Hacker News: bonzog

New comment by bonzog in "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort"

bonzog — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 09:44:54 +0000

Perfect. I find myself applying the same principle to online discussion boards and comment threads. Humans post a question looking for other human input and get replies saying "I asked Gemini and it said...". I find that ignorant and rude when the context is a request for human insight.

New comment by bonzog in "DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market"

bonzog — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:48:52 +0000

>Not in the UK.

This was my experience, too. Pis would disappear from online retailers before you noticed the stock alert email.

I only got hold of a Pi 4 by chance when Raspberry Pi did an official pop-up store in Southampton for one day only. The queue to get in was about 45 mins long.

New comment by bonzog in "Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle"

bonzog — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:36:09 +0000

Ditto - and there's also the "iLok" dongle used by loads of virtual instrument & effects plugins for DAWs.

New comment by bonzog in "The hidden engineering of runways"

bonzog — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:08:12 +0000

It's not quite the same thing - the EMAS is the overrun surface itself, rather than the signs warning of it. However you are quite close to the money on another aspect of airfield design.

Lots of obstructions near the runway - signs, lights, aerial masts, meteorological equipment, fences - are supposed to be "frangible" [1]. They must break into pieces less likely to cause damage to an aircraft in a high-energy collision. There's a heck of a lot of GFRP used in lieu of metal around an airfield.

1. ICAO Doc 9157, particularly part 6.

New comment by bonzog in "Self-hosting email like it's 1984"

bonzog — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 18:21:21 +0000

I've been running MIAB for a few years now with generally good success as an outgoing sender using a rented cloud machine and a "clean" reputation IP. I've had to email the Microsoft postmaster on one occasion when my emails weren't reaching Outlook users, but they were surprisingly helpful and it's been working fine for years now. It's a good learning exercise in setting up stuff like DKIM/SPF/DMARC.

That said - receiving account sign-up emails is the absolute biggest pain in the backside with Mailinabox! The greylisting anti-spam feature relies on bouncing unknown senders and waiting for a retry. The trouble is, many legit sites just don't bother retrying. So email verification for new accounts and 2FA-type stuff often takes ages to come through, if at all. MIAB stubbornly has no easy, mail user-facing way to temporarily disable spam filtering and it's a real PITA at times.

New comment by bonzog in "Reverse engineering the Ravensburger TipToi pen"

bonzog — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 12:30:52 +0000

The thing I dislike most about Tonies is that they don't licence the original recordings for lots of the movie/TV themed characters.

They licence the songs and then record them in-house and goodness me some of them are disappointing if you are familiar with the real soundtracks. The Moana one has the same two singers doing impressions of every character.