Hacker News: Cockbrand

New comment by Cockbrand in "Laptop Based on 6502 CPU"

Cockbrand — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 05:38:36 +0000

Of course, is's great for executive poolside work, see also https://sm.pcmag.com/t/pcmag_uk/photo/c/commodore-/commodore...

New comment by Cockbrand in "Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains"

Cockbrand — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 05:22:55 +0000

+1, unfortunately.

A few years ago, I experienced absolutely stellar service from Gandi when (due to negligence of the previous registrar) I had trouble moving a domain in.

A couple of months ago, my main domain was offline for over a day due to a configuration snag that I could not resolve on my own, and Gandi's customer service now has ridiculously short hours (pretty much only in the morning), took quite a while to respond, and didn't provide much background info on the underlying issue.

I was amazed by the drastic change in quality, and I'll move my domains out soon. Where to is a still open question, though.

EDIT: I just read in a sibling thread that Gandi has been bought by private equity a while ago, that explains a lot.

New comment by Cockbrand in "The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME"

Cockbrand — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 20:47:19 +0000

I learned this stuff from friends, O'Reilly books and endless nights of failure and trial and error. I'm certainly not a super wizard, but I feel like I'm not missing any shell skills to be able to do what I need to do.

[Insert mild rant on kids these days having no attention span any more]

New comment by Cockbrand in "The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME"

Cockbrand — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 14:54:22 +0000

I feel like this is common knowledge and should not be worth mentioning. But then it apparently is not common knowledge, as the article proves.

Have I run into this at some point?

I certainly have.

Have I learned to quote better and only where appropriate from it?

I certainly have.

Bourne compatible shells take a while to learn and require some experience. This won't change, but alternatives exist, with their own caveats.

New comment by Cockbrand in "Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage"

Cockbrand — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 07:53:13 +0000

+1 to both.

Elaborating a bit:

1 acre-foot is 325,851 gallons or 1,233,482 liters.

For easier mental handling: 4 acre-feet are roughly 5 million liters or 5,000 cubic meters.

New comment by Cockbrand in "In an $80 motel room, a discovery to shed light on the origins of life"

Cockbrand — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 19:46:54 +0000

+1 on this question, without any snark intended. What's a good, not too expensive beginner's microscope that's capable of this kind of citizen research (and other fun stuff)?

New comment by Cockbrand in "Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi"

Cockbrand — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 19:24:03 +0000

I was having a very similar thought - finally a nice use case for HTML wallpapers like Windows used to have them. I bet that there's a trick to have this as a desktop background in Wayland, but I'm too lazy to find out right now.

Either way, really nicely made, I love it! Small change request: adjust the CSS to make the controls look less vibecode-y.

New comment by Cockbrand in "Launch HN: Coverage Cat (YC S22) – Umbrella insurance via your personal agent"

Cockbrand — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:05:34 +0000

I live in a rainy and windy place, so I often need to replace a flipped umbrella. How did I not know that there's umbrella insurance!?

New comment by Cockbrand in "Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side"

Cockbrand — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:15:56 +0000

Now that you're mentioning it, I seem to remember seeing or even owning Extended Keyboard IIs with the same print. I may be wrong, though.

New comment by Cockbrand in "Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side"

Cockbrand — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:31:16 +0000

The weird Canadian helm icon on the Control key caught my eye in particular.

New comment by Cockbrand in "Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side"

Cockbrand — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:29:48 +0000

The Extended Keyboard II came with a plastic overlay for the function keys. It showed Cut/Copy/Paste for F2/F3/F4 respectively. See https://chrispeak.com/2022/04/08/apple-extended-ii for a photo.

Not sure if this was ever supported system-wide in any way, though.

New comment by Cockbrand in "Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side"

Cockbrand — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:23:49 +0000

Maybe the author uses a CMS that's supposed to replace tags like [happy-face] with an emoji, but something broke?

New comment by Cockbrand in "XCancel service is suspended until further notice"

Cockbrand — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 06:58:55 +0000

What!? It's the entire, singular purpose and meaning of life for millions of people to make themselves look glamorous on Instagram, and you say it's optional?! /s

New comment by Cockbrand in "When code is a maze, smart developers make maps"

Cockbrand — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 06:30:58 +0000

And so the war began.

This is a bit like vim vs Emacs - everyone should be able to use their favorite setup, and the formatting should not get in the way of the engineer's preferences.

New comment by Cockbrand in "iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27"

Cockbrand — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 20:28:29 +0000

Oof! Mine is still the original one, and it’s incidentally also at 89% after maybe 3.5 years of being my daily driver.

New comment by Cockbrand in "iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27"

Cockbrand — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:27:52 +0000

I agree, despite being quite the Liquid Glass hater at first. It has grown on me, and they have ironed out the worst kinks. I still don't love it, but it's great that we're getting a bit of three-dimensionality back, after all the ambiguity that comes with the flat design trend of the decade or so before Liquid Glass.

New comment by Cockbrand in "Steam Frame starts at $1059"

Cockbrand — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:22:02 +0000

Now I see that the page reveals this:

> Four high-resolution, monochrome cameras provide controller and headset tracking

(Emphasis mine)

So it's not really suitable for real AR out of the box. Thanks for the heads up!

New comment by Cockbrand in "iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27"

Cockbrand — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:07:55 +0000

So what's your experience in terms of speed and battery life with iOS 27 on the iPhone 13 so far? I have a 13 mini, and I still haven't gotten over the (perceived) shorter battery life with iOS 26.

New comment by Cockbrand in "Steam Frame starts at $1059"

Cockbrand — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:05:43 +0000

Not being very savvy about VR glasses, am I assuming correctly that this device can't do AR, as the cameras are only used for tracking?

New comment by Cockbrand in "iPhone Duo"

Cockbrand — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:05:46 +0000

> you could never do fancier than a 1500 buck iphone

There's always high-end commercial modders like Caviar [0], who help customers flex both their wealth and their extremely bad taste...

[0] https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/