Hacker News: dn3500

New comment by dn3500 in "A few interesting modern pixel fonts"

dn3500 — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:01:29 +0000

Square pixels were certainly not an innovation of the Macintosh. The earliest raster scan workstation I'm aware of is the Alto, released in 1973. It and the ones that came after it like the Star and Dorado all had square pixels. So did the early 1980s engineering workstations like Apollo and Sun, which also came out before Macintosh.

New comment by dn3500 in "California's Battery Array Is as Powerful as 12 Nuclear Power Plants"

dn3500 — Sat, 16 May 2026 07:20:37 +0000

California imports a third of its electricity, and that's expensive. It gets almost another third from natural gas. They've been changing rapidly from fossil fuels and nuclear to renewables and that's pretty capital intensive. And there have been some huge costs associated with the wildfires.

There's a bit more technical info on California battery storage here:

https://www.ess-news.com/2025/04/11/california-battery-domin...

New comment by dn3500 in "Batteries Not Included, or Required, for These Smart Home Sensors"

dn3500 — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:58:32 +0000

Yes. This was more than 50 years ago. The store owner let me examine the device. It was wired into his alarm system. It even had the frequency listed on the label.

New comment by dn3500 in "Batteries Not Included, or Required, for These Smart Home Sensors"

dn3500 — Wed, 06 May 2026 12:18:07 +0000

Children too. My own hearing extended to about 23 kHz until I was in my early 20s, and I don't think I was exceptional. There was a jewelry store in my town that I couldn't go in to because the "ultrasonic" motion detector was so painfully loud. But I doubt these devices would be a problem for children or pets because the pulse is so short.

New comment by dn3500 in "From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control"

dn3500 — Mon, 04 May 2026 09:43:21 +0000

There were several proprietary systems in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The one I remember was DSEE from Apollo Computer. It was integrated with the file system such that commits and branches worked like zfs snapshots. You could just "cd" to whatever tag, branch, or individual commit you wanted. No checkouts required. Very cool, I wish we still had that today. DSEE was spun off as Clearcase, acquired by IBM, then I don't know what happened to it after that.

New comment by dn3500 in "San Francisco streets with confusingly similar names"

dn3500 — Sun, 03 May 2026 07:06:57 +0000

Seattle is crazy. I used to live on 1st Ave N, which is the same physical street as 1st Ave and 1st Ave S, but don't confuse them because they all have their own numbers and some of them overlap. It is however completely different from 1st Ave NE, which is way on the other side of town. And this isn't an aberration, most of the streets work the same way.

New comment by dn3500 in "Connie Converse was a folk-music genius. Then she vanished"

dn3500 — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:37:50 +0000

That's why I wish I'd paid closer attention. If she played her own compositions, I wasn't aware of it. My aunt and uncle were both serious amateur musicians and often had people over to play music. It's more likely they played popular or folk songs that the other musicians would have known. To answer your question, no, she was just another musician in my uncle's circle. I remember her because they worked together, not because of her music.

New comment by dn3500 in "Connie Converse was a folk-music genius. Then she vanished"

dn3500 — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:47:02 +0000

I knew her in Ann Arbor. By then she had stopped performing but I heard her play a couple of times at my uncle's house. I now wish I'd paid closer attention, I was just a stupid teenager at the time.

New comment by dn3500 in "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder"

dn3500 — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 16:57:11 +0000

Here's a photo of the tape recorder:

https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...

New comment by dn3500 in "What if the Apple ][ had run on Field-Sequential?"

dn3500 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:19:08 +0000

It's a specific technique where you deliberately modulate the signal so as to interfere with the color subcarrier. This can be used to produce colors that are otherwise not available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors

New comment by dn3500 in "Using an engineering notebook"

dn3500 — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:56:56 +0000

Engineering notebooks were required at my first job in the 1970s, for patent reasons. The notebook pages are numbered and it has a real sewn binding, making it harder to remove or insert a page without being noticed. We were required to date and sign each page and start a new page every day.

By the time I retired I think I was the only one at my company using one. I had to special order to get a proper one with the quad ruling, numbered pages, and sewn binding.

New comment by dn3500 in "Cartographers have been hiding illustrations inside Switzerland’s maps (2020)"

dn3500 — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 23:27:48 +0000

Standard Ebooks does a nice job of typesetting and proofreading many of the Project Gutenberg books, including this one.

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jack-black/you-cant-win

New comment by dn3500 in "A vector graphics workstation from the 70s"

dn3500 — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 23:11:50 +0000

I bought a Tektronix 4014 in 1991 and had it until 2016. During that time it never required any repairs or calibration. Built like a tank. The guy I sold it to had to replace capacitors in the power supply, and still uses it today.

New comment by dn3500 in "We're learning more about what Vitamin D does"

dn3500 — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 19:06:13 +0000

I live in the tropics and there is plenty of sunshine here. So my skin doctor told me to avoid the sun at all costs, always wear suncreen and a hat, don't go out in the daytime. A few years of that and now I have a vitamin D deficiency.

New comment by dn3500 in "Oversight Committee Releases Additional Epstein Estate Documents"

dn3500 — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:13:59 +0000

Not only that, it's all jpeg images. Of email messages. I wonder if they printed these out from Lotus Notes on a dot-matrix printer then screenshotted them on their camera phones.

There are various efforts (outside the government) to convert these to pdf and ocr them. I think Internet Archive has a torrent.

New comment by dn3500 in "Inside an Isotemp OCXO107-10 Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator"

dn3500 — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 09:11:52 +0000

An entire 1000 foot reel of 35 mm film only has about 15,000 frames on it, so one part in 30,000 would be good enough. When I worked in TV none of the sound equipment had ovens for their crystals.

We did have a sync generator with a crystal oven. I forget who made it. The sync generator has multiple outputs, the most important one being the color subcarrier, which is 3.579545 MHz for US NTSC (I still remember that number). It also puts out vertical and horizontal sweep signals. The stable timebase allowed us to free run for a day in case we lost the network signal for some reason. The network (NBC in our case) had a cesium clock in New York that they calibrated against WWV for time of day. We locked our clock to their signal, and all our equipment to our clock.

New comment by dn3500 in "Inside an Isotemp OCXO107-10 Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator"

dn3500 — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 08:55:34 +0000

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45719250

New comment by dn3500 in "Putting a dumb weather station on the internet"

dn3500 — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 08:33:43 +0000

You might consider joining the Citizen Weather Observer Program. It's a great way to share your data with other station owners.

http://www.wxqa.com/

I had a station for a few years. The receiver had a usb interface so no software radio required. I used weewx to import the data. I even had a water temperature sensor off the end of my dock so I could see if the lake was warm enough to swim in.

New comment by dn3500 in "Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?"

dn3500 — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 17:17:13 +0000

I had a TV once, can't remember the brand, that refused to stream from my dlna server unless it could contact its own corporate servers over the internet first.

New comment by dn3500 in "Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?"

dn3500 — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 01:52:07 +0000

In 1981 I wrote a tool that is still in use today. You can install the package on most major linux distros. This was before we paid much attention to software copyright, and I simply published it with my name on it and no license.

About six months later someone took my code, removed my name from it, made some small changes that didn't change its behavior at all, and re-published it. By that time I had moved on and wasn't aware that it had started to take off.

The man page now has someone else's name on it as author. I don't really regret publishing it but I wish I had put a copyright notice and license on it.