Hacker News: Dathuil

New comment by Dathuil in "Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux"

Dathuil — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:23:32 +0000

I used my eee PC for my final year project in college. How I didn't get rsi on that keyboard I'll never know.

We moved house recently and I found it in a box when I was unpacking. Maybe I should find a use for it

New comment by Dathuil in "Midjourney Medical"

Dathuil — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 08:46:35 +0000

Reminds me that a few years ago my wifes grandfather (80+) was wondering if he should cut back on the amount of exercise he was doing. He would regularly be knocking on our door at 6am to see if one of us would want to got for a quick 10k run or to hit the gym.

He was a firefighter in NY in his youth and had never stopped exercising even after retirement.

He went to his GP explained his workout routine and was basically told there is no precedent for it as people his age tend to not be running 10km a day. In short he was told if you're not in pain or fatigued keep at it.

I think he's nearly 90 now and has cut back the running to only a day or so a week, but last time we went to visit he was in his garage bench pressing 50kg

New comment by Dathuil in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

Dathuil — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:17:18 +0000

Aside from dipping my foot into games with Godot I've pulled back an old project to solve a me problem. A few years ago I wrote a tool to tell you what weapons in Dark Souls 1 you are missing to get the Knights Honour achievement on steam.

Part of this required that I manually parse a binary save file and extract the information. This was done through lots of trial and error and looking at other java implementations.

What I would have prefered is some sort of descriptor language that lets me generate the parser and interfaces for everything so I just drop the binary stream into a parse function and get my typed object back.

I'm working on creating a TypeSpec Library and Emitter for this so that you can describe everything in Typespec as to where and what is in the file and have it parse.

New comment by Dathuil in "How we made hit video game Prince of Persia"

Dathuil — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 07:45:42 +0000

This is serendipitous as I'm just reading the making of Prince of persia from stripe press.

Goes into lots of detail as what was going on through the journal entries of the dev. Honestly it has encouraged me to start journaling again myself as I can see the value in being able to read back to a day in the last.

New comment by Dathuil in "Chuwi Minibook X"

Dathuil — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:26:15 +0000

I just unpacked my eee PC from college after a move. 8gb of RAM and can barely run a very stripped down version of windows 7. Just the thought of writing my final year project on that little machine again is giving me RSI.

I'll stick with my 13" MBP going forward. Netbooks served a purpose but I'm not sure they make much sense anymore

New comment by Dathuil in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

Dathuil — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 13:12:30 +0000

I discovered recently that IKEA actually do a deeper Billy that you can order online. I've seen them as deep as the Kalax. I used to work there and never knew. Might be helpful for the overhang

New comment by Dathuil in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

Dathuil — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 12:25:49 +0000

I have about 10 unfinished blog write ups that I should publish. Let me get that sorted and I can link it in

New comment by Dathuil in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

Dathuil — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 10:02:27 +0000

I've been on and off attempting to reverse engineer old Sierra games in Godot. I've brought in AI to build tooling to speed up asset extraction from the old game files which has been a huge help. I just got building placement working last night which was a huge win.

This is part of a small hobby where I try to recreate aspects of old games myself to see how I would implement them. I eventually hope to have the skills to create the kind of game I miss playing when I was a kid 30 years ago.

New comment by Dathuil in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (Jan 2026)"

Dathuil — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 23:50:52 +0000

I started the year by setting out to recreate the city building portion of an old sierra game (Zeus, master of Olympus) the first few days have been mostly reverse engineering the asset files from the original game.

I’m hoping to learn enough to start building my own game based on celtic and Norse history. But I’m also a dad with a full time job so it’s probably a pipe dream

New comment by Dathuil in "All clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity"

Dathuil — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 10:27:04 +0000

I remember being on a plane as a kid and seeing someone playing sonic on their ipod video across the aisle and my mind being blown. I assumed it was some sort of jailbreak that loaded the games on. I had no idea they were an actually supported feature!

New comment by Dathuil in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)"

Dathuil — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 21:31:15 +0000

Would this work for Weever fish? My father in law was stung while walking the beach last year in Portugal, and I've been looking for some sort of sea shoes to bring with us since

New comment by Dathuil in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)"

Dathuil — Mon, 26 May 2025 09:06:59 +0000

Continuing my return to GameDev. I'm making my own copies of subsets of games or recreating games that already exist. Currently making FlappyBoo (FlappyBird with the ghost from Super Mario). Nearly at parity with the original game and will add a few "upgrades".

End goal is to have many reference examples when I start to make the game I want to make.

New comment by Dathuil in "How I Blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare – Zero Cost, Fully Owned"

Dathuil — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 13:51:37 +0000

My own setup is similar but replace cloudflare with netlify and vscode with obsidian. However I do find writing markdown as someone with dyslexia to be a huge issue when it comes to spelling and grammer.

How is Obsidian for correcting this? Years ago I would have used something like grammarly to solve it but I'd rather something build it in if possible and make it as brainless as possible

New comment by Dathuil in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)"

Dathuil — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 11:22:15 +0000

Mostly just trying to get back into game development after a 15 year hiatus. Trying to task myself with recreated some portion of a game I've been playing recently. This month it's the fishing mini game from Dredge. Last month it was a simple inventory system. I've nothing to share really, I'd hoped to do a few blog posts on it, but having a 17 month old takes up most of your spare time

New comment by Dathuil in "Show HN: Aldi Price Map"

Dathuil — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 09:41:04 +0000

I can't read the link but we've the same thing in Ireland. I've always assumed it stemed from shops being family owned. e.g. We have a stationary store that was originally called Eason and Sons which when said quickly sounds like Easons.

There'a s few other examples but that's the one that always stood out to me

New comment by Dathuil in "Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?"

Dathuil — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 11:28:10 +0000

getfive.app seems to be down due to gatsby cloud. what did it do as i myself also have many todo lists

New comment by Dathuil in "Show HN: WireHole combines WireGuard, Pi-hole, and Unbound with an easy UI"

Dathuil — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 23:20:29 +0000

I ran into this issue a few months ago when I got sometime to actually setup my home server and wanted to use urls like nas.local and homeassistant.local on my home network to make things easy for my family to access.

Worked fine on windows but all the Apple devices in the house had a conniption when trying to connect. I ended up just using my personal domain replacing .local. Am currently investigating a wildecard DNS SSL cert to get HTTPS working on the LAN, but that's more out of curiosity than anything else

New comment by Dathuil in "One of the best podcasting apps you know is built by a single person"

Dathuil — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 11:23:03 +0000

I should check this myself. I think I was also grandfathered into the pay once plan.

New comment by Dathuil in "Ask HN: What are your goals for 2023?"

Dathuil — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 11:26:41 +0000

1. B1 in European Portuguese. (Wife and I got our A2 this year and are seriously considering moving to Porto).

2. Actually start updating my blog with my research.

3. Shift the weight that's piled on the last few years

4. Start the new job search, just hit 5 years at my current role and I'm getting seriously itchy feat.