Hacker News: 2mlWQbCK

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks"

2mlWQbCK — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 18:43:29 +0000

> My oldest programs in gw basic are on 5.25" DD disks

Mine as well, but luckily many years ago I copied all the contents of my old floppies to CD-ROMs, and then later all the CD-ROMs to DVDs, and finally to USB-harddisks, and now all the files live happily (hopefully forever) in my hoard ZFS (and several off-site backups).

The only significant exception is most 1.2 MB floppies. Those were also 5.25", but the drives were much more difficult to calibrate well. Can't get the files from almost any of those. A few I can list the filenames, but not access the file contents. Most are just unreadable. I could not even find a drive that worked well enough to copy those using my KryoFlux.

(* Not that there is anything at all of real value on all those old floppies. This is pure nostalgia/hoarding.)

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks"

2mlWQbCK — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 18:38:03 +0000

Swedish government archives (Riksarkivet) (IIRC; could have been some library or other archive?) used to have a page asking for donations of equipment that can be used to read old disks/discs/tapes. Basically any kind of drives, old computers that those drives can be used with etc, precisely for this reason that sometimes the archive have to rescue data from ancient media.

Can't find it now so not sure if it is still up, but I can't imagine they ended up with enough equipment that they will never need more. Must be something all archives struggle with and there will always be some format they do not already have equipment for, or some machine they need spare parts for?

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks"

2mlWQbCK — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 18:30:32 +0000

There was a few mentions of KryoFlux in the X-Copy article linked from HN 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45552913 (X-Copy developer Christian Bartsch that is interviewed now works on KryoFlux.)

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "The Cannae Problem"

2mlWQbCK — Fri, 02 May 2025 14:12:57 +0000

Do you really need this to explain WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3? They, like many others, built their castles on Microsoft's land. Isn't it that easy? What could they have done realistically once Microsoft decided they wanted to own the market for word processors and spreadsheets?

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable"

2mlWQbCK — Thu, 01 May 2025 13:46:20 +0000

Some future manager will look at a graph and think monetization can be improved X% while only losing an estimated Y% of users. It is guaranteed to happen. Question is only if most in the current generation will outlive free access to their entire Steam library or not.

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "Firefox tab groups are here"

2mlWQbCK — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 17:11:23 +0000

I used to have 200+ tabs open all the time, but it's just noise. Now I close tabs asap. If the page contents are of any interest I save the contents first using the Single File extension. If the page address is for some reason interesting (that is far less common) I save a bookmark. I started having the bookmarks bar enabled again and it pretty much serves the purpose that the tabs used to serve for me, but in a more organized way.

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "The Homebrew Channel repository is archived (Apr 28, 2025)"

2mlWQbCK — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 09:46:02 +0000

I installed Homebrew Channel and got all our Wii games ripped to a USB stick. That was far easier and cheaper than to replace the failing DVD player in the Wii. Now the kids can still play all our old Wii games when they want to (not that often to be honest). I have resisted the temptation to sail the seas to expand our game collection beyond the games we already owned.

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" and LLMs replacing human programmers"

2mlWQbCK — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 15:15:22 +0000

And good enough does not mean "as good as". Companies happily outsource programming jobs to worse, but much cheaper, programmers, all the time.

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge"

2mlWQbCK — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 13:18:06 +0000

Chris Crawford wrote in his On Game Design about a trick like this, that he implemented in Patton Strikes Back. Plus some other tricks. He claims that he never found a cracked version that had fixed the secondary checks. The result was a crash just before winning the game.

This looks like an older version of the same text that he later edited into a chapter of the book (does not have the claim about only finding failed cracks):

https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/j...

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "Eurorack Knob Idea"

2mlWQbCK — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 15:56:01 +0000

My favorite documentary I have not seen (yet), I Dream of Wires from 2013, about modular synthesizers. I know in some trailer there was a maker of modules saying something to the effect that if only people actually making music with their synths bought modules he would be out of business. Can't find that trailer now or I did not watch carefully enough now. There are a few different ones on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQSxqha62j0

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)"

2mlWQbCK — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 13:30:26 +0000

I don't think I ever had a A4 printer that could not also print Letter. It is almost certainly the exact same models that they also sell in the US, but with just some bit flipped in the firmware to change the default paper size.

My current printer, like most printers I believe, can be configured to print custom sizes. The maximum is something like 9 or 9.5 inches wide IIRC, and the length can be set much longer.

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "Pike – a dynamic programming language with a syntax similar to Java and C"

2mlWQbCK — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 17:31:57 +0000

Turns out there is no Pike package for FreeBSD, no port, and the Pike git repository has a FreeBSD subdirectory last updated 22 years ago.

But ./configure && gmake && gmake install seemed to work, or at least it runs and nothing weird has happened so far.

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "Pike – a dynamic programming language with a syntax similar to Java and C"

2mlWQbCK — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 17:04:37 +0000

Not sure what they are referring to, but it may be that you can declare things as having one of several types (e.g. int|string|void) or even that something can be any type at all (i.e. turn off static type-checking for that thing)? I do not think the type-checker will ever randomly decide to just not check a type given that you have provided types for it to check, but it was a long time ago since I had to read or write any Pike code.

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "Pike – a dynamic programming language with a syntax similar to Java and C"

2mlWQbCK — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 15:46:37 +0000

From what I remember of working with Pike, the best part was probably the included image module. Maybe I will install Pike again just to see if I still like it.

https://pike.lysator.liu.se/docs/man/chapter_13.html

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "Prolog Adventure Game"

2mlWQbCK — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 07:39:47 +0000

Reminds me of Dialog, a domain-specific language for writing adventure games, heavily inspired by Prolog:

https://github.com/Dialog-IF/dialog/

https://linusakesson.net/dialog/

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "The Labyrinth of Villa Pisani in Stra, an Intricate Pathway"

2mlWQbCK — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 07:11:13 +0000

That you need to go to the center is not necessarily an issue, but it looks like there are cycles in the labyrinth, and that can ruins the "just follow the left/right wall" trick. I do not see for sure if there is any place where you may end up stuck in a loop though?

The article oddly argues the opposite, that it is difficult to solve because "each junction or fork never allows you to find an alternative route, but always leads to a dead end".

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "Everyone knows your location, Part 2: try it yourself and share the results"

2mlWQbCK — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 13:35:32 +0000

Does turning off data (mobile+wifi) when not actually using any app help at all (on Android)? Will apps still be able to phone home in the background? Or will they just fill up a huge cache with data and bulk-transfer it the next time the phone is online?

Maybe at least disconnecting from the internet while not using it will make location tracking slightly more difficult?

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "Which year: guess which year each photo was taken"

2mlWQbCK — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 09:06:05 +0000

Is that really true? It is true for me, but I always assumed that is just because I were younger last century. In 1990 I could easily tell if someone was looking like 1980, but today I could never guess if someone looked like 2015 or 2025. I would be happy to learn that this is because fashion actually slowed down, but until proven wrong I will just assume it is because I am older and not paying attention.

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "Multipaint: Draw pictures with color limitations of 8-bit and 16-bit platforms"

2mlWQbCK — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 19:27:10 +0000

Not just a modern application with a retro gaming aesthetic, but this year I got heavily into using (ex-Autodesk, now open source) Animator as my programmer art application of choice. Actual 16-bit software.

https://github.com/AnimatorPro/

https://github.com/AnimatorPro/Animator-Pro/tree/f5ed37135ad...

Fun restrictions to work with/around and it has some fun features too. Running in DOS also makes it run everywhere, including on my phone.

Would be happy to use more old DOS software, but I just have not found more that seemed as useful (maybe VGAPaint 386 for a different paint app?). No constant (forced) upgrades to keep up with. I can compromise a lot with features if it means that I can spend years/decades on mastering a tool instead of just barely keeping up with how the latest version works. (Guess that is why I always liked Emacs so much.)

New comment by 2mlWQbCK in "Defold: cross-platform game engine"

2mlWQbCK — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 18:44:23 +0000

How does it compare to Löve 2D, other than shipping with a IDE? Looks like Defold supports more platforms, but I guess there are some strings attached since packaging games for various consoles usually come with very non-open dependencies.

https://love2d.org/