Hacker News: Damogran6

New comment by Damogran6 in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

Damogran6 — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:17:56 +0000

My keyboard is currently behaving. For once. It's been useless roughly three times since the last major update.

Over the course of each year-long iOS version life, I've become used to it sucking for a bit, either at the beginning (with bug fixes improving things) or towards the end (where, I assume, accumulated learning diverges from clean slate behavior.)

I suspect that the keyboard team is pegged with using new features on the silicon (Neural processing in earlier processors, then Neural Engine with newer processors) and they're doing what they can when tasked with new code.

But man, iOS4 didn't have all that and the keyboard was GREAT.

New comment by Damogran6 in "TI-99/4A: Leaning more on the firmware"

Damogran6 — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:04:36 +0000

Wow...I learned UCSD/Pascal on the Amiga in High School, that takes me back.

Edit: Hmmmm, might have been the Apple II. Not seeing the Amiga in the Wiki...We started on Apples, then migrated to Amigas Junior Year

New comment by Damogran6 in "Creating a bespoke data diode for air‑gapped networks"

Damogran6 — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 20:25:37 +0000

I'm assuming you don't have any audit requirements for this application. The stupid pricing for hardware often isn't in the hardware, it's in the compliance.

New comment by Damogran6 in "BMW Patents Proprietary Screws That Only Dealerships Can Remove"

Damogran6 — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 16:50:00 +0000

Bundling. You get 5 things, one of which makes the other ones worthwhile. Yeah, I get it...

By the same token, all ranges of Mini Cooper now have the B48 turbo 4...the top of the list had a bigger turbo and improved intake...the bottom two I suspect are identical with differing software.

I will happily take advantage of that when the car's out of warranty. (I have the base motor)

New comment by Damogran6 in "BMW Patents Proprietary Screws That Only Dealerships Can Remove"

Damogran6 — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 16:46:52 +0000

At the time the code was/is written, I'm betting carplay offered up a square viewport. Apple's since wanted to offer up multi-display solutions to be the AV/GUI for cars...I think Aston Martin took them up on that...but a number of other manufactures are backing off on that (GM) I suspect because they want to distance themselves from a look and feel you could get in other cars.

I'm not a fan of subscriptions, but in this case, the $10 seemed like good value for features. the map is better, and it's much better integrated into the HUD.

It felt like you were getting more, unlike having buttons that don't work unless you pay...weird psycholgical difference between a subscription and being held hostage.

New comment by Damogran6 in "BMW Patents Proprietary Screws That Only Dealerships Can Remove"

Damogran6 — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 13:58:23 +0000

Having just bought a Mini Cooper, I'm in the initial free-services period of the ownership and honestly, if it's the $10 a month I suspect, I'm okay with it. Primarily for the navigation...it really is superior to the Carplay experience (a square in the middle of the round screen, vs a map that takes up nearly the entirety of the screen...IIRC, traffic, Weather, remote start, and voice control come along for the ride.

I won't pay for 5g (phone does that) or Serius XM (for all the channels, I'm really not jazzed about the offerings)...but $10 for the above features seems reasonable.

New comment by Damogran6 in "Apple Releases Open Weights Video Model"

Damogran6 — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 15:18:46 +0000

I also got notification on my apple watch, while being away from the house, that the homepod mini heard our fire alarm going off.

A call home let us know that our son had set it off learning to reverse-sear his steak.

New comment by Damogran6 in "1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises"

Damogran6 — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 14:29:00 +0000

In general, your dollar buys a _Crazy_ amount of compute...but over the last 30 years or so, RAM has spiked several times (Taiwan plant fire) and suffered from several market driven spikes (DDRx shortages, Apple's crazy pricing structure)

New comment by Damogran6 in "Pimped Amiga 500"

Damogran6 — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 16:17:19 +0000

Raspberry Pi emulation works well, too. (and is massively fast.)

New comment by Damogran6 in "FPGA Based IBM-PC-XT"

Damogran6 — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 18:55:40 +0000

Pull the CMOS battery. Recap before you put power to it...make sure the power supply is healthy. Do those things and it'll run 40 years from now.

New comment by Damogran6 in "Recovering videos from my Sony camera that I stupidly deleted"

Damogran6 — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 18:13:49 +0000

I've found when you have a file with stops and starts, it's because the extraction process is not familiar with how the data is laid down on the storage media. So it sees 'I have a file'...and if it's better it sees 'the name of the file is here' and then 'it's this big' and then 'here's the linked list of clusters for that file'....or it starts at the first cluster and gets as far as it can before it runs off the tracks.

New comment by Damogran6 in "OS/2 Warp, PowerPC Edition (2011)"

Damogran6 — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 19:56:59 +0000

At the time, formatting a floppy disk was a single task thing.

Downloading a file via Zmodem was mostly a single task thing.

The Windows of the day could to the latter, but not the former.

OS/2 on my 8mb 386sx could do both AND have a clock up, and play solitaire, and have another terminal window open.

It took a bit to get there, and there was swapping while everything loaded, but it was true pre-emptive multitasking, while still maintaining the highly time critical I/O stuff that Windows couldn't touch.

New comment by Damogran6 in "Migrating from AWS to Hetzner"

Damogran6 — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 14:02:18 +0000

As a career security guy, I've lost count of the battles I've lost in the race to the cloud...now it's 'we have to up the budget $250k a year to cover costs' and you just shrug.

The cost for your first on-prem datacenter server is pretty steep...the cost for the second one? Not so much.

New comment by Damogran6 in "Apple M5 chip"

Damogran6 — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 16:06:43 +0000

There's a cost/value calculation that just doesn't work well...I have a Ryzen9/rtx3070 PC ($2k over time) and my M4 Mini ($450) holds it's own for most all normal user stuff...sprinting ahead for specific tasks (Video CODEC)...but the 6 year old dedicated GPU on the PC annihilates the Mini in pushing pixels...You can spec an Apple that does better for gaming, but man, are you gonna pay for it, and still not keep up with current PC GPUS.

Now...something like minecraft or SubNautica? The M4 is fine, especially if you're not pushing 4k 240hz.

Apple has been pushing the gaming experience for years (iPhone 4s?) but it never REALLY seems to land, and when someone has a great gaming seperience in a modern AAA game, they always seem to be using a $4500 Studio or similar.

New comment by Damogran6 in "Indefinite Backpack Travel"

Damogran6 — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 16:47:07 +0000

We're in a mode where we're 'camping' with a 5th wheel trailer. It has COMPLETELY altered my travelling experience in ways I never expected. Being in Nature, with a clean bathroom and warm shower and cold beer makes the experience amazing.

More in line with this thread: Our house is full of stuff. It's a long story that ends up being: four adults living in the space that holds two comfortably.

Having the trailer lets us spend time in a relatively uncluttered environment. IT's a reset that lets me not get quite so worked up about the time I spend not-camping.

None of this is, in any way, cheap.

New comment by Damogran6 in "We bought the whole GPU, so we're damn well going to use the whole GPU"

Damogran6 — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 14:05:09 +0000

That's what you got with BeOS...throw out backward compatibility and build to current Best practices...it's ability to extract performance out of an 133 Mhz processor was amazing.

New comment by Damogran6 in "I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster"

Damogran6 — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 18:10:03 +0000

CORE energy in Colorado is charging $0.10819 per kWh _today_

https://core.coop/my-cooperative/rates-and-regulations/rate-...

New comment by Damogran6 in "I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster"

Damogran6 — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 18:02:12 +0000

I got past that back when I was paying for ISDN and had 5 Surplus Desktop PCs...write it off as 'Professional development'

New comment by Damogran6 in "Experimenting with Local LLMs on macOS"

Damogran6 — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 15:35:40 +0000

I don't, I'm a REALLY light user. smaller LLMs work pretty well. I used a 40gb LLM and it was _pokey_, but it worked, and switching them is pretty easy. This is a 12 core Xeon with 64Gb RAM...my M4 mini is....okay with smaller LLMs, I have a Ryzen 9 with a RTX3070ti that's the best of the bunch, but none of this holds a candle to people that spend real money to experiment in this field.

New comment by Damogran6 in "Experimenting with Local LLMs on macOS"

Damogran6 — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 18:21:06 +0000

Oddly, my 2013 MacPro (Trashcan) runs LLMs pretty well, mostly because 64Gb of old school RAM is, like, $25.