Hacker News: alnwlsn

New comment by alnwlsn in "Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines"

alnwlsn — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 20:04:43 +0000

This is approximately what it looked like near my area in mid July for a few days.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wildfire_smoke_Wyand...

It just looks like fog, but it is smoke, and the sky has an unusual orange color. Smells and tastes like you are standing in the path of a campfire, but you can't move out of the way. It irritates your eyes and throat if you spend more than 20 mins out there. You can go inside, but if the building you are in is leaky, it will smell like smoke inside there too.

The actual fire was hundreds of miles away. You can try driving in any direction for hours and not be clear of the smoke. Still, compared to other areas, this is barely worth complaining about.

New comment by alnwlsn in "Time Nuts (2005)"

alnwlsn — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 17:37:56 +0000

It was just the correct time.

New comment by alnwlsn in "Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you"

alnwlsn — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 15:39:11 +0000

I rarely see yards used in the united states outside of football and other sports. Usually, distances to travel will go as feet, then right into miles. I can't think of many people who wouldn't say "quarter mile" over "440 yards". Anything less than that is in feet. Buildings and structures are measured in square feet, our long tape measures are usually labeled "300 feet" and not "100 yard", and in land surveying, measurements are often done in (decimal) feet.

One place I do come across yards is in "a yard of dirt" (or mulch, sand, concrete, etc) where it means cubic yard.

New comment by alnwlsn in "I electrified my push scooter with a power drill"

alnwlsn — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:11:36 +0000

Years ago, some guy was selling a kit for some imported mini bikes that used a cordless drill and a right angle gearbox. Something about not being able to sell the gas engines that came with them, or something:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8abvlYHK3Q

That one used a cable to pull on the drill's original trigger, so no rewiring needed.

New comment by alnwlsn in "I electrified my push scooter with a power drill"

alnwlsn — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:03:50 +0000

Fives of minutes!

New comment by alnwlsn in "eBay Restricts Listings of Radio Equipment, but Exempts Ham-Band-Only Gear"

alnwlsn — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:37:52 +0000

It is very strange that when you come across anything radio related, people seemingly come out of the woodwork to tell you not that you are necessarily, actively doing something against regulation, but that there is always potential to be breaking the law.

Take this Hackaday article from the other day:

https://hackaday.com/2026/10/15/so-you-want-to-make-your-sdr...

The subject is mostly academic, but in 18 comments no less than 3 different people are warning about doing something against the rules. It's weird. I don't know of any other subject that provokes responses about "the rules" like this. I could understand if the article title was "How to Aim Laser Pointers at Airplanes", but attach a long enough wire to an oscillator and people start to get uppity.

On the other side of things, I don't know if you've turned on a shortwave radio recently, but the only thing I hear on mine is switch-mode power supply noise.

New comment by alnwlsn in "ETH-68: Ethernet Audio Interface for Linux"

alnwlsn — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 23:04:15 +0000

Ultrasonic recordings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQCP-5g5bo

New comment by alnwlsn in "Show HN: I turned my iPhone and a $20 smart plug into an f-stop timer"

alnwlsn — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 21:11:25 +0000

I'd probably put the typical smart switch hardware/software stack at around 0.25 seconds. Maybe you can but I don't think I'd try to rely on anything much faster than that.

If you did, I would go in the custom firmware for the smart switch direction. A lot of them are just an ESP32 inside, and you could probably get to 0.001 seconds that way (but you are switching AC which cycles on the order of 0.02 seconds, so whatever)

New comment by alnwlsn in "The future of independence is interdependence"

alnwlsn — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:34:48 +0000

Was speaking more generally there; I don't think you need to know everything but I don't recommend being clueless. For the doctor example, if you are prescribed medicine, I think you should know what it is, how much and how often you are supposed to take of it, and at least at a high level what it is supposed to do for you. I've known people who don't know any of the above, and while their health outcomes weren't necessarily bad they were more complicated than they could have been.

I'm not saying you need to be paranoid and scrutinize every decision down to the molecule, but you are the greatest person who cares about the things you care about, and you deserve to know about those things.

New comment by alnwlsn in "The future of independence is interdependence"

alnwlsn — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:48:10 +0000

Finding someone who will take your money is easy. Finding that they can actually be trusted to do the work correctly, on budget and on a compatible schedule may or may not take more time than actually doing the thing itself.

Also, if you do not bother to learn at all, you have no way to verify that the work is actually done correctly. People will absolutely take advantage of your ignorance.

New comment by alnwlsn in "Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility"

alnwlsn — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:26:33 +0000

My home internet is on a CGNAT, so I experience a lot of the same. Ironically, sometimes a VPN will get through.

New comment by alnwlsn in "Price Increases for 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5"

alnwlsn — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 16:11:45 +0000

If you're a hobbyist, pick up some used thin clients from Ebay. I lost a couple of pis recently, and instead of replacing them, I bought a batch of Wyse 3040 thin clients for about $23 each, power supply (which is 12V) included. 2Gb RAM and a 4-core intel Atom - roughly equal to a Pi 4, but at (what is now) 1/3 the price.

New comment by alnwlsn in "Evan Doorbell's Phone Tapes – Brought to You by Telephone World"

alnwlsn — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 14:54:24 +0000

There's a link to that same youtube channel on the webpage.

New comment by alnwlsn in "I'm Tired of Being on the Network"

alnwlsn — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:12:38 +0000

It still does, but it is cool you can make a radio for one with some wire and a razor blade.

New comment by alnwlsn in "I'm Tired of Being on the Network"

alnwlsn — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:46:11 +0000

You can on the desktop website, I do it all the time. Although in general I've stopped buying a lot of stuff on there since it seems like everything now costs 5x as much as it used to, you seem to pay for shipping on everything, and the ability to search for things is way, way down (it's actually better than it used to be, but still terrible compared with 6-7 years ago).

New comment by alnwlsn in "LinkedIn wins court order blocking mass scraping of user data"

alnwlsn — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 17:31:08 +0000

As you do to view completed listings on Ebay

New comment by alnwlsn in "The "Windows XP Box" (2003)"

alnwlsn — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:01:05 +0000

Construction stands out - this is made from a bunch of (thick) cut plastic sheets glued together. But within just over 10 years, almost nobody attempting this would do anything other than 3D print the whole case in one shot.

New comment by alnwlsn in "Photon-Emission-Guided Laser Fault Injection Enables RP2350 Secure Debug"

alnwlsn — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 20:39:34 +0000

Depending on what sort of important you're talking, those ICs don't have the usual "something important" environmental specs, like an extended temperature range, or certification for automotive use or safety critical applications, for one thing.

New comment by alnwlsn in "Wax motor"

alnwlsn — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:06:21 +0000

Seems as though it's been filed under a different page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_thermostatic_element

New comment by alnwlsn in "The Helicopter with Radioactive Blades"

alnwlsn — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:26:17 +0000

You must not hang out on there. Those are some pretty standard grade Hackaday comments. I love the site, read every day, but the comments section can be... rough.