Hacker News: eggfriedrice

New comment by eggfriedrice in "RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3"

eggfriedrice — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 08:24:28 +0000

Lovely job, I like the "here's where I've got to so far" style. This gives people enough to work from and make a hand-wired version while he's waiting for boards to come back. Even if he runs out of time to do anything it's leaving a working design and firmware for folk to start from.

It's definitely too easy to put off publishing until it's "properly" done and then it never happens.

New comment by eggfriedrice in "Using e-ink tablet as monitor for Linux"

eggfriedrice — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 14:06:49 +0000

This was a really interesting read! Back in the day a friend and I started a company and Kickstartered a RPi add-on. The kickstarter campaign failed, but we ended up building anyway after one of the silicon manufacturers spotted the project and provided some FoC devices which changed the economics.

We spent oodles of time on it, learned lots, build a fairly simple product but ended up selling it through some of the bigger RPi retailers. It was all an excellent learning experience, and ignoring our time we made about 50p out of the entire batch of a thousand. Factor in our time and it was a complete financial disaster, but we were young and carefree and had fun doing it!

New comment by eggfriedrice in "Pimped Amiga 500"

eggfriedrice — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 12:57:42 +0000

Classy job!

New comment by eggfriedrice in "The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain"

eggfriedrice — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 12:40:35 +0000

I recall at the Torness tour that the guide, who's a local, remembered at public the planning meetings that they were told the building wouldn't really be visible from the A1!

At least they painted it grey to match the sky...

New comment by eggfriedrice in "Show HN: A text-only blog engine using Cloudflare workers and KV store"

eggfriedrice — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 19:34:53 +0000

This is nice, apart from a quick play when they were new I've never really looked at CF Workers and KV again. This made me go and have a look at the docs and find that it's actually looks quite useful. I didn't know they'd added Python and other languages, so that's cool in itself.

I like Jon's example here, a single and fairly short file that does just enough to demo this all, nice.

New comment by eggfriedrice in "HTML Tags Memory Test"

eggfriedrice — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 16:25:20 +0000

Today I learned about

New comment by eggfriedrice in "How to untangle phone numbers"

eggfriedrice — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 20:54:51 +0000

I particularly like how the UK phone number examples are not written how we would write them in the UK, which I guess underlines the point.

New comment by eggfriedrice in "Favorites from our prompt engineering tournament"

eggfriedrice — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 19:18:37 +0000

I'm not sure I understood much except the photo of the cake

New comment by eggfriedrice in "Computer Engineering for Babies (2021)"

eggfriedrice — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 22:55:29 +0000

It's a great book, my daughter loves it. I was pretty chuffed when she figured out the AND gate needs both buttons pressed at once. I'm not entirely sure she's sussed XOR yet though.

New comment by eggfriedrice in "Happy 20th Birthday to Inkscape"

eggfriedrice — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 23:42:39 +0000

I've also lasered lots of things from Inkscape drawings. I've always found it easier to use than proper CAD but still get good results.

I don't remember this much, but a previous me wrote a guide for lasering using Inkscape for Edinburgh Hacklab. I don't think the process has changed much... https://wiki.ehlab.uk/inkscape_for_lasering

New comment by eggfriedrice in "New LoRa RF distance record"

eggfriedrice — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 12:00:38 +0000

There is essentially no use of LoRaWAN at 433MHz in Europe, this would have been at 868

New comment by eggfriedrice in "Understanding battery performance of IoT devices"

eggfriedrice — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 16:51:12 +0000

I do a lot with LoRaWAN, and I like the simplicity of its approach for class A devices, which is to wake up and transmit and then listen for a reply in two defined time windows. These are shortly after the transmission, so clock drift is less of an issue with cheap oscillators.

New comment by eggfriedrice in "The art of auto engineering"

eggfriedrice — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 13:07:10 +0000

OMG, I had no idea Tim Hunkin was churning out YouTube videos these days! I was exactly the right age to appreciate the Secret Life of Machines, and it looks like I have several hours of quality stuff to watch there.

New comment by eggfriedrice in "Rclone is 10 years old today"

eggfriedrice — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 17:45:12 +0000

Yup, it's great. I used it to shuffle stuff from s3 into Dropbox and it was just the right tool for the job.

New comment by eggfriedrice in "Zrepl on Rsync.net"

eggfriedrice — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 19:20:00 +0000

Back in the day I managed a small office server, backing up via a particularly slow ADSL line. It took about a week to do the initial sync, so I just let it run and in the meantime backed up to an external disk every couple of days.

Once it was up and running most snapshots took a few minutes to sync, always finished before the morning anyway.

Definite +1 to rsync.net, this was >15 years ago but it was always 100% solid, I don't think I ever had any issues. It's nice to see they're still doing the same thing and haven't bloated it with crap!

New comment by eggfriedrice in "Oil Wells Hidden in Plain Sight in L.A"

eggfriedrice — Mon, 02 May 2022 09:36:32 +0000

There's some nice fake buildings in Edinburgh, Scotland

There's a fake "house" at the end of my street. It's actually a telephone exchange: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@55.9050155,-3.2075701,3a,75y,...

There's normally an Openreach van or two parked outside, which gives the game away, but driving past you wouldn't notice.

My favourite is Dewer Place sub-station, despite the fancy frontage it was purpose built in 1894 as a sub-station: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@55.9465325,-3.2112386,3a,75y,...

I went on a tour round a few years ago and it was notable for using Gas Insulated Transformers, which are unusual outside of Japan if I remember rightly. There were amazingly strict planning regs that required the installation to be super quiet, so the building had a surprising amount of sound insulation.

New comment by eggfriedrice in "Nothing like this will be built again (2002)"

eggfriedrice — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 15:56:35 +0000

I went on a tour round Torness a couple of years ago and it's a fantastic engineering marvel to mosey around.

A few things stand out, like the old-tech ring binders and Windows 95 screensavers on CRTs. The safety focus was clear. Nothing was done without a risk assessment, and the young apprentice who was helping with our tour was given a telling off by the tour staff as he wasn't holding the handrails - as had clearly been drummed into them.

What really struck me was how many people were involved in running the plant. I don't know how it compares to similarly sized gas plants, but there were hundreds and hundreds of people employed - mostly in project management/safety roles. I wonder how it compares to how many folk are employed in renewables, we have a lot of wind power here now.

It's a shame that cracks have started to form in the reactors so the plants will be shutdown earlier than planned. It looks like tours are suspended for Covid, but go round if they open up again before shutdown!

New comment by eggfriedrice in "The world’s biggest offshore wind farm, Hornsea 2, generates first power"

eggfriedrice — Wed, 29 Dec 2021 13:44:01 +0000

I like the photo showing the blades labelled A, B and C. Makes it look like IKEA-style assembly, but with a massive Allen key.

New comment by eggfriedrice in "The Arduino IDE 2.0 beta"

eggfriedrice — Tue, 11 May 2021 21:40:53 +0000

I stand corrected!

New comment by eggfriedrice in "The Arduino IDE 2.0 beta"

eggfriedrice — Tue, 11 May 2021 21:18:22 +0000

Nice to see that it's not just another VS Code spin off. They seem to be finding a nice middle ground between the very basic Arduino 1 IDE, and an over-complicated all-in IDE.

Plus, debugging, woo!