Hacker News: buu709

New comment by buu709 in "Books are not too expensive"

buu709 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:45:40 +0000

Ebooks go on sale a lot. You can often get them for less than $3.00, but it takes effort to track what you like and keep an eye out for sales. The trade off wasn't worth it for me years ago and I paid full price for what I wanted to read... lately there are very few books I pay full price for.

New comment by buu709 in "North American English Dialects"

buu709 — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:37:59 +0000

Most of Newfoundland being lumped in with the Atlantic Provinces too. For the most part you can tell where on the island someone is from based solely on the accent. Hell, I've lived & worked with people from the south coast and I still have a hard time even understanding them sometimes.

New comment by buu709 in "4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)"

buu709 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:18:33 +0000

Honestly? It's an estimate based on spot checking a half dozen smaller albums where I could tell what was missing.

New comment by buu709 in "4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)"

buu709 — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:53:42 +0000

Not just bad to use, but doesn't fully work. I've been trying to get my photos off Google Photos to backup elsewhere, but takeout misses something like 20%-30% of them.

New comment by buu709 in "Nvidia's 10-year effort to make the Shield TV the most updated Android device"

buu709 — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 15:55:26 +0000

I've got the OG model, and it's still the main device hooked up to my TV. All my TV streaming goes through it (mostly Jellyfin these days), and it can stream games no problem via Moonlight.

It's hooked up to a 4k LG TV, and I have no idea about how it does the upscaling, but 720p content looks perfectly fine on it.

Best (worst?) of all... it still gets updates.

New comment by buu709 in "An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm"

buu709 — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 18:03:04 +0000

When the cold air coming from the window drops, it pushes the rising hot air out into the room. Overall loss of heat, but feels better for the human occupants long term.

New comment by buu709 in "Kitchen optimizations"

buu709 — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 21:55:56 +0000

We use very little plastic, but I'm also admittedly incredibly picky over stuff being dry. It could be water dripping from the plastic racks above; nothing is truly wet, just enough that I'm not willing to put the dishes away without further drying.

I think plastic has a lower thermal conductivity/mass. Heat moves into the plastic more slowly and it just doesn't hold as much energy thus doesn't get hot enough to make the water evaporate.

New comment by buu709 in "Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?"

buu709 — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 20:55:17 +0000

For something like Mother of Learning I'd recommend The Years of Apocalypse. Available on RoyalRoad (where Mother of Learning was also posted before being published). Bit of a slower burn, but builds to similar heights and not finished yet.

New comment by buu709 in "Kitchen optimizations"

buu709 — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 17:18:58 +0000

I was honestly a little disappointed with my Bosch.

I had an old low end dishwasher that I had kept going up to a point, but the rack was after rusting to the point it broke.

Bought a mid range Bosch after reading so many glowing reviews and I find it does a terrible job at drying the dishes. They're clean, and the third rack is so much better than I had imagined it would be, but there's always still water on everything!

The old dishwasher had a vent on the front, when it was doing its drying you could see the steam coming out. The Bosch doesn't seem to have any vent... it heats up for a dry cycle, but if you don't catch it and open the door at the end the water vapor just recondenses.

New comment by buu709 in "Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts"

buu709 — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 12:32:11 +0000

I'm really hoping you're wrong about the removed APIs as I recently tried doing a takeout and about 1/3rd of every album I checked was missing. Was really hoping I could find another tool to get my photos downloaded and moved out/backed up.

New comment by buu709 in "Amazon will allow ePub and PDF downloads for DRM-free eBooks"

buu709 — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 13:38:03 +0000

There wasn't when I went through my collection. Reading the announcement from Amazon it looks like the existing DRM free books will not be automatically flagged to be downloadable.

The publisher/author will have to go through a process to have their books be downloadable again.

New comment by buu709 in "Amazon will allow ePub and PDF downloads for DRM-free eBooks"

buu709 — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 12:40:02 +0000

You'd be surprised. Tor and Solaris both offer DRM free books on Amazon. Also anything self published tends to be DRM free.

I saw the writing on the wall and downloaded my books from Amazon a few months before their announcement. Out of around 1000 books I had 300ish that were DRM free.

New comment by buu709 in "Steam Machine"

buu709 — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 19:53:09 +0000

My Shield is 7 or 8 years old at this point and still going strong. Was very much hoping for something like this from Steam just in case something were to happen to it.

New comment by buu709 in "In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information"

buu709 — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 17:39:34 +0000

Allows you to check your feeds from multiple devices. For example I usually read from my phone, but sometimes would like to check my feeds from my desktop.

You could just subscribe to the same feeds from multiple devices/apps, but then you have to manually keep track of what's already been read and that will quickly get out of hand.

New comment by buu709 in "Ask HN: Books that helped you lose weight?"

buu709 — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 19:28:42 +0000

I recently read Burn[0]. It lined up very well with my weight experiences and explains how the mind/body works with food.

One of the things they found that lines up with my experience is the fact that exercise doesn't necessarly burn calories - your body will end up adjusting to any exercise routine (up to a point, but you'd have to go pro athlete levels to really make a difference.) For instance, I walk around 10km daily for my job; when I switched from an office job to this one I started feeling hungrier and thus ate a bit more - I ended up putting on weight even though I was getting much more exercise!

[0]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57977402

New comment by buu709 in "Standard Ebooks: liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover"

buu709 — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 16:45:35 +0000

For Linux, Foliate is very nice.

New comment by buu709 in "Ask HN: Best book/course/resource for personal finance or financial literacy?"

buu709 — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 20:52:53 +0000

I would imagine it would depend on where you're from? I'm from Canada and the book that helped me more than anything else is 'The Wealthy Barber Returns'.

'Millionaire Teacher' is also fantastic, and I believe is U.S. based (been a few years).

Both books teach the fundamentals of how to save/invest in a safe manner in a way that is easily digestible. Barber especially is an engrossing read.

New comment by buu709 in "Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th"

buu709 — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 18:53:22 +0000

ebooks.com does tell you if a title has DRM or not, which seems to be the best option currently. Outside of that I haven't found much.

New comment by buu709 in "Bookshop.org launches Kindle alternative, sends e-book sales to local bookstores"

buu709 — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 16:30:14 +0000

ebooks.com will tell you whether a title has DRM or not. I've switched all my non-DRM buys to them. Unfortunately publishers dictate whether or not something will have DRM so the vast majority of books are DRM'd.

New comment by buu709 in "A gigantic landslide shows the limit to how high mountains can grow"

buu709 — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 17:23:38 +0000

I'm Canadian, and have never traveled to Europe but, every imported piece of food I've ever seen has the energy measured in kilojoules.