Hacker News: benoliver999

New comment by benoliver999 in "Visa, Mastercard, major banks facing new litigation over 'anticompetitive' fees"

benoliver999 — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 16:47:19 +0000

Surely the UK can also pull this off given how quick faster payments is. I'm always surprised at how we just stuck with Visa

New comment by benoliver999 in "The lamps in my house"

benoliver999 — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 05:29:14 +0000

It's good practice I think for avoiding duplicates.

New comment by benoliver999 in "The lamps in my house"

benoliver999 — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 05:24:27 +0000

Does that then mean the switches can't be used?

New comment by benoliver999 in "Suits Are Better Tech Than Modern Clothes"

benoliver999 — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 06:24:44 +0000

I wore a suit for years at work. I liked it! Even a with scratch built tailored suit, the trousers would wear through though.

Eventually, can't remember why, I stopped

New comment by benoliver999 in "2026 Eclipse Webcams"

benoliver999 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:44:51 +0000

Surely the smart money is to go to Spain

New comment by benoliver999 in "Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'"

benoliver999 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:37:08 +0000

FT is great. The Week I just cannot get on with the style of writing.

New comment by benoliver999 in "Substack writers, you need a website"

benoliver999 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 18:29:19 +0000

My RSS reader accepts email newsletters so I subscribe using that and funnel them all into feedbin

New comment by benoliver999 in "What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard"

benoliver999 — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:25:06 +0000

Ditto here. I was an early customer and it's just flawless. It powers right off my piano USB so it's basically silent.

If I ever get good at piano it'll be handy

New comment by benoliver999 in "I'm a USB-C Maximalist"

benoliver999 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 22:09:04 +0000

I have had a few failures and I can only assume it's the second one? I have one on a thinkpad that only works if you hold it in the right position

New comment by benoliver999 in "I'm a USB-C Maximalist"

benoliver999 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 22:06:29 +0000

I get trouble with the female ports too

I have had a failed port on my laptop - fortunately the laptop can charge on two of its ports but it sucks to have lost one.

I have had a failed port on an iPad, and on my phone. Again I was fortunate to have a fairphone, so I just replaced the port.

New comment by benoliver999 in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

benoliver999 — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:50:38 +0000

I've been reasonably happy with it since 2013 now.

This last year however, I've started to hear complaints from staff of annoying popups about AI stuff people don't want to use

New comment by benoliver999 in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

benoliver999 — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:44:41 +0000

I remember in the early days you could watch your storage quota go up in real time.

New comment by benoliver999 in "Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead"

benoliver999 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:41:47 +0000

We did this with Jeremy Brett Sherlock. Boxed set is of some sentimental value, but we tired of loading the disc, finding the episode etc. Even worse if you have to stop half way.

They ended up ripped and played on kodi

New comment by benoliver999 in "Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead"

benoliver999 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:40:10 +0000

I run jellyfin and on iOS infuse is the only player that seems to work with all codecs

New comment by benoliver999 in "Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead"

benoliver999 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:37:31 +0000

There's one in the UK too, Cinema Paradiso. The prices are also quite high.

Also, the turnaround times were really slow. Slow mail perhaps, but at the same time it's kind of in their interests to not turn things around so fast.

In the UK, letters get a lower priority than packages which doesn't help.

New comment by benoliver999 in "The death of social media is the renaissance of RSS (2025)"

benoliver999 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 10:44:18 +0000

https://ooh.directory/ is a great list of blogs that is nice to navigate

New comment by benoliver999 in "New iPad Air, powered by M4"

benoliver999 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:02:37 +0000

Yeah that just tripped me up trying to recomission a 2012 Macbook Pro.

Couldn't connect to wifi except through a password-less hotspot. Then I couldnt get online because nothing with SSL was working.

I didnt have a pen drive so I had to FTP off another machine, via my phone hotspot. We got there though!

New comment by benoliver999 in "I baked a pie every day for a year"

benoliver999 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:53:52 +0000

Yes it's a common misconception that you can only make wide crumbed hipster crusty loaves. Those are great but if you want plain white bread, buns, croissants, etc etc it's all possible to do.

New comment by benoliver999 in "Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love"

benoliver999 — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:19:21 +0000

In fact a lot of these helped shape our miserable dystopia. HN didn't see that coming

New comment by benoliver999 in "I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers"

benoliver999 — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 07:45:24 +0000

The switch to systemd is the last time I FUBARed my system. 2012 it looks like?? I simply did not even remotely understand what I was doing.