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https://randomcountrygenerator.com/

Sorry HN, nothing sophisticated or fancy. Life is really busy last few years (family :), day job, building house).

Next time it will be some great tool from me, I promise. :)


Ha, this is fun but I definitely thought it was going to be making up countries


Well, with this AI thing going on right now. Maybe it is not bad idea to try with making up countries.

"Hey AI, generate some random country name, flag, capital city and borders. Oh yes, and few pictures of country."


No. Bora is strong wind and can last for days.


> Bora is strong wind

Fun fact: Jugo (another frequent wind on Adriatic coast) is even stronger wind, but what makes bora/bura special are strong sudden gusts.


> Fun fact: Jugo (another frequent wind on Adriatic coast) is even stronger wind, but what makes bora/bura special are strong sudden gusts.

I saw it jack-knife a semi truck on my way back from Dalamatia to Istria, all my Life I ave seen the aftermath of the Santa Ana winds in SoCal but I've never seen it happen in person, but I was stalking that truck for at least 15 mins keeping my distance as the the carriage swayed hard left an right as the Bura got stronger as we got higher in elevation.

Eventually the hitch thing that attaches to the front part of the truck snapped and sent it flying into the air and then sliding down the road, it blocked the entire 3 lane road. I checked to make sure the guy was fine and then left when the police showed up.

Ironically, I had a Bura beer [0] with my food at a cafe as I was waiting for the rain to stop. I got hme to Istria pretty late, and all my patio furniture was tossed up, The Bura is no joke, but it has a cleansing effect; everything felt lighter after that storm.

0: https://www.burabrew.hr/our-beer/


> semi truck on my way back from Dalamatia to Istria

I can guess that was under Velebit, where bura is often very strong and at those times the road is closed for motorcycles, campers, double-deckers and vehicles with trailers.

But people regularly ignore those restrictions because they are not aware of the danger.


> But people regularly ignore those restrictions because they are not aware of the danger.

Possibly, I couldn't tell you where exactly it was to be honest.

I'm not stranger to driving in 100MPH winds (Santa Ana), and I even did my Motorcycle endorsement in 70mph winds (I dropped their bike coming to a stop due to a freak side gust) but my little under-powered Golf was being tossed around by the Bura so bad that I was just waiting for the thing to jack knife as there were no exits for like +30km.

I took the toll road the rest of the way back to Istria as it wasn't worth it in the end.


It was topic about showing your side projects, or something similar.

I had small website just like [1] but with ads (I sold it later). It gave me lot of traffic, more visibility, eventually better Google rank and more money from ads.

Such small/fun sites can get you real money!

1: https://randomcountrygenerator.com/


Hi I see that you are serving your own OSM tiles, can you share how are you generating them? Especially in webp?


I'm using TileMill to generate tiles. I does not support webp. I exported it to png, and then with some one line script converted all png's to webp.


What did you use for ads? Adsense?


Correct. It was passive income. Once running, I didn't touched it almost at all.


Amazing, how much does it net you?


I had site similar to this that generated 600-700$ USD per month as passive income.

https://randomcountrygenerator.com/

I didn't touched it, sometimes for many months in a row.


Aw, I thought this would create a wikipedia-style entry for a fictional non-existent country!


How does this make money? I don't see any ads.


They said a site similar - Not that this is theirs.


Not the OP, but if you search for "random country generator" you will indeed find a few similar sites which do definitely have a lot of ads.


Oh, now I understand.


1. Linode VPS 12.5$/month

2. domains around 100$ year

3. Backblaze personal backup 60$ year.

Working on 2011 Mac Mini in Macvim, cheap and works perfectly fine.

I mentioned fun part, and will skip mentioning health insurance, car etc.


https://random.country/

It's few yeras old now, but still half baked. I will rewrite it, make better UX.


Cool site - I run a similar one. Would be interested in discussing something with you - my email is in my profile.


Just read this "Snowbound" at Outside Online. What a story!

note: it's Garmin inReach Mini, if someone is interested.


Right, that's the exact model you should look for, InReach is the term they use to describe their whole sat-messaging line.

By the way, they also have an API you can hook into. I once was toying with the idea of implementing a compact language to help me with resupplying between towns: Lets say that my flashlight breaks or my mattress gets a hole that I cannot fix, I could have a list of all my items (it's rather short - for example here is my '19 HRP thruhike gear list: https://lighterpack.com/r/rbjo9d). For every item I can maintain let's say an amazon product page (with some price bound probably), as well as the list of towns I'll be visiting.

A single text message that says "ORDER 1 flashlight to Bridgeport" could trigger an order to the General Delivery address which I already have in my Amazon account.

This could even work as a service that possibly pays itself using just Amazon's referral fees.

I never got to actually testing their API since you have to manually apply to their business plan which cost significantly more than the regular plan. But it could really be useful and save you a lot of time and money while thruhiking, when you really need to get a replacement item while out there between towns with no signal and your next town only has a general store.

And yes, Otter's story is so crazy, sad and depressing. Being there so long and slowly realizing that there is no way out feels so difficult to process. I can easily see how it could have been adapted to a film.


"The dogs bark, but the caravan goes on."

Also when I think I have problems in life, this helps a lot: "Things could be (much) worse." (I think it is from Stoicism)


Correct! I have been there.


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