hackshack

An LS-120 mechanism (see "SuperDisk"), being designed for much higher density, can sometimes read the data.

Canned fish are tiny now compared to 5 years ago. They shrank to bait size.

Many of us are sysadmins at home. Home Assistant, home NAS, home DVRs, etc. Consumer NASes are in tension against the DIY hacker / homelab people who often run these things. These NASes are just complicated enough to be consumer unfriendly, but not enough for "our" needs. The author has a good point about how NAS hardware is more integrated - less capable for power users - while the software has stagnated into a sort of semi embedded, minimal viable product.

Just yesterday I heard about a friend-of-a-friend type situation where the sysadmin husband was in hospice, and the wife was struggling to figure out how to operate the NAS to recover family photos, etc.

I think consumer NAS manufacturers could add a "foolproof backup connection method," such as a USB port in USB device mode, so the NAS could be easily connected to a laptop by someone with little computer knowledge, in read-only mode.

That said, my home NAS is "the littlest server": an aging ProLiant DL380 Gen8 MicroServer. It's behind a double conversion UPS. SAS card + drives, Proxmox running virtualized FreeNAS, etc. Typical overdone geek build. I have not seen a finer NAS platform for the precocious home admin. I wish there were newer versions which kept the enterprise style "lights out management," and added m.2 and such, but I think HP Enterprise as a company is not interested in the homelab use case.

Oh no! That keyboard was incredible. Very compact, built in TrackPoint (tm) pointing stick, and option to use USB dongle or Bluetooth. It was the perfect KVM / server rack keyboard, and uniquely great as a VR headset keyboard. I remember it was frequently out of stock and would sell out very quickly. Cannot understand why they would discontinue this keyboard.

USB-C has a mode to run analog audio over its cable, called "Audio Adapter Accessory Mode." It uses the D+ and D- pins for Right and Left, and SBU1 and SBU2 for Mic and Ground.

Texas Instruments explains the scheme in a document, "tidub66.pdf."

I know USB-C connectors aren't quite what you had in mind, but they are smaller and more rugged than the 3.5mm connector (in my opinion).

Downside is it is not widely supported, but it is possible. The host device needs to support a way to detect the analog USB-C audio cable (recognized through four shorted pins) and then to split off the analog audio signals before they hit the internal USB transceiver chip.

This person scraped phosphor out of a broken fluorescent tube and made several experimental CRTs: https://www.sparkbangbuzz.com/crt/crt6.htm

From the site: "The cathode ray tubes that I am describing here are crude and they are relatively easy to make at home. They are in fact, much easier to build than most technically minded people would ever imagine."

Between this, and icon-only toolbars and ribbons, I think we're reinventing Chinese, badly. Ideographic characters can often convey meaning succinctly.

My vote is to either go back to picture icons, or use Chinese characters with localized pronunciation, so 車 or 车 is car, and so on.

"Remembering the Kanji," by James Heisig, will set you up real good. I recommend this to anyone who starts in with the 3000+ character thing. It is fundamentally different from rote memorization that they would have you do at school, instead using mnemonics and stories.

You're on to something. I tried this too, a few months ago, with offline Ollama/Magistral on Mac. "You're a dungeonmaster for a single player adventure game, with me as the player..."

It lost track of things almost immediately. But the foundation was there.

Maybe if we had a MUD-tuned model...

If it has an approximate way to track state, and a "pre-caching" method where it can internally generate an entire town all at once, room by room, so hallucinations are rarer... actually starts to sound like a traditional DM's method of world building for a campaign.

Maybe something like an LLM-assisted Inform (interactive fiction engine). https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/

Side note: been playing Aesir, then the Aesir 2 MUD since 1994. It's still up!

+1; thanks from another satisfied user. I have an annual SOLIDWORKS plan, but SolveSpace is my go-to for quick stuff. It makes CAD fun. There is a clarity of design behind the software that gives it a zen-like feel.

radmind had this philosophy. https://radmind.org

It let you create diffs of a filesystem, and layer them with configurations, similar to containers. Useful for managing computer labs at the time.

Consider checking out this fellow's project. He's making an e-ink text editor: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5jL92TrQ803IKtdFwmUC...

A keyboard with the keys pulled and replaced in the Dvorak "LH" (left hand) layout might be worth a try. Years ago, I had a hand injury for several weeks and this got me through. Took about a week or two to type reasonably well. It remaps the number row to one side for maximum use of the keys on the strong side.

August Dvorak developed these "LH" and "RH" layouts for amputees. The layouts are well thought out IMHO. It feels like typing on a numeric keypad.

I struggled for years with touch-typing on QWERTY. I remember the "hovering" action that you described.

After switching to Dvorak, within months, I naturally began touch-typing. I suspect it is due to it being home-row-heavy, with all vowels on the left and most common consonants on the right.

The work of these two (Duane Blehm and John Calhoun) formed my initial opinion of the Macintosh. A fast monochrome environment where you could blit entire images as quickly as sprites. World class audio - Glider 4 had a twangy bass soundtrack and recognizable sounds for every little thing around the game environment. In 1991, coming from the TRS-80 and Apple II it was a revelation.

I believe Duane's About box in Stunt Copter even had an "OffScreen BitMap" button which laid out all the "sprites" in front of you.

That they are both Kansans and have a touch of the surreal in their respective titles also was not lost on me. Something about the early Mac seemed to draw these folks. It attracted a different type of artist than the Amiga; slower paced, more surreal. If not for the Mac, I wonder if the world would have had Cyan/Myst.

A pleasant surprise - the KDE version works "out of the box" on my 2015 MacBook 12" (A1534). This is an unusual machine, and Linux distros tend not to support its hardware out of the box. Chimera even sees the internal SSD, traditionally a stumbling point to installing Linux on this machine.

The vintage Apple A9M0330 (“the IIgs keyboard”) came to mind. The keycaps have a smaller, raised central part. This gives smaller tap targets with a generous space between each cap. Feel is linear. This keycap design helps prevent your fingers from slipping between keys.

This reminds me of the Calculator Construction Set story. I like its example of a builder (engineer) working with a curator (boss), and solving the problem with toolmaking.

Engineer was building a calculator app, and got a little tired of the boss constantly requesting changes to the UI. There was no "UI builder" on this system so the engineer had to go back and adjust everything by hand, each time. Back and forth they went. Frustrating.

"In a flash of inspiration," as the story goes, the engineer parameterized all the UI stuff (line widths, etc.) into drop-down menus, so boss could fiddle with it instead of bothering him. The UI came together quickly thereafter.

https://www.macfolklore.org/Calculator_Construction_Set.html

Agreed - they deliver a very flexible, cost-effective, performant MCU. Downsides (to me) are toolchain and power consumption.

Has the Arduino toolchain been enough for home automation? I’ve been playing with Zephyr, but when I’ve gotten down into those gritty late-AM Saturday night programming hours, actual library support seems to be patchy, outside Arduino and Espressif toolchains.

I ended up running MicroPython on the Sonoff Dual R3 (a cheap and cheerful box about the size of a fig, controlling two separate line voltage relays) but GPIO access is really unsafe, which makes it useless for sensing, but fine for control. For everything else I use the ESP-WROOM-32, a fairly ancient dev board, and it’s highly capable, but I get the sense there are better boards for prototyping in 2023.

If you have a preferred board, do tell!

About once a month, I dwell on this. Modern web pages can easily be 20MB. You can do a lot in 20 megs.

Re-reading Apple’s “Thoughts on Flash” tonight, I was surprised at how many times Apple mentioned vendor lock-in. JavaScript is definitely here to stay. Ten years later, though, I wonder if we have ended up in nearly the same place we strived to avoid - high power consumption - but with worse authoring tools. But with at least open standards, which are good.

I figure the magic moment will occur when some tiny startup builds friendly authoring tools on top of a tight runtime à la Decker. Like HyperCard/Director/Flash it’ll only get you 66% there, but that will be enough for many folks. Hackers. Hobbyists. Students. Tiny companies, and guerrilla departments.

The challenges will be preventing feature-itis, keeping it embeddable / avoiding JS library dependencies, and making it at least free-as-in-beer with an open format. I know there’s space for such a thing. My money’s on some lean 5-person startup with strong opinions.

Decker: https://beyondloom.com/decker/index.html

My RM2, “pencil” with “eraser,” and fabric cover were about $530 USD in 2020 (early adopter). I absolutely love it and would re-pay $600 for the above if I lost my current hardware. I use it 1-4 days a week.

I have an iPad Pro 11 with Pencil, but it is a completely different experience. The iPad is “work” to use. It’s very modal, there are apps, it feels like you’re writing on slick glass, etc.

Whereas, the RM2 is virtual paper for me. Almost frictionless. No pun intended - the screen has “tooth” like real paper which makes it less fatiguing. Less modal as well. I suspect their current user base is Hacker-News-types. Features in that realm would be nice. I don’t care about cloud sync, but I would really like OmniGraffleish features on my RM2.

I do worry about the subscription thing. I worry that they’ve saturated the market with their near-perfect device, and like everyone else they have rent to pay. If I were them, I would consider private cloud / fleet management so that they could sell batches of 20, 100, etc. to corporate entities. Their transcription is good, but eSign and diagramming might be a good next step.

Very difficult to convey the actual user experience of this thing without using it in person. All this jaded old hacker can say is that it surpassed my expectations, to the point of surprise, and I won’t sell it, ever.

1990. It was like a… different kind of object. Not a computer as I understood them. I had done my time with 6502- and Z80-based machines, and, even then in 1990, the first Mac I saw from afar (an SE/30) was a very alien feeling. I remember the white screen and how small the computer was. (Back then I remember thinking, irrationally, such a small thing can’t do much work.)

My feeling at the time was that it was very alien, which made me uncomfortable. But I was young. It would be another year before I got to actually touch a Mac. I was comfortable with the Apple ][ but distinctly remember this new Mac “toy” being almost like an intrusion into “our” well-defined computer-user space.

And then I got a Mac and dug into the floppies.

Bill Atkinson’s HyperCard destroyed my opinion of computers, and elevated it to a new level. Bill, thank you so much.

I will never forget HyperCard. It is a humanist classic - a book that you re-read every 10 years.

Only recently have I grokked how the actual, physical hardware was basically built by hackers, which endeared me to it even more so. They were running very, very close to the edge. The way they ran the timings… it feels like a very complex embedded system.

Absolutely terrifying from a business standpoint.

In any case, it all held together long enough to become acquired by NeXT, and here I am with a 3-pound supercomputer on my desk. In a tasteful indigo black.

Whew!

I honestly didn’t think it would end up this way. It’s not bad.

This is why I moved to the Duck 3-4 years ago. I became tired of clicking past Page 1 of my Google results, all content mills and SEO farms.

DuckDuckGo is just a front-end to Bing, though, and as of mid 2021 I've begun seeing more and more low-effort SEOey links in the first page. Google started the trend, but it seems like all major search engines are increasingly disconnecting search results from the actual search terms.

I actually find myself using archive.org to search if I need super-specific old-school AltaVista-style results.

Data point. Old fart who switched to Dvorak eons ago, at age 16. It felt natural after 1 week, and felt more efficient than the ‘qwert sometime between weeks 2 and 3. I suspect young age greatly affects take-up speed. Good on ya for taking care of yourself, and switching when you did.

Incidentally, at age 26, I used the “left-handed” Dvorak layout for 2 weeks while my right wrist and hand healed from a dirtbike crash. I was only becoming proficient at the 2 week mark.

The Dvorak left- and right-hand layouts are not as widely known, and look nothing like the standard two-hand layout… but are incredibly optimized. Even the number row is remapped to accommodate letters. Once I started to grok its efficiency, it felt like 10-key’ing entire words at a time. Might be interesting on modern phones.

I experience the same thing with QWERTY and tendons in wrist & forearm. I have to slow down - a lot - and take breaks. I just remap teh kbd if > 15 minutes. iOS kbd keeps my brain familiar with QWERTY; no first-party Dvorak and I don’t expect Apple to ever include one.

Kino. They were the best Soviet band.

I agonized about this for years. I wanted a proper server, not something embedded or a Pi with a rat's nest of cables, that would still fit in a credenza in the living room.

Ended up getting an HP MicroServer Gen8 and absolutely love it. Same cube design as the DS918+, but with proper iLO (remote media, etc.), lots of boot options, and very stoutly built. It feels like a real HP DL300-series server (the Gen9 does not IMHO). I bought it as it was being discontinued.

It's running VMware ESXi with FreeNAS on top of that, with an LSI SAS card connected to the drive bays, then hardware-pass-through'ed to the FreeNAS VM. I've got the home's DNS server, Pi-hole, Unifi controller, test VMs, etc. happily virtualized alongside FreeNAS. 16GB RAM total, with 8GB dedicated to FreeNAS. Boot is off a microSD card (on the motherboard, naturally) and VM datastore is on an SSD connected where the optical drive would go.

I know I'm violating several recommendations here (low RAM, virtualized FreeNAS, SAS card passed through, etc. etc.) but it does indeed work, very well in fact. 2+ years of serving the home. With the Gen8, HP built almost the perfect home server for tech-oriented types... pity they cost-reduced its successor.

This. Possibly my best computer "upgrade" was switching to Dvorak at 16 years old. Took about 2 weeks. It makes all keyboards much more comfortable, especially laptops. I would recommend Dvorak first, before starting down the path towards an ergonomic keyboard.

On Dvorak, your fingers automatically drift back to the home row because of how the letters are arranged, so I found myself touch-typing after several months with no specific effort. Plus, iOS only has QWERTY, so the phone keyboard keeps me in practice enough to use QWERTY on off occasions.

Dvorak plus the Kinesis Advantage, for me at least, is the most comfortable combination. Speed is probably a bit slower than a flat keyboard, but it's about long-term comfort, not speed, when I type as much as I have to every day.

Thanks to HN, I checked it out on my PS5 tonight. Very impressive. The thing that immediately jumped out at me was the 24fps target. The demo has a cinematic feeling, and thus the 24fps framerate feels “correct.” Compared to 60fps, you can do a lot more when you have 2.5x as much time per frame.

The first part is a CGI representation of Keanu and Carrie-Anne. I was shocked at the quality; it had “the demoscene feel,” if you know what I mean - “I did not know the hardware could do that.” Artists going full OCD, just because it was the right thing to do. Great work.

Parts of it had that CGI feeling, but most of the first two minutes, I swear I was watching video and not CG.

Part 2: the city tour. I am not sure if there’s a detailed YouTube video of same, but the artists used some clever tricks, as any good 3D artist would. You can fly around and peer into offices and apartments through their windows. There are a limited number of static rooms, and they use frosted glass to blur the details. Interiors are fully modeled and there is parallax through the glass. HVAC units on rooftops are robust, down to the warning messages. Great use of LOD.

I saw Z-fighting and LOD “popping” when surveying the city from on high.

I walked away from this (um, got up from the sofa) thinking Epic’s gambit is to push Unreal Engine 5 as a virtual movie set.

They went all out on the character models in the first part, with Keanu and Carrie-Anne. There were a few uncanny valley shots (“dead eyes”) but very impressive overall. Some of the shots could be taken as a reference, or gold standard.

Even more impressive is that it’s running on a (loss leader) $600 Sony PS5.

Blender's 2.9 release was what did it for me. That team is on fire.

I'll hype Krita's 5.0 release (still in beta) - it has the same "turnaround" feel.

Thanks, everyone, for plugging the donut tutorial link! Checked it out today. 3D modeling has lots of subtle, jarring nuances and the author addresses them head-on. Recommended.

It's exciting to see libre software becoming so refined. Several projects are serious about managing the triangle of UI, stability, and features. These tools aren't "in the artists' way" anymore.

This is incredibly frightening. I’ve seen data rot up close, and as a former data janitor, I can sympathize. My advice is to control everything down to the wall socket. I considered the Synology boxes for my home NAS, but my “spider sense” was tingling, so I built around an HP MicroServer Gen8 with an LSI PCIe card, and mirrored drives. It’s on a double-conversion UPS (Smart-UPS RT). It runs FreeNAS on VMware ESXi, and the drives present as raw volumes to ZFS. No data integrity issues after ~3 years. Note the trend: clean power, good server-y hardware, matched drives in a simple RAID, properly resourced ZFS, etc. But yeah, spinning disks are generally not a “backup.”