November 1, 2025
Label Wars: P‑Touch vs Web App
Show HN: A simple drag and drop tool to document and label fuse boxes
Label wars erupt: “just buy a label maker” vs “make it for switches”
TLDR: A simple web tool to label home electrical panels sparked a showdown: practical users swear by a handheld label printer, while techies want it adapted for network switches. The biggest fight? Calling them “fuse boxes” instead of circuit breakers — a naming nitpick that fueled the thread’s drama.
A humble Show HN project promises a drag‑and‑drop tool to document and label home electrical panels, complete with custom colors, save‑to‑PDF, and geeky import/export in JSON (a simple text format computers use to store lists). It even has a cheeky roadmap line to “add more fuses.” But the community immediately made it a spectacle. One camp yelled, “Why software? Use a Brother P‑Touch!” — the classic label printer got crowned the everyday hero by practical types who don’t plan to map their breaker box like a treasure chart.
Tech folks, meanwhile, saw a different playground: networking. A commenter pitched adapting it to Ethernet switches, because labeling ports (those little numbered holes on a network box) could save sanity in messy server closets and home labs. Then came the semantics police: “These aren’t fuses, they’re circuit breakers,” complete with disappointment from people expecting automotive fuse diagrams. Cue the memes about “add more fuses” becoming “add more ports,” plus jokes about labeling everything in the house, from cats to coffee makers. In short: a tiny DIY labeling app triggered a surprisingly spicy debate — old‑school label tape vs web app, home wiring vs network racks, and whether the word “fuse” belongs in 2025. Drama over labels about labels — peak internet energy.
Key Points
- •Fuse Box Labels is a tool for documenting and labeling fuse boxes with drag-and-drop functionality.
- •Users can import and export configurations as JSON and save layouts as PDF.
- •Custom colors and labels are supported for tailored panel documentation.
- •The roadmap includes cleaner code, improved PDF output, asynchronous save with progress, and more fuse types.
- •Local setup requires cloning/downloading the repo, running npm install and npm run dev, and accessing via http://127.0.0.1:3000/.