Hacker News: deadlyllama

New comment by deadlyllama in "The "Windows XP Box" (2003)"

deadlyllama — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 07:57:06 +0000

Please accept this revision:

  I got my first real Pentium
  Bought it at the local shop
  Played Quake till my fingers ached
  Was the summer of '99

  Me and some guys from school
  Had a LAN and we played real hard
  Jonny lost, the network failed
  Should've upgraded our thinnet

  Oh, when I look back now
  Ninety-eight was more fun than XP
  And if I had the choice
  My kids wouldn't be stuck with chromebooks
  I really miss my old PC

...

New comment by deadlyllama in "An unusual way for your DHCP server to run out of dynamic IPs"

deadlyllama — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 02:38:45 +0000

Whatever it is, it's not that. A ping to a unicast IPv4 address in the local subnet won't be transmitted at the Ethernet layer until the IP has been resolved to an Ethernet MAC address via ARP. The troublesome host must have been responding to the broadcast ARP requests with ARP responses, too. Promiscuous mode makes no difference here as those ARP requests are broadcasts and you'll receive them with or without promiscuous mode.

New comment by deadlyllama in "How Hard Is It to Open a File?"

deadlyllama — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 03:35:38 +0000

Before I read the linked page I assumed this was a rant about using MS Office with files on your local filesystem. Although that would be titled "How Hard is it to Save a File?"

New comment by deadlyllama in "Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers"

deadlyllama — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 04:57:47 +0000

EC2 is pricey if it's all you're getting from AWS. If you have wierd requirements, colo may be a good option. Otherwise, just get a VPS or 3 and be done with it. You'll get a virtual KVM that lets you boot it off an ISO and set it up the way you want.

Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode, ... are long established VPS players.

I'm cheap and buy VPSes off deals on lowendtalk.com. e.g. my backups are on a VPS with 3TB disk, 2GB RAM, 1 vCPU, USD7/mo. I suspect your USD80/mo budget would stretch to something amazing, by comparison.

New comment by deadlyllama in "FFmpeg-over-IP – Connect to remote FFmpeg servers"

deadlyllama — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:26:32 +0000

Sharing filesystems is hard when you make users do it in advance.

I was thinking of the server end of an ffmpeg-over-ip system bringing up a FUSE filesystem backed by something similar to your VFS-served-by-the-client. Combine that either with argument rewriting, or chrooting into the FUSE filesystem.

As another commenter said, where's plan 9 when you need it? If you go the FUSE route there are existing 9P implementations for both server and FUSE client you can use.

New comment by deadlyllama in "FFmpeg-over-IP – Connect to remote FFmpeg servers"

deadlyllama — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:07:52 +0000

I've been meaning to build exactly this for a while, and my waiting has been rewarded by someone else doing it!

Had you thought about using FUSE on the server side, rather than patching ffmpeg? Like a reverse sshfs? That avoids patching the ffmpeg binary, which allows usage of wierd and wonderful ffmpeg binaries with other people's patches.

I'd be interested in seeing how well it works with SBC GPUs - many have hardware decoding and encoding, and their vendors love to fork ffmpeg.

New comment by deadlyllama in "The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void"

deadlyllama — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 21:11:32 +0000

As a New Zealander, I can say: it's not bad.

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

deadlyllama — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 18:00:36 +0000

I went back to self hosting when Google were going to kill free Gmail for your domain. I have no problems with deliberability. And I have tiny mail volumes.

Pre Gmail I was on Exim. Now I'm on Postfix. I used the 123qwe.com tutorial as a starting point.

The real problems are (1) family members just want Gmail and (2) I have to maintain an email system.

New comment by deadlyllama in "Email was the user interface for the first AI recommendation engines"

deadlyllama — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 19:36:56 +0000

My high school got email access for students in 1997 (New Zealand). We had to pay per megabyte for web browsing. There were services you could email URLs to, that would email you back a text rendering of the page. So I used that.

They had a fairly smart UI for following links. They would appear as footnotes and IIRC you could just hit reply, type the footnote number, and then send.

New comment by deadlyllama in "Comet open source remote KVM from GL-iNet"

deadlyllama — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 17:14:59 +0000

How similar is this to the sipeed NanoKVM? (RISC-V based, software source https://github.com/sipeed/NanoKVM ) From the outside it looks very very alike.

New comment by deadlyllama in "NetBSD on a JavaStation"

deadlyllama — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 07:17:53 +0000

I remember when Java was exciting. There were several attempts at open source Java OSes like JOS (https://jos.sourceforge.net/). A Java applet runtime for the PalmPilot. My thesis on dynamic aliasing protection was based on a dynamic Java-esque runtime. But... Java got a reputation for being heavyweight.

And yes, as others have said, instead we got the modern web, with (for example) web based word processors requiring orders of magnitude more compute power than a desktop of the early Java era.

New comment by deadlyllama in "OpenRA – Classic strategy games rebuilt for the modern era"

deadlyllama — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 20:19:10 +0000

Does it play the single player mode cutscenes though? My PC was underpowered when I was playing Red Alert. Full screen, full motion video still seemed pretty amazing back then. "Hitler is.. out of ze way"

New comment by deadlyllama in "Intel built best budget GPU for 1440p gaming"

deadlyllama — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 07:30:09 +0000

As long as it's better than the i740 I used to have!

New comment by deadlyllama in "Arduino PLC IDE"

deadlyllama — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 19:04:46 +0000

How prevalent is ladder logic for new industrial systems?

Over two decades ago I was programming a Foxboro PLC in their SALL language, which was compiled down to C. Variables and control structures! And you could hack the C if you wanted your state transitions to go faster.

New comment by deadlyllama in "Police cannot seize property indefinitely after an arrest, federal court rules"

deadlyllama — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 19:56:36 +0000

Would this work:

* put a warning wrap on your sandwich - danger - this sandwich may have laxatives added

* if your sandwiches continue to go missing, label them AND add laxatives

New comment by deadlyllama in "Ask HN: Video streaming is expensive yet YouTube "seems" to do it for free. How?"

deadlyllama — Sun, 19 May 2024 19:53:26 +0000

DIY (instead of the cloud) is the answer. If you're pushing terabytes+ from day 1 on a shoestring, you're going to want your own CDN. If you can manage a queueing system and the occasional wait, run your own (or rented physical) hardware for transcoding at as high a utilisation as you can.

Build vs buy pushes you to "build" early on when your margins are slim and your volume is huge.

New comment by deadlyllama in "Changes in Windows to Comply with the Digital Markets Act in the EEA"

deadlyllama — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 01:15:43 +0000

At last we can uninstall Bing & Edge!

... in the EEA.

"Windows uses the region chosen by the customer during device setup to identify if the PC is in the EEA."

Imagine the tourist ads if it was just device location: "Hate Edge? Uninstall it and see the Eiffel tower at the same time!"

New comment by deadlyllama in "OpenWrt One/AP-24.XY: new open source router board by OpenWrt and Banana Pi"

deadlyllama — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 20:14:13 +0000

Yes, you are being too paranoid. Once booted into Openwrt the router will only be running Openwrt code. I guess there's the tiny possibility of a backdoored bootloader but that would have to be a pretty sophisticated backdoor!

New comment by deadlyllama in "BYD Overtakes Tesla as Most Popular EV Maker"

deadlyllama — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 17:52:00 +0000

When I looked at buying an EV last year, BYD was a serious option. In the end I decided on a second hand Nissan Leaf. In New Zealand, we're right hand drive and have no local auto makers. We import lots of second hand cars from Japan as a result. Like most New Zealanders, I've never owned a new car. Cheap Chinese EVs are somewhat cost competitive with second hand Japanese EVs which is crazy. Still not going to buy one. I'm happy that geopolitical tensions aren't going to stop spare parts being available.

New comment by deadlyllama in "Gigantic heat caverns in Mustikkamaa have now been filled with water (2021)"

deadlyllama — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 05:06:31 +0000

If enough people didn't buy tickets, then the airlines would have to reduce capacity on the routes, and that would reduce emissions.