Hacker News: benjaminpv

New comment by benjaminpv in "macOS Sequoia adds weekly permission promptfor screenshot, screen recording apps"

benjaminpv — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 01:38:00 +0000

Apple, start your photocopiers and you'll see why 2024 won't be like 2007[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control

New comment by benjaminpv in "How CD pregaps gained their hidden track superpowers"

benjaminpv — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 14:39:40 +0000

Do you remember if the textbook was orange (possibly with a two-tone cover design)? I had a really good textbook in college that had a... 4? CD set (with the big jewel case) that had a bunch of tracks and like you I really enjoyed it.

New comment by benjaminpv in "WinDirStat – Windows Directory Statistics"

benjaminpv — Thu, 23 May 2024 20:15:01 +0000

Contrasting seemingly all the other responses to this, I use it the same way you do (only opening it when needed) and I'm fine with the delay: even at its slowest rebuilding the index and searching is faster than the in-built windows Search.

New comment by benjaminpv in "The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder"

benjaminpv — Thu, 23 May 2024 17:04:11 +0000

I always liked the cases where people have broken open ROMs only to find that the compilation process stuffed a bunch of directory and filenames in the silicon. It's funny to think that in a time when literally every byte cost money there's a fair number of carts that have people's FAT entries burned into them.

https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?t=17324

New comment by benjaminpv in "Windows 10 wallpaper was physically built and photographed (2015)"

benjaminpv — Thu, 23 May 2024 08:59:39 +0000

In Windows when you set a wallpaper it (sometimes) silently transcodes the one you selected into a new, smaller version. It doesn't always, there's a heuristic, but it's assumed it happens to prevent people from selecting a 1TB terapixel photo and have it destroy the machine.

Anyway, since it transcodes the WP into a JPEG, it has the ability to select a compression ratio. That ratio is pretty famously < 100% and as a result there's some degenerate cases where a wallpaper that looks good when viewed in the filesystem looks terrible when set to the background.

https://superuser.com/questions/1377883/how-to-prevent-wallp...

New comment by benjaminpv in "This USB flash drive can only store 8KB of data, but will last you 200 years"

benjaminpv — Mon, 20 May 2024 12:14:30 +0000

Do things like the upgradable firmware and integrated text editor live in a path that's separate from the 8KB of data? If not I'd fear it would die before the actual storage did.

I also vaguely recall that Sonic 3 used this storage type? Like it was a weird outlier for cartridge-based saves IIRC.

Edit: Yeah, it did: https://hackaday.io/project/13425-sonic-3-feram-adapter

New comment by benjaminpv in "If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly"

benjaminpv — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 21:07:12 +0000

Or more broadly, don't do something unbidden on my behalf then complain when it doesn't work. I swear 75% of the times I've daydreamed about a return to a single-tasking OS like DOS was on account of software trying to 'help' me.

New comment by benjaminpv in "If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly"

benjaminpv — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 21:02:34 +0000

Yeah, people frequently trot out the Sim City classic example, but the fact is that games in particular have borne the brunt of Windows API changes. If it didn't happen we'd have no need for wrappers like dgVoodoo: software once only meant to wrap Glide calls, but now used to get around deprecation to DirectX as well. Not to mention the breaking changes to the audio stack that happened between 9x and Vista.

New comment by benjaminpv in "If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly"

benjaminpv — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 20:58:00 +0000

I don't know if anything's changed but for a long time a lot of Word's formatting was impacted by the printer you had installed and/or selected. So it was pretty easy to run into scenarios on a network where printers being taken offline/their capabilities changed resulted in documents getting reformatted.

New comment by benjaminpv in "Fixing Classical Cats: How I got tricked by 28-year-old defensive programming"

benjaminpv — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 15:04:49 +0000

>mService always immediately returns the “drive ready” code

I've read enough of these emulation / reverse engineering blogs to know this will inevitably come back to haunt them.

New comment by benjaminpv in "How Apple's developers reflashed Mac ROMs in the '90s"

benjaminpv — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 15:19:47 +0000

Decades late, but they could have told you to use Special: Eject Disk if dragging to the trash was too much for you. Then you'd have to grapple with what to do now that the physical disk was in your hand but its icon remained. There was also...Command+Y, I think?

New comment by benjaminpv in "American travelers are being charged up to 3 times more for vacations"

benjaminpv — Mon, 01 May 2023 17:29:29 +0000

Absolutely this. My parents would take an impromptu vacation toward the tail end of winter and every time they basically just told the school 'we're leaving, give him the homework he'll be missing, end communication.'

Years later I was having dinner with a coworker and his teacher wife and explained it to her. "Yeah we'd go to like science exhibits and museums and all, it was really fun!" She was just aghast. Like 'y-you can't just t-take kids out of school?!'

New comment by benjaminpv in "COBOL: Thinking about it wrong"

benjaminpv — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 16:05:25 +0000

COBOL was actually in the CS curriculum for my university, a fact that several of my friends brought up when the 'COVID is prompting a real need for COBOL programmers in light of the need to change benefits rules and unemployment!' stories were a regular feature on the nightly news.

'You should do it, man!' Yeah, sure. I'd already suffered through the liquidation of my entire department in 2018, the prospect of the heat around COBOL dying down and facing that once again with the additional stain of 'oh, what've you been doing? Cool, popular JS frameworks? No, COBOL? Pass.' on my CV during my next round of interviews didn't seem at all appealing.

That mentality should set the expectation for anyone looking into a COBOL job. It's not just this job, it's the next one.

New comment by benjaminpv in "Sierra’s Macintosh Timebomb (2021)"

benjaminpv — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 22:42:55 +0000

Yep, you still see it come up nowadays with people running it under virtualization.

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/those-win9x-crashes-on-fast-mac...

New comment by benjaminpv in "Logging practices I follow"

benjaminpv — Mon, 09 Jan 2023 16:58:46 +0000

Something I haven't seen discussed very widely: it feels like there's not only a balance needed in determine what to log vs what not to log, but also logging in a way that isn't a detriment to the readability of the code overall.

Over time I've actually found myself logging less just because having to sorta mentally elide logging lines added to the cognitive overhead of reading & understanding code.

New comment by benjaminpv in "Unbricking a BIOS-Bricked Motherboard"

benjaminpv — Mon, 09 Jan 2023 03:26:39 +0000

That feeling of absolute dread, thinking 'my parents are gonna kill me when they realize I killed the family computer' did a lot to prepare me for the white-knuckle experience of troubleshooting problems in Production. :)

Bless the talented engineers that put together last-ditch recovery methods and bless the folks that documented things well enough to let us make use of them.

New comment by benjaminpv in "Subtext - A multi-user BBS server for classic macOS"

benjaminpv — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 14:40:52 +0000

Somewhat surprised that you could even use threads in System 6. I know in the 7 era you'd find applications that shipped with the Thread Manager[1], I'm guessing this individual must have rolled their own thread handling?

[1]: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/thread-manager

New comment by benjaminpv in "YouTube confirms that it has removed the “sort by oldest/newest” option"

benjaminpv — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 17:57:39 +0000

Try tap+holding the "+ Save" button. If you just tap it the video goes to Watch Later but if you tap+hold it should show you a list of your playlists.

That said, the behavior's really janky. When I do this on my iPad you kinda have to 'hold+smudge' your finger around before it'll reveal the list for some reason and sometimes it just wants to save to Watch Later no matter what you do.

New comment by benjaminpv in "An Apple II Tale"

benjaminpv — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 15:13:25 +0000

I'm not terribly familiar with Apple ][s either but given the surrounding context it sounds like there was a computer and fixed disk that was sent to a junk sorting center. It was initially thought that the disk they were sent was bad (with the owner having written as much on it), but evidently there was a component or two that had gone bad.

With the author's knowledge and some nearby spare parts he was able to revive the disk and computer and then started looking through its contents by dumping it to the screen (sorta like if you look at a raw hex dump from dd or a tool like Spinrite). From that he realized that the source code for that copying software was on the disk, the source code everyone theorized had been lost.

New comment by benjaminpv in "An Apple II Tale"

benjaminpv — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 15:07:28 +0000

I was gonna say, from context it was clear it's some sorta container but I'd never heard it used that way.