Hacker News: ChristopherDrum

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "Visual Basic on the PC with Windows 3.1"

ChristopherDrum — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 23:12:41 +0000

Very strange. I'll send that off to the Ghost admins and see if they can help me with it. Thanks for the error report.

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "Visual Basic on the PC with Windows 3.1"

ChristopherDrum — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 23:11:26 +0000

I included a shout out to ToolBook, with screenshots and comparative features, in the article. Specifically, I show how it addresses some of the complaints I had with Visual Basic's IDE.

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "Visual Basic on the PC with Windows 3.1"

ChristopherDrum — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 03:53:46 +0000

That would be Visual Basic for Applications, not the full-featured Visual Basic, if I'm not mistaken. I don't think it's possible to save out standalone executables that can run on machines that don't have Excel (or perhaps other Office apps), since its purpose is for Office automation scripting.

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "Visual Basic on the PC with Windows 3.1"

ChristopherDrum — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 02:50:38 +0000

Also like that, yes. (I did include an Epstein-related link in the post)

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "Visual Basic on the PC with Windows 3.1"

ChristopherDrum — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 02:49:54 +0000

Thank you, that's great to know! (I also found the method for reporting false positives to AdGuard, and hopefully that will get cleared up on their end one day.)

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "Visual Basic on the PC with Windows 3.1"

ChristopherDrum — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 02:10:59 +0000

Author here. Let me first note that the site is 100% free, and requires no account to read anything. I only use the built-in Ghost blogging subscription for those who want it delivered to their email, but it is absolutely not necessary. That's the full and total extent of anything email related with the site. I have many readers who subscribe to the RSS feed, which is free and open and requires no email whatsoever.

I have been trying to get this unblocked for some time now. I've tried reporting it as a false positive, and so did the Ghost admins, through the Google safebrowsing report mechanism. I saw my blog listed on phishtank.net, but that site isn't accepting new accounts and I have to have an account to report a false positive.

Ghost admins recommended I use a custom subdomain, and it may come to that. Sorry for the inconvenience, this is very frustrating.

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "Visual Basic on the PC with Windows 3.1"

ChristopherDrum — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 23:47:30 +0000

Something like that, yeah.

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "The Commodore Callback 8020 smart flip phone"

ChristopherDrum — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 23:53:57 +0000

Commodore's CEO said in the press release about this phone that he wanted it because he, himself, had become addicted to his smartphone, so he switched to a dumbphone "And my two year-old daughter doesn’t see me staring at something she doesn’t understand for half of the day."

Not to sound overly flippant about it, but that sounds like a "him" problem, not a phone problem? He clearly doesn't see it that way. Instead he's decided that his inability to personally cultivate a healthy relationship to current technology represents a flaw in the technology itself, so we should regress it. Kind of, "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." vibes.

I'm not a father, so I can't speak with authority, but it seems to me the appropriate approach (given technology's advances will not stop) is to nurture the skills in children that help them navigate the waters, not to drain the sea.

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes"

ChristopherDrum — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:56:47 +0000

I think the part I keep forgetting is the "Menu" mouse button. In the RISC OS case, having the application icon in the Icon Bar is, effectively, like having the application "foreground and running." A "Menu"-click on the icon parallels having, say, a MacOS 7.5 application running with its menu visible at the top of the screen. The Mac puts it more "in your face" but either way the ability to open the application menu and start a new document is essentially equivalent in both cases.

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes"

ChristopherDrum — Sat, 09 May 2026 23:25:18 +0000

Author here. That still doesn't get at my confusion over the UX. It wouldn't change any of the memory management issues to have a double-click on an app icon jump straight into the application. That user intent seems pretty clear to me, so the extra step could have been automated away. Maybe RISC OS users just had a different way of working?

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes"

ChristopherDrum — Sat, 09 May 2026 22:27:28 +0000

Author here, thank you for pointing that out. I don't know why "Tray" was so stuck in my mind; the vernacular of the OS never quite embedded itself in my brain. I've updated the article to "Bar."

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes"

ChristopherDrum — Sat, 09 May 2026 22:12:02 +0000

Author here. Working on getting better takes, sorry. (in my defense, I called out my own "bad takes" in the Captain Planet image)

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes"

ChristopherDrum — Sat, 09 May 2026 22:08:42 +0000

Author here and... what the heck?!

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes"

ChristopherDrum — Sat, 09 May 2026 22:02:56 +0000

Author here. Technically the webmaster is Ghost blogging platform itself, because I just rent a subdomain on their servers. This is frustrating and I'm checking it out now.

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes"

ChristopherDrum — Sat, 09 May 2026 22:01:53 +0000

Author here. Fireworkz was next, then Fireworkz Pro, both of which are discussed in the article.

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes"

ChristopherDrum — Sat, 09 May 2026 22:01:20 +0000

Author here. Yes, I don't self-host exactly because I was hoping to avoid stuff like this by relying on a more robust back-end than I could provide.

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes"

ChristopherDrum — Sat, 09 May 2026 21:59:01 +0000

Author here. This is strange, as I only use the Ghost site itself for hosting. I don't do any self-hosting or anything. Until this week, I'd never heard of anyone having troubles, but over on Reddit I saw a long-time reader getting some kind of SSL error, then later it said the site "wasn't available". Now in that thread someone else is getting that "phishing" error.

Time to get ahold of Ghost tech support and see what's going on. Sorry for the troubles!

Show HN: Continuum, a pedantic recreation of the OMNI font

ChristopherDrum — Mon, 04 May 2026 23:05:25 +0000

"Pedantic" in this case means, "If it didn't show up in the magazine, it isn't part of the font." That means there are no lower-case letters and a few other symbols, but there are alternate letterforms as the font changed over the years. Default kerning is set to be as close to "type a word and get a perfectly set header" as possible, keeping in mind that was done by hand back in the day, and this is a digital recreation. Typing "OMNI" in "upper case" should emit a perfectly set masthead. Includes various symbols used throughout an issue, like the "Anti-matter" symbol and end-of-article marker.

Others have made similar typefaces, and I talk about how mine differs on the github README. At the end of the day, this is not "a font inspired by OMNI." It aims to BE the OMNI font.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48016120

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "How an oil refinery works"

ChristopherDrum — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 23:00:27 +0000

Here's how a refinery works: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/simrefinery-e65 (built for Chevron, in fact)

And the manual: https://archive.org/details/sim-refinery-tour-book_202006/mo...

New comment by ChristopherDrum in "Ask HN: Best stack for building a tiny game with an 11-year-old?"

ChristopherDrum — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:49:19 +0000

I'm a big fan of Pico-8. Great community ready to help beginners and pros alike. The feedback loop between its built-in tools is really satisfying, plus its system design forces us to scope our ideas down, though there is surprising depth once you've gotten used to what it can do.