Hacker News: FredFS456

New comment by FredFS456 in "Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids"

FredFS456 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:34:32 +0000

Landlines only work when there is no power if: - you use an old school landline phone (not cordless) - your landline is actually copper going to the house (I've seen fiber to house + conversion to twisted pair by a box with a battery) - upstream infrastructure either still has (possibly battery) power

New comment by FredFS456 in "America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks"

FredFS456 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 23:33:33 +0000

I think specifically for example of getting Nvidia chips to China, many Singaporeans would say that that is only illegal because the US deems it so. There is no moral reason.

New comment by FredFS456 in "America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks"

FredFS456 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 22:28:18 +0000

I agree with you that the migrant workers are effectively a serf class. However, I think it's fine that the SG government severely discourages owning a car. It's a small island with lots of people, there would be gridlock if everyone wanted their own car. The public transportation system is amazing and works well.

New comment by FredFS456 in "Eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece (2023)"

FredFS456 — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 13:07:43 +0000

I haven't used Dark Sky but on my Android phone, Meteoswiss is definitely very very good

New comment by FredFS456 in "Bose has released API docs and opened the API for its EoL SoundTouch speakers"

FredFS456 — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 21:50:12 +0000

They do have very basic EQ but for sure you have enough documentation to modify the speaker itself if you'd like.

New comment by FredFS456 in "Bose has released API docs and opened the API for its EoL SoundTouch speakers"

FredFS456 — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 16:56:12 +0000

I bought one just this week because of this. They really went above and beyond:

- mechanical CAD, schematic and PCB files: https://docs.teufel.de/download/MYND/Open_Source_Hardware_Fi...

- firmware: https://github.com/teufelaudio/mynd-firmware

- Bluetooth API documentation: https://cdn.teufelaudio.com/image/upload/v1748589486/product...

- battery repair/replacement guide: https://cdn.teufelaudio.com/products/MYND/pdf/Teufel_MYND_RM...

I believe that they designed the mechanical parts to be 3D-printable as well.

New comment by FredFS456 in "Why Nextcloud feels slow to use"

FredFS456 — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 14:07:41 +0000

I think you could replace Nextcloud's syncing and file access use cases with Syncthing and Copyparty respectively. IMO the biggest downside is that Copyparty's UX is... somewhat obtuse. It's super fast and functional, though.

New comment by FredFS456 in "The Synology End Game"

FredFS456 — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 09:08:45 +0000

There are some new NAS boxes hitting the market (UGreen being one of the brands that are cheaper, but also Minisforum) which have solid hardware but aren't locked down at all. They're just x86 boxes with bog-standard hardware so you can just run whatever OS you want, and they support that use case.

New comment by FredFS456 in "Is TfL losing the battle against heat on the Victoria line?"

FredFS456 — Mon, 26 May 2025 07:34:48 +0000

Platform screen doors can isolate tunnel temperatures from platform temperatures.

New comment by FredFS456 in "It's 2025–Why Are Banks Still Getting Authentication So Wrong?"

FredFS456 — Tue, 13 May 2025 19:17:45 +0000

Zurich Kantonalbank (ZKB) has a very similar system, probably because they're also a big bank in Switzerland

New comment by FredFS456 in "If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling"

FredFS456 — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 15:25:40 +0000

Multimode transceivers are still a slight bit cheaper ($30 for 10GBASE-LR vs $22 for 10GBASE-SR on fs.com) but that's more than offset by the single mode fiber being slightly cheaper, even for short distances.

New comment by FredFS456 in "Announcing the data.gov archive"

FredFS456 — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 11:32:41 +0000

IMO US elections have already been less-than-fully-democratic for a while, what with the voting registration and ID nonsense, as well as obvious gerrymandering and voter intimidation. At the very least, significantly less democratic than a number of other western countries.

New comment by FredFS456 in "Show HN: Using YOLO to Detect Office Chairs in 40M Hotel Photos"

FredFS456 — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 10:25:54 +0000

> There was a LTT video where they mentioned how WiFi used to be better in some locations so those rooms were more desirable and the hotel's solution was to make it standard for everyone. They seemed to be suggesting that they brought down the quality rather than balanced.

This was from their podcast 'WAN Show' a week or two back, specifically about hotels in Las Vegas.

New comment by FredFS456 in "Exotic new superconductors delight and confound"

FredFS456 — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 22:52:04 +0000

There's some fusion startups successfully making >10T magnets using ReBCO tape now, so hopefully things will scale up/cost down enough to be used in MRIs.

New comment by FredFS456 in "Exotic new superconductors delight and confound"

FredFS456 — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 22:49:55 +0000

There's a few fusion startup companies using superconducting ReBCO tape to make their magnets. From the results that they're getting, I think we've largely cracked the engineering problems of making "wire" from ReBCO and it's largely just a scaling game now. I do want to point out that they're still cooling with liquid hydrogen at ~20K for high current capacity though.

New comment by FredFS456 in "Show HN: Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay – Bridge Bluetooth Devices to USB"

FredFS456 — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 17:40:19 +0000

A cheap USB switch would also work, that would reduce the switching to switching monitor inputs and pressing the button the USB switch

New comment by FredFS456 in "Thunderbird for Android Now Available"

FredFS456 — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 18:07:54 +0000

I dunno if it's native or not, but the Fastmail app doesn't work when you're offline.

New comment by FredFS456 in "Jump Trading, Virtu and the 'hidden optical fibre cable' under an Ohio field"

FredFS456 — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 22:09:36 +0000

Speed of light in an optical fibre is about 2/3 that of the speed in air

New comment by FredFS456 in "Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more"

FredFS456 — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 06:17:38 +0000

When I bought my Paperwhite around 2013, I noticed that ads were an option on the kindles sold in the US but not in Canada. In Canada there was only the no-ads version.

New comment by FredFS456 in "Hell Freezes Over as AMD and Intel Come Together for x86"

FredFS456 — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 18:38:32 +0000

ARM cores can be used with UEFI and other hardware autodiscovery mechanisms. Not a limitation of the instruction set but rather the willingness of vendors to do the work. Many ARM servers have UEFI implemented.