Hacker News: cricalix

New comment by cricalix in "rpg: A modern psql-compatible Postgres terminal and TUI written in Rust"

cricalix — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 07:25:51 +0000

I get the name, but for a moment I thought someone had made a RPG IV or similar interpreter/compiler in Rust..

New comment by cricalix in "LibreOffice Writer now supports Markdown"

cricalix — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 06:56:13 +0000

And potentially get fired for using unauthorised software on a corporate machine. Or find out tha USB storage is disabled (which is better than getting fired).

New comment by cricalix in "Indefinite Book Club Hiatus"

cricalix — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 08:03:47 +0000

Physical letters do not obviate scams, nor is the cost that prohibitive. I remember actual 419 scams on blue airmail all-in-one letters back in the 80s. And that was international post too.

New comment by cricalix in "Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition"

cricalix — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 07:25:28 +0000

12‽ I'd swear the Slackware I downloaded was closer to 30+. On dialup. Via a VAX. Using FTP to go from internet to the VAX box, then Kermit from the VAX to the DOS PC using Procomm Plus. Write it all, start the install sequence, find out that the 18th disk was bad. Reboot. Rinse. Repeat.

X disks were X11. There were also the A,B, C etc disks.

Then there was the Coherent install, with massive manual on ultra thin paper with the shell on the front.

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

cricalix — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 10:19:39 +0000

UnRaid does a variant of this; license is tied to the serial of the USB drive. It barely writes to the drive, so wear isn't meant to be much of an issue.

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

cricalix — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 06:47:13 +0000

Tangential to this was the existence of California Software Product's "Baby/36" software. My father was a 36/400 programmer and sysadmin, and in his spare time used Baby/36 to write software for local businesses. I have vague memories of parallel port dongles being involved back then too. Don't think he mandated their use, was more a "framework" requirement.

New comment by cricalix in "AI Slop Report: The Global Rise of Low-Quality AI Videos"

cricalix — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 10:11:04 +0000

For me, in Ireland, tacking "-ai" on the end of Google searches disables the hallucination engine. For now at least.

New comment by cricalix in "Always bet on text (2014)"

cricalix — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 10:32:24 +0000

I poked this - the 96 installer from Archive didn't play nice with wine. However, dosbox plus win3.11 and some ingmount commands worked just fine. So yes, you could export to plain text or similar.

New comment by cricalix in "Commodore 64 Ultimate"

cricalix — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 21:22:43 +0000

Someone's first impressions on the new version from Commodore International.

Commodore 64 Ultimate

cricalix — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 21:22:42 +0000

Article URL: https://bigzaphod.com/blog/commodore-64-ultimate/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46348627

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by cricalix in "Wolfram Compute Services"

cricalix — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 14:10:14 +0000

On the note of Jupyter notebooks and version control - there was a talk at this year's Pycon Ireland about using a built in cleaner for notebooks when committing the JSON (discard the cell results), and then dropping the whole lot into a CI system utilising remote execution (and Bazel or similar) to run and cache the outputs. Was a talk from CodeThink. No video up yet though. Scenario was reproducible notebooks for processing data from a system under test.

New comment by cricalix in "The differences between an IndyCar and a F1 car"

cricalix — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 20:06:04 +0000

Tangentially related would be Adrian Newey's memoir "How to build a car"; he talks about both F1 and Indy cars he worked on. ISBN 9780008196806

New comment by cricalix in "Orion 1.0"

cricalix — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 20:28:06 +0000

> How many times a day / week / month do you launch your browser from scratch ?

Every morning / day across multiple machines. I don't leave them sleeping or hibernated.

Don't think I'd notice a slightly faster browser start; a 50% faster start would be nice though.

New comment by cricalix in "Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'"

cricalix — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 18:16:19 +0000

scoot, you may find the current mini-series by the podcast Unexplainable to be interesting. It's on sound, and one episode is about tinnitus and research into it.

https://www.vox.com/podcasts/467048/unexplainable-hearing-au...

New comment by cricalix in "WebDAV isn't dead yet"

cricalix — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 07:20:30 +0000

They also support FTP without the SSH transport, and it's not FTPS either. Various IP cameras still support FTP as a way to write files out periodically; I use this to provide a "stream" from a camera (8 seconds per frame because reasons) to the world. Actual streaming via RTSP is also available, but I could never get a stable stream to a video host (like YT or Twitch) from the camera (partially because of a poor quality network connection that can't be upgraded easily). So, FTP + credentials -> walled off directory that's not under the web root -> PHP script in web root -> web browser.

New comment by cricalix in "WebDAV isn't dead yet"

cricalix — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 21:02:17 +0000

"FTP is dead" - shared web hosting would like a word. Quite a few web hosts still talk about using FTP to upload websites to the hosting server. Yes, these days you can upload SSH keys and possibly use SFTP, but the docs still talk about tools like FileZilla and basic FTP.

Exhibit A: https://help.ovhcloud.com/csm/en-ie-web-hosting-ftp-storage-...

New comment by cricalix in "How older parents divorce affects their adult children"

cricalix — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 19:46:25 +0000

Anecdotally, this rings true for me. Father walked out on mother essentially, when I was in my early 40s. Rocked my world thoroughly, hadn't seen it coming. Several years of therapy to come to terms with it.

New comment by cricalix in "Lucky 13: a look at Debian trixie"

cricalix — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 06:33:39 +0000

It might be better on Debian, but it's absolutely fine on Fedora too - in that I've hit zero snags. Maybe there are problems somewhere, but I've not encountered them yet (with a mix of all three supported ways to run things).

New comment by cricalix in "Lucky 13: a look at Debian trixie"

cricalix — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 07:06:45 +0000

I've been happy with Fedora for my personal systems, and it's the only blessed distro at work for those who don't want Windows or Mac.

Heck, I use Fedora Server as my homelab OS to run Incus. Works For Me.

New comment by cricalix in "Optimizing my sleep around Claude usage limits"

cricalix — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 22:01:44 +0000

In no particular order:

Marine mammals

Sunsets with no land in sight. Sunsets framing the land. Sunrises with no land in sight. Sunrises framing the land. Thunder and lightning rolling up one side of an island in the distance, putting on a show.

Dark skies and the stars.

The peace and tranquility of quiet places with just nature and you. Until the sod over the hill turns on their generator.

Fresh fish.

The feel of sea spray, wind in the ears, the connection to your boat, knowing if things are right just by the feel and sound.

And that's just from doing non-ocean-crossing sailing.