Hacker News: breakall

New comment by breakall in "Show HN: Ableton Live MCP"

breakall — Sun, 03 May 2026 21:58:02 +0000

Yes! I want this for MainStage -- this would allow me to automate my weekly template setup for playing at my church. Each week before practicing I look up the songs in Planning Center and create a new MainStage concert file with one patch per song, and add notes to each patch screen with the song's key, etc. Automating this would save me the time of doing the busy work and get right to practicing.

New comment by breakall in "Anthropic announces proof of distillation at scale by MiniMax, DeepSeek,Moonshot"

breakall — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 19:46:52 +0000

Reap what you sow

New comment by breakall in "Adblock Plus and (a little) more"

breakall — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 14:14:22 +0000

i love ublock origin and have used it for years. i recently migrated to macos and was disappointed to find that ublock origin doesn’t work with safari.

what’s the best ad-blocking option for safari on macos?

New comment by breakall in "Serverless DNS: Self-hosted DNS resolver at the edge"

breakall — Sat, 30 Jul 2022 15:55:14 +0000

comparing to self hosted pi-hole, this would allow you to take advantage of ad and other content blocking outside of your home wifi.

New comment by breakall in "Not smart but clever? The return of 'dumbphones'"

breakall — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 16:52:37 +0000

I saw that post too and immediately ordered the iFlash Solo adapter. Coincidentally I had just run across an iPod video in a drawer that wouldn't boot up... it was about a 20 minute project to replace the hard disk with the adapter and a big SD card, and the iPod is working great now!

Intro to terminal commands in the style of a text adventure game

breakall — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 01:56:44 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/KanoComputing/terminal-quest

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28823822

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by breakall in "How Watches Work"

breakall — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 15:33:31 +0000

May I also recommend this excellent video[1] from Hamilton made in 1949 that thoroughly explains how mechanical watches work.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL0_vOw6eCc

New comment by breakall in "How to run your own mail server (2017)"

breakall — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 19:28:21 +0000

Roundcube has come a long way, and they just released a huge update with a responsive design that works great on desktop and mobile!

New comment by breakall in "How to run your own mail server (2017)"

breakall — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 19:26:59 +0000

Should you host your own email server? Yes! It’s a really fun learning project. There are tons of resources out there to make it do-able, so go for it!

New comment by breakall in "UBlock Origin 1.17.4 released"

breakall — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 14:19:36 +0000

Patreon sends a 1099-K if you get more than $20K in a year.

https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/207099566-Will...

New comment by breakall in "SpamAssassin is back"

breakall — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 14:37:25 +0000

Spam detection on my personal email server took a huge leap forward when I got Spamassassin correctly configured to use the DNS blocklists (URIBL, etc.). I had to set up a local DNS server because the blocklists weren't responding to requests coming via my hosting provider's DNS, and the scores had to be tweaked over a few weeks, but now it's working great. The content rules like "hi my dear", "request for money", and "all caps" are still in there, but the blocklists do the heavy lifting.

New comment by breakall in "We Should Teach Music History Backwards"

breakall — Sun, 17 Jun 2018 23:06:35 +0000

Personally I have to be careful of this....it’s easy for me to focus so much on the solution that the problem is never even clearly articulated to the developers (who may have a better solution that I came up with once they grasp the problem).

I ran across an interesting essay on Medium recently on this topic, advocating a new approach to roadmaps focused on the problems: the problem roadmap. Instead of saying what new features the team will be working on in the future, map out what problems they’ll be working on.

New comment by breakall in "We Should Teach Music History Backwards"

breakall — Sun, 17 Jun 2018 20:24:40 +0000

This reminds me of the hours I spend poring over the Allmusic Guide to Rock I had borrowed from the local library, tracing backwards from Van Halen, Nirvana, and Beastie Boys to discover their influences. I had taken piano lessons for several years and had learned Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Debussy — sometimes tracing back led me to what I had learned on piano.

I agree that working backwards can lead to wonderful discoveries. What can be difficult to grasp as you go back is what the music sounded like at the time—how an album sounded because it was the first time musicians had made that sound.

New comment by breakall in "Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years"

breakall — Mon, 24 Jul 2017 15:22:13 +0000

This is the OneNote screen clipping tool. If you don't have Office, Win+Shift+S doesn't do anything.

This is a super useful tool, but most often I paste into mspaint and mark up from there.

New comment by breakall in "The British Library Puts Over 1M Images in the Public Domain"

breakall — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 14:53:20 +0000

Not sure I can advise on the best practice, but I know how NOT to do it: my buddy just told me that a family member spent untold hours digitizing decades of family photos and documents... all at a resolution of 1024x768. headdesk

New comment by breakall in "The rise of the new Crypto War"

breakall — Sun, 12 Jul 2015 17:27:12 +0000

Isn't their a fair distinction between an undocumented weakness ("back door") to which LEOs have access, and a provider providing a key ("front door") upon a lawful order, maintaining the strength of the encryption scheme?

It seems some believe that Comey is playing with semantics in order to obfuscate, or doesn't understand the argument he's making -- I don't.

New comment by breakall in "The Dark Web as You Know It Is a Myth"

breakall — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 14:52:05 +0000

Nothing about these terms is "accurate". By that definition, Facebook is in the deep web.

...And in the dark web -- they now have a Tor-friendly Onion address!

New comment by breakall in "Microsoft announces support for SSH"

breakall — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 14:03:40 +0000

MobaXterm is also a nice product: http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/

New comment by breakall in "The habits of practically unhackable people"

breakall — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 12:12:29 +0000

Run your own for a few bucks a month! Here's a guide to setting OpenVPN up on an Ubuntu machine:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...

New comment by breakall in "The habits of practically unhackable people"

breakall — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 12:09:05 +0000

This helps when your password is lost along with thousands / millions of other passwords in a breach -- attackers would be trying to re-use passwords programmatically in bulk and wouldn't detect your algorithm.

But if you were individually targeted i.e. a human attacker is looking at your password, your algorithm would provide access to many of your accounts with little effort.

I used to use this solution, btw, but have now gone to a unique, complex password per site with a password manager.