Hacker News: AstroJetson

New comment by AstroJetson in "The Cult of Costco"

AstroJetson — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 01:38:45 +0000

Sometimes you need 1 item, like a chicken for dinner or ribs to grill. Pro tip, don’t take a cart. Go in, get your two/three things and walk out for under $40.

Take a cart, always over $100.

New comment by AstroJetson in "Tinnitus Is Connected to Sleep"

AstroJetson — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 03:09:34 +0000

Some of us don’t, but for about $2k they will drain the fluid out and refill will floater free materials.

Changed my life, I thought I was living in a small crowd of fruit flies.

New comment by AstroJetson in "I built a pint-sized Macintosh"

AstroJetson — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 03:02:31 +0000

There is a version for the Adafruit Fruit Jam Board. It’s pretty cool, it was fun to go back in time. About 75 all up in costs.

New comment by AstroJetson in "Don't Cite Unsold eBay Listing Prices"

AstroJetson — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 02:39:15 +0000

Does this mean my Beanie Babies are not worth $250 each? Asking for a friend... /s

New comment by AstroJetson in "Access to a Shared Unix Computer"

AstroJetson — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 07:13:50 +0000

One very overwhelming overworked volunteer. It’s a free service, so patience is a virtue.

New comment by AstroJetson in "One year of keeping a tada list"

AstroJetson — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 03:03:15 +0000

I have the same system, todo become done. I also add done things that I didn’t expect/ plan to do. (Life’s curve ball). I also started tracking “what is the worst thing that happened today”. That’s added perspective that I may think I had a bad day, when in fact I got these things done and the worst thing was actually pretty minimal.

New comment by AstroJetson in "Advent of Sysadmin 2025"

AstroJetson — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 03:16:22 +0000

I think the BOFH answer would be “They ride Elevator #2 to sub-basement 3.” Plot twist, there is only sub-basement 2.

Two pints of ale please!

New comment by AstroJetson in "Running Unsupported iOS on Deprecated Devices"

AstroJetson — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 03:26:56 +0000

I have an iPad Air that I love, made in 2014, last iOS is 12.5. I’d love a slightly more current browser, but the rest of the software is working fine. I spend 6-7 hours using it each day.

Just a browser is all I want.

New comment by AstroJetson in "Employee quits job over an Nvidia RTX 5060"

AstroJetson — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 03:07:46 +0000

It’s like the days when I traveled for work, and some bright spark in finance said the bonus points belonged to the company. We had a few go-arounds about it. It got ugly in the company, and I refused to fly. Then about a dozen other employees refused to fly. I still went to customer locations, but I drove. What could be a one day trip to Chicago became 3 days out, one day there, 3 days back. Mileage, food and hotels were easily 4 times the cost of the flights. They backed down.

New comment by AstroJetson in "Solving Fizz Buzz with Cosines"

AstroJetson — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 16:29:05 +0000

Thanks for the memory reminder, I read them when they first came out. They are still highly amusing today!

New comment by AstroJetson in "McDonald's is losing its low-income customers"

AstroJetson — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 13:58:43 +0000

Popeye the Sailor has entered the chat. /s

Weirdly, I do get ads for veggies, but it could be driven by my recent research spree on vegetarian recipes to have great food across the holidays for my mostly vegetarian family. I may have skewed “the algorithm “

New comment by AstroJetson in "Magic Mushrooms. LSD. Ketamine. The Drugs That Power Silicon Valley"

AstroJetson — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 23:35:06 +0000

> things you can do at work when you’re high on drugs, such as brainstorming in a meeting or using Excel.

... using Excel. Oh nice, some of the most complex stuff I've seen has been in Excel and lots of magic VBA.

New comment by AstroJetson in "MicroPythonOS – An Android-like OS for microcontrollers"

AstroJetson — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 22:41:58 +0000

Oh that would be cool. The current list of hardware has two boards. So the answer to your specific question is "No."

You might want to look at upyOS all it needs is micropython running. https://github.com/rbenrax/upyOS

I've added this to my "try someday list"

New comment by AstroJetson in "Root cause analysis? You're doing it wrong"

AstroJetson — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 22:17:04 +0000

I did a very long RCA on a problem. My management at the time was really BIG into looking at ALL THE CAUSES. They wanted HUGE fishbone diagrams to show that we had looked at everything. This was in the days of having huge drum plotters, so the diagrams could be 36" and many feet long.

So I did what they wanted and the root cause was:

On December 11 1963 Mr and Mrs Stanley Smith had sexual intercourse.

I got asked what that had to do with anything and I said, "If you look up a few lines you'll see that the issue was a human error caused by Bob Smith, if he hadn't been born we wouldn't have had this problem and I just went back to the actual conception date."

I got asked how I was able to pin it to that date and said "I asked Bob what his father's birthday was and extrapolated that info"

I was never asked to do a RCA again.

New comment by AstroJetson in "Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?"

AstroJetson — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 19:29:37 +0000

Winner!! I have a pair of these that have multiple HDMI ports. So my "hacking" is hanging a raspberry pi or a x86 computer.

New comment by AstroJetson in "Ken Isaacs: "How to Build Your Own Living Structures" (1974)"

AstroJetson — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:43:19 +0000

That architecture was big in the 70's There was a companion product around then called Gridbeam that was given a boost.

I've been using gridbeam for the last 15 years for easy assembly of lots of builds.

New comment by AstroJetson in "The Dismantling of the Forest Service"

AstroJetson — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 17:56:18 +0000

Yes, you can pick a better word if you want.

    Positive spin: consolidation, efficiency, right-sizing, focus, sustainability
    Negative spin: downsizing, austerity, retrenchment, contraction, gutting

I would say that for something that is good for the public, that cutting it back is not a good thing.

Remember, they are not making land any more, so once it's no longer forest / public areas, it's gone.

New comment by AstroJetson in "Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image"

AstroJetson — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 01:13:11 +0000

It was number 1 when using the "Web" link, it was also the number 1 when I clicked "all"

Not sure why they get very different result.

New comment by AstroJetson in "When Computer Magazines Were Everywhere"

AstroJetson — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 01:58:42 +0000

In the 80’s I lived in SE Pennsylvania. In the King of Prussia Mall was Gene’s Books. They had ALL the titles. I worked for a tech company that wanted people to learn things. I wrangled $300 per month budget and a small office that we turned into a tech library. Gene’s was a regular bi-weekly stop to get the lates editions. Computer Shopper was the only magazine that we got 3 of every month.

New comment by AstroJetson in "Motorola, Intel, IBM Make a Mainframe in a PC – The PC XT/370"

AstroJetson — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 01:18:19 +0000

At one point Burroughs did the same thing, there was a chip version of the Burroughs A Series processor. Soon after Intel chips became much more powerful and they could run a software emulation.