Hacker News: BashiBazouk

New comment by BashiBazouk in "Is it a pint?"

BashiBazouk — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 23:24:29 +0000

Maybe not today, but in the summer of 1990 every pub I went to seemed to have a different glass and I was somehow expected to know what they were called...

New comment by BashiBazouk in "Is it a pint?"

BashiBazouk — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:39:15 +0000

Reminds me of backpacking up and down the east coast of Australia. I learned that Fosters is only northern New South Wales for beer. Every place had their own preferred beer, but maddeningly they all had their own glass. A tenner, a schooner. Each a slightly different size. I made friends with a guy in Hobart that was staying in the hostel as he was doing research there, I think he was a biologist. He took me to his favorite pub as they served imperial pints. I think who ever is behind this site needs to do some serious research in Australia as they could, at least, double the "know your glass" section...

New comment by BashiBazouk in "New iPad Air, powered by M4"

BashiBazouk — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:41:36 +0000

I have a 6 with cracked glass and won't buy another one until 3rd party browsers can release without webkit. The net is an awful place without uBlock, which I am reminded about every time I try to surf with the ipad...

New comment by BashiBazouk in "I swear the UFO is coming any minute"

BashiBazouk — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 02:14:41 +0000

I took 101 at San Jose State and had to participate in a study as part of the curriculum. It was pretty cool. I went to the NASA Ames research center and did a study of seeing how well people could predict an object being exactly on the side of them. It was small spheres that came at you then went out of view and you clicked a butten when you thought they were exactly on your side. The tech was the most interesting, 90's era VR run on a Silicon Graphics reality engine. We has Iris boxes in the computer art lab but this thing was a much bigger...

New comment by BashiBazouk in "Carrier Landing in Top Gun for the NES"

BashiBazouk — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 20:54:18 +0000

Most people? Am I one of the few who grew up with video games from the beginning and mostly missed Nintendo? My equivalent for the time period was Falcon, in my case played on an Amiga 1000.

New comment by BashiBazouk in "M.C. Escher Prints Digitized and Put Online by the Boston Public Library"

BashiBazouk — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 21:01:49 +0000

Back in the 80's I worked with a lady that had the north American rights for t-shirts in all things Escher. I did a good deal of the graphic arts photography (how you did prepess pre computer) for the t-shirts. got to handle the original prints of most of the common Eschers you see. They have amazing detail that you usually don't see in reproductions. I used to say a good looking halftone is a terrible halftone as part of it is compensating for ink spread. A deep black on a normal press is about 85% black, even more grey if it was going to newsprint. For the shirts we were down to 40-50% as there was considerable ink spread in the silkscreen process...

New comment by BashiBazouk in "Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account"

BashiBazouk — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 18:21:52 +0000

I have been very impressed with the Steam Deck and if I ever build another gaming PC, I would be very tempted to skip windows and install SteamOS. But then I have a PS5 for the online/AAA/games with company specific launchers...

New comment by BashiBazouk in "Learning basic electronics by building fireflies"

BashiBazouk — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 18:21:27 +0000

My kid is about to learn a bit of electronics as I plan to replace some PS5 joysticks with TMR replacements. Cracking open without destroying, documenting dissemble so we know where everything goes back and quite a bit of de-soldering, re-soldering. Should be interesting...

I remember in high school signing up for this electronics stuff. I was just learning what a resistor was and a few engineer kids over the two semesters bought and built an original Apple I kit. Ah, growing up in the silicon valley...

New comment by BashiBazouk in "3dfx: So powerful, it's kind of ridiculous (2023)"

BashiBazouk — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 18:59:59 +0000

For me it was Carmageddon. I bought it later on an ipad and it may have just been rose tinted glasses of being completely blown away back in the day but the ipad version never seems quite as crisp...

New comment by BashiBazouk in "After Moss Landing Power Plant reignites, officials brace for more flare-ups"

BashiBazouk — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 20:34:45 +0000

I got to take a tour of the plant when I was in high school. This was long before it had lithium batteries. A very interesting experience and very loud.

New comment by BashiBazouk in "After Moss Landing Power Plant reignites, officials brace for more flare-ups"

BashiBazouk — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 20:31:46 +0000

When I got certified for diving through the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in college, there was nothing more curative after a long morning of diving than a Phil's chowder in a bread bowl...

New comment by BashiBazouk in "Tom Lehrer and Santa Cruz: the trail of one of America's premier satirists"

BashiBazouk — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 22:54:56 +0000

Having grown up in Santa Cruz, the place kind of died for me after the Loma Prieta Earthquake. The Santa Cruz downtown merchants/city council really screwed up with the rebuild. Took the beautiful Roy Rydell botanical mall and turned it in to little San Jose...

New comment by BashiBazouk in "Tom Lehrer and Santa Cruz: the trail of one of America's premier satirists"

BashiBazouk — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 22:48:43 +0000

Any idea of where his house was? "just south of Pleasure Point" is odd for a "house on the beach". There are a bunch of houses on the low cliffs looking directly out at Pleasure Point, then the O'Neill house, then the house bordering perverts perch by the Hook and then it's opal cliffs cliff houses down to Capitola. A bunch of cliff houses in back of Depot Hill and down Grove Lane and then you are on New Brighton Beach and a little down from there are the first real "houses on the beach". Seems a bit far for "just south of Pleasure Point". There are beaches below the cliffs but tiny unless it's low tide. But then I grew up in a Santa Cruz beach house so maybe I'm jaded and his description more metaphorical than literal...

New comment by BashiBazouk in "An EMP or Solar Incident Could Result in Blackout Warfare"

BashiBazouk — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 17:30:30 +0000

What these articles always leave out is what are the US capabilities in this area? Can we destroy the Russian and Chinese power grids by the same methods? Snowden showed that yes, the NSA and other US agencies have pretty much gotten in to everything and the cyber warfare is likely in place. What are our EMP capabilities both nuclear and non-nuclear? Is this a case of something new? The adversaries have caught up? Or someone just wants some more funding?

New comment by BashiBazouk in "Population tipping point could arrive by 2030"

BashiBazouk — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 17:40:33 +0000

I think it would be fantastic to drop the world population to a sustainable two or three billion. The "problem" is the house of cards built out of debt. Large debt from government borrowing to your large mortgage is that it assumes a growing economy and inflation will reduce it's relative value over time. Go the other direction and it all falls apart pretty fast.

On the other hand the quickest way to realistically reduce emissions by half is to reduce the population by half. And yes, I know the numbers do not work out as linearly as the flippant comment would assume...

New comment by BashiBazouk in "Nobody Wants to Buy the Future: Why Science Fiction Literature Is Vanishing"

BashiBazouk — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 16:58:58 +0000

Or maybe they just moved to video games where they can live the dystopian future rather than read about it. For a few decades I was a voracious sci-fi and fantasy reader. Now with my limited time I would rather read the net and get my sci-fi/fantasy hit through an open world video game.

New comment by BashiBazouk in "The Lone Volcano in California's Central Valley"

BashiBazouk — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 15:28:15 +0000

I went to a wine tasting party about 15 years ago. All blind and everyone was to bring a red. I think that was the only requirement. Silicon valley techies so most the wines were in the $30 to $50 range with a few closer to $100 and 20+ total bottles. The most chosen bottle was 7 Deadly Zins, a not particularly expensive old vine zinfandel.

New comment by BashiBazouk in "The Lone Volcano in California's Central Valley"

BashiBazouk — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 15:19:42 +0000

I've always wondered why I have never seen that marketed or recommended as it's a real thing. This is great first bottle, but that wine over there is just a fantastic third bottle. I wouldn't start off with it but...

New comment by BashiBazouk in "The Reddits"

BashiBazouk — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 21:06:42 +0000

Unfortunately, yes. A throw away quote at the bottom of one of the many articles during the API protest that was ignored by most:

“I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” Huffman said, adding that’s “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.”

Edit: here is the story. I changed "he" to "Huffman" since I took the quote out of context of the full story. It's way down almost at the end. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko...

New comment by BashiBazouk in "U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly"

BashiBazouk — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 20:50:02 +0000

You got that right. I have an old basic 6th gen ipad with a cracked screen and slowly disappearing battery life but I refuse to get a new one until they drop the requirement for webkit because the web has become a miserable place without ublock. It's amazing that what was once a surfing champ has been reduced to almost unusable with all the trackers, frameworks, adworks, et. I'm mostly reading text, I should not need a super computer.