Hacker News: damieng

New comment by damieng in "5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens"

damieng — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:55:20 +0000

You can get nicer 5x5 fonts amd it was not that uncommon back in the day. 4 wide is not too bad if you make the center of M and W just two pixels inset from top or bottom respectively or borrow the spacing column.

Plenty of systems did it like CP/M on the Spectrum +3 and it looks pretty decent.

New comment by damieng in "Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help"

damieng — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 09:52:26 +0000

I remember when these first started appearing in Windows was around the time toolbars became popular.

I think the idea was the most common ones had icons which matched the toolbar button so you could start with the slower-but-more-comprehensive menus and then notice the quicker toolbar equivalent through their matching icons.

New comment by damieng in "I Let Claude Build My Home Network: Two ISPs Bonded, $312/Year Saved"

damieng — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 21:20:22 +0000

I also went with an Xfinity cable and Frontier fibre combo in about 2018 I think.

I just bought a Synology RT2600 router at the time and plugged each provider in then set it to load balanced.

Reliability and speeds were great. Possibly not as optimised as this perf wise but a lot easier to setup.

New comment by damieng in ".NET 10"

damieng — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 19:30:28 +0000

If you use LINQ and have ever used areay Contains youre about to find out it's not going to be smooth. They knew about this for a year but decided coercing to span in an expression tree despite it being invalid wasn't worth fixing.

New comment by damieng in "How to self-host a web font from Google Fonts"

damieng — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 14:52:40 +0000

Even better download it, subset it then base64 encode it into your CSS for zero FOUC.

https://damieng.com/blog/2021/12/03/using-variable-webfonts-...

New comment by damieng in "AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong"

damieng — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 21:36:32 +0000

I'd argue putting CloudFront on top of S3 is less complex than getting the permissions and static sharing setup right on S3 itself.

New comment by damieng in "Eliminating JavaScript cold starts on AWS Lambda"

damieng — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 11:59:47 +0000

In my experience the type of developer using JS for their Web apps rarely overlaps with someone comfortable doing high performance C++ runtime work.

New comment by damieng in "[dead]"

damieng — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 19:53:10 +0000

I wrote a LINQ provider (.Net) for Elasticsearch. Was quite the challenge dealing with the sorts of quirks and subtle differences between the two. Case sensitivity and the tokenization are also hurdles to overcome but mapping Group by to Elastics aggregates was facets back then) was the toughest part.

Hats off to Coralogix for taking up the challenge in converting SQL.

New comment by damieng in "I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust"

damieng — Sun, 11 Aug 2024 18:58:14 +0000

It's a trade-off. Have every single instance of m look squished vs it might touch another m or w somewhere else and look odd.

I've done fonts in both categories.

New comment by damieng in "I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust"

damieng — Sun, 11 Aug 2024 18:45:09 +0000

My own collection of free 8x8 fonts might suit your needs at https://damieng.com/zx-origins

Looking forward to trying this exciting rust tool in my chain as well to see what additional formats I can include.

(Update: Seems the PIFO tool is not open-source :( I guess I'll stick to using scripts + FontLab Studio 5)

New comment by damieng in "Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened (2022)"

damieng — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 23:45:38 +0000

https://youtu.be/rf5o5liZxnA?feature=shared&t=542 has a demonstration of NextStep 3 (released September 1992) that clearly shows a computer icon that Steve refers to as "My Computer" and then moves into hitting the "Network" icon globe that shows other computers on his local network.

New comment by damieng in "Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened (2022)"

damieng — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 14:35:32 +0000

"NeXTStep had its Dock, but that doesn't have menus or a status icon."

NeXTStep not only had menus but tear-off dockable menus/sub-menus that are superior to any menus we have in apps today. It's clearly present in the screenshot I linked to.

New comment by damieng in "Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened (2022)"

damieng — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 12:51:22 +0000

"The task bar, the Start menu, the system tray, "My Computer", "Network Neighbourhood", all that: all original, patented Microsoft designs. There was nothing like it before. "

Apart from, you know, NextStep which had a dock for system tray/start menu as well as my computer and network neighbourhood.

You can find screenshots of NextStep 3.3 showing this such as https://winworldpc.com/product/nextstep/3x from 1992 and it's possible they're also in earlier versions - NextStep 1.0 was released in 1989.

New comment by damieng in "Amiga ASCII Art"

damieng — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 21:37:45 +0000

Surprised an article of this depth didn't mention that the Topaz font changed between Kickstart 1 and 2.

New comment by damieng in "ZX Origins 8x8 bitmap fonts"

damieng — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 10:31:27 +0000

I'm in PAL land so it's almost 1 :)

New comment by damieng in "ZX Origins 8x8 bitmap fonts"

damieng — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 18:41:14 +0000

Cool, thanks! It took longer than I care to admit. They're redrawn on the fly and it also means the 2x and 3x options can render it without upscaling blur.

New comment by damieng in "ZX Origins 8x8 bitmap fonts"

damieng — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 18:40:23 +0000

Most of the 8-bit machines had quite square pixels (Spectrum, Commodore 64) but machines with multiple resolutions often had modes that doubled the horizontal res (C128, PCW, BBC Mode 3) giving rectangular pixels and by the time the 16-bits hit (Amiga, Atari ST) these modes were commonly the default and square pixels were relegated to "low-res" modes which were used less often.

New comment by damieng in "ZX Origins 8x8 bitmap fonts"

damieng — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 18:36:23 +0000

Fantastic book, has a place on my shelf in my office and I've been lucky enough to shoot the breeze with the author on Zoom!

New comment by damieng in "ZX Origins 8x8 bitmap fonts"

damieng — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 17:58:46 +0000

I thought about setting up my camera and pointing it at my Princeton 15" multisync CRT and scripting a live screenshot of every font but that seemed... overkill.

New comment by damieng in "ZX Origins 8x8 bitmap fonts"

damieng — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 17:58:00 +0000

The process involves me creating a raw 768 byte "ch8" file for the Spectrum then running it through a bash script that creates the .psf and .bdf using psf2tools.

https://gist.github.com/damieng/b2e279c72146ee469731acbadbea...

It then opens up the font in FontLab using a template and some custom Python 2 scripts to convert that into the TTF.

https://github.com/damieng/font-creation-tools/tree/master/F...

The next bash script uses a bunch of third-party tools and my own PixelWorld open-source .NET tool to generate all the other formats and disk images and then packages them up into a zip and uploads it to S3.

https://gist.github.com/damieng/d2519cda1c674b4ede74f154f05f...

https://github.com/damieng/pixelworld

Hope that's of some interest to somebody.

Damien