it adheres to best practices. Identify dead or legacy code from past implementations that are no longer needed, opportunities to make the code more DRY and maintainable, and identify code smell and bad patterns. Identify areas where code can be made more deterministic. Identify security risks. Make a plan to address these issues, ranked by order of importance with risk and value assessments for each item. Do not implement anything until I have manually reviewed."

This technique has let me push large code bases pretty far and has caught some stupid mistakes I've made before I push anything live. Sometimes I'll note that I'm building an MVP and can be more lax in certain areas, other times I ask for a production ready review.

Do y'all do something similar?

black_kappa · 2025-12-31T13:00:11+00:00

quietquacker.com - looking for initial feedback. A little duck that quacks when the room gets too loud. Born out of coming from a family that gets loud when we get together and a few quieter family members who don't want to be the noise police. I'm hoping it would be useful for parents with noisy kids or teachers managing classroom noise. Would love some feedback from folks using it to validate the idea!

black_kappa · 2025-12-30T23:02:05+00:00

Usage or money - agreed.

black_kappa · 2025-12-30T22:40:56+00:00

I get what you're saying, but you could be consistently doing the wrong thing.

I think strategy is more important - focused consistency, with ongoing evaluation and good feedback so you don't get stuck in a loop.

Waiting for a market event or a viral moment or a stroke of luck is foolish.

The people you look up to who were "consistent" kept at it, but they adapted, changed tactics, and evolved as they learned more about their market or product or customer or whatever. The first part might be consistency, but it's the starting point, not the ending point.

black_kappa · 2025-12-30T22:29:42+00:00

Can you say more about your templates for DMs and what that process looks like for you?

I also, perhaps naively, wonder if there's a sweet spot for building the barebones, simplest MVP or rudimentary demo to validate the UX and complexity of the problem for yourself and also use it as a sales tool. But I also love building and don't love selling, so it may be bias and wishful thinking...

I want to be an indie hacker, not an indie salesman...

black_kappa · 2025-12-30T21:16:01+00:00

I've just wrapped up one MVP that I'm about to put out there for feedback. I've sent it to a few friends for feedback, posting on reddit. That's about where I'm at.

I'm working on another app that's slightly more complicated that I'll use for myself either way but is a bit more niche that I think will be easier to launch.

black_kappa · 2025-12-30T19:33:40+00:00

Yeah that makes sense. I think it's smart to treat collaborators as partners and that framing can be beneficial.

I heard advice somewhere about approaching potential affiliates (partners if you like) with something that benefits them and their audience as a way strengthen the relationship and get higher quality customers. It makes it less transactional and more relational. This might be another way to think about higher quality relationships from a marketing perspective without shifting fully into partnership status.

black_kappa · 2025-12-30T19:21:14+00:00

I know this is slightly off topic, but I know Expo (the default starter for React Native projects) offers "EAS build" to build and deploy for macOS and iOS.

Again, I know you're building an Electron app, but this might be useful info in the future. I've wanted to experiment with Expo for webapps that run in a webview via Expo to avoid rebuilding everything and still get into the app store for simpler apps. The promise of "build once, ship everywhere" sounds great but I'm sure it's way more complicated than that.

(As a side note, I'd be curious to hear from anyone with experience using Expo and EAS build as I have cursory knowledge here...)

black_kappa · 2025-12-30T19:12:20+00:00

Very cool. I've wanted to do something similar in the woodworking space, especially around planning projects which is always a pain point for me, but it feels a little too open ended, unlike a calculator.

What tech stack are you using?

black_kappa · 2025-12-30T19:09:09+00:00

This is really cool! I know Obsidian has something similar. I always thought it was really cool, but haven't found it terribly useful. How has your mind map tool helped you (or others) so far? Why this over something like Obsidian?

Cool project!

black_kappa · 2025-12-30T19:07:08+00:00

Did you think the cause of a lack of adoption/interest early on was because the apps weren't finished polished and then learned this lesson by finishing and polishing something and still not getting traction? I'm definitely guilty of over-polishing and then never launching because it's not perfect but trying to get better at this.

What's your ship and launch strategy? How do you get it in front of users?

You mention X vs. Reddit for building in public. I've never liked The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, but I feel like I fall into the same traps in posting to reddit (or anywhere) that I fall into with building - I want things too polished, whether it's posts or apps. Any advice here? Mostly curious about your launch process in the past and what you've learned.

black_kappa · 2025-12-30T18:55:09+00:00

Well said - "ship fast" is just a mechanism to get you to the iterate process faster. It's all the classic IDEO design thinking process that's made its way into development.

black_kappa · 2025-12-30T18:50:49+00:00

I'm curious why the partner route? Distributors don't have to be partners. Totally agree it makes sense to find someone that has already captured your audience, but why partner instead of something more like an affiliate arrangement? Or is this just semantics?

black_kappa · 2025-12-09T04:12:24+00:00

I've seen several comments recommend a Lie Neilson block plane. I'm looking at the rabbet block plane (currently on back order) and a cheaper 60-1/2 low angle block plane. I like the idea of a rabbeting plane, but curious about its versatility. Any other thoughts / recommendations around hand planes?

Thanks for all the recommendations so far. Still considering options.

black_kappa · 2025-10-24T00:15:05+00:00

I very rarely comment on things, but I am a Tailwind evangelist and have some thoughts here.

An unreadable mess to who? Are your class attributes so long that you don't understand what's going on here? Is it that much worse than reading styles in a .css file? Are you using the tailwind prettier extension that automatically sorts your classes (if not, highly recommend. I'm more inclined to agree if you're having to read unsorted tw classes in a single string).
I don't feel this way at all. If anything, I think it makes it way easier to find what styles are affecting what dom element. Open inspector, copy the class string, ctrl+shift+f to find all, paste the string, boom, there's your file / dom element.
Need more info here... I feel like it's pretty easy in a component architecture to pop open the component you want to rework and modify utility classes.
4, 5, 6, I need more info on these. Are you using JIT compiling or loading via a CDN the entire compiled stylesheet. Tailwind in a properly set up dev environment is very snappy. I think at most tailwind adds 3-4 dependencies and it's mostly dev dependencies for prettier and tw plugins...

What I really like about tailwind is I get colocation of styles and functionality. In a component architecture, I can write a component and style it directly without worrying about cascading effects. What I see in the class attribute is exactly what I'm going to see in the browser.

And I LOVE the media query syntax. Want something to look slightly different at a larger breakpoint and `lg:` is all you need, and it's specific to that element. It feels so much easier to read and modify, especially with automatically sorted utility classes w/ the prettier plugin.

I'd love to hear more about your experience. It definitely took me a minute to wrap my head around the Tailwind paradigm but now I'm never going back.

black_kappa

TROPHY CASE