Hacker News: flyinghamster

New comment by flyinghamster in "News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development"

flyinghamster — Fri, 29 May 2026 14:43:22 +0000

I have yet to even get started with ESP32, mainly because software-defined radio is my main use case. Once you start getting into absurdly high sampling rates, you start to need a lot of horsepower, and that's where the more powerful SBCs shine.

As an example, one of my Pi 5s takes an Airspy and an RTL, extracts 11 different FM broadcast stations, then encodes each audio stream and sends all of them to an Icecast server. There's processing power for more stations, but there are none I'm interested in among the others I'm streaming. With the current 11, it's using about 75% of CPU resources with no overclock. (Edit: this is a 2GB model, and it's running in roughly 500 MB.)

New comment by flyinghamster in "News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development"

flyinghamster — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:30:40 +0000

I've been doing some heavy SDR lifting with a couple of my Pi 5s, and my own experience is that the active cooler works extremely well, and more often than not the fan can be shut off and it will work well as a passive cooler.

New comment by flyinghamster in "Leaving the Physical World"

flyinghamster — Thu, 14 May 2026 13:47:29 +0000

I was ranting about the demise of American manufacturing as I was entering the workforce forty years ago, and it seems that nothing has improved in that sphere. Sure, dismantling General Electric produced a supernova of shareholder value, but the problem with supernovas is that once they're done, they're done.

New comment by flyinghamster in "Scorched Earth 2000 – Web"

flyinghamster — Thu, 14 May 2026 13:28:32 +0000

Back in the early 2000s, that scene was HOPPING. A whole bunch of mods were around, some of which seem to have disappeared, particularly Armored Warfare Evolved.

A couple of things happened (at least to my perception): a bug cropped up in the Apocalypse mod where hitting a small shop would cause it to burn for over a minute, disrupting multi-player game play, and on the servers there was an invasion by trolls complete with Nazi avatars, who drove players away (myself included).

New comment by flyinghamster in "Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price"

flyinghamster — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 19:07:31 +0000

Seeing all the gigantic and very-high-priced Pavement Princess Pickups clogging dealer lots, it's plain that the auto industry in general didn't learn a damn thing. It's easy to point fingers in all directions, but it always ends up that we get the worst outcomes.

New comment by flyinghamster in "Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group"

flyinghamster — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 14:57:43 +0000

I'm of two minds on this. In peacetime, I'd consider something like that to be unreasonable and harmful, not that I'd ever even consider setting foot anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula. But, if anyone has noticed, World War III is raging all around us, and when an enemy who wants to kill you is backing that up with explosive payloads, you really don't want to be handing them battle damage assessments.

New comment by flyinghamster in "The Document Foundation ejects its core developers"

flyinghamster — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:01:23 +0000

It seems that way, but it's been flooded with politics for all my adult life. Steve Jackson Games, the Clipper Chip, software patent shenanigans, the public domain stolen from 1976 to 2019, endless thinly-disguised censorship and control efforts - in meatspace, nothing is new.

New comment by flyinghamster in "Circuit-level PDP-11/34 emulator"

flyinghamster — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 01:59:00 +0000

My high school had a /34 running RSTS/E, with roughly a dozen terminals on-campus, mostly in the lab. Even in 1980, I recall my teacher warning about Y2K, though not yet named as such. Fast forward 20+ years, and I would set up SIMH, install RSTS/E on it, and discover that version 7.0, which was what I used at the time, was not Y2K-compatible.

New comment by flyinghamster in "EMachines never obsolete PCs: More than a meme"

flyinghamster — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:51:42 +0000

Even better, it was a classic zombie brand revival, and it seems like the vast majority of the trusted names of my youth have followed this path.

New comment by flyinghamster in "EMachines never obsolete PCs: More than a meme"

flyinghamster — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:46:43 +0000

Dave's site has an article on Fry's: https://dfarq.homeip.net/what-happened-to-frys-electronics/

They only had one in Illinois, about seven miles or so from Micro Center, and it was one of the earliest to fold.

Once upon a time, I had brick-and-mortar Tiger Direct, Micro Center, and Fry's stores all within an hour's drive. Micro Center is the last one standing.

New comment by flyinghamster in "General Motors is assisting with the restoration of a rare EV1"

flyinghamster — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:05:04 +0000

Yes, and unlike what has been done in the Prius, these were large-format cells. The patents on them ultimately ended up sold to a Chevron subsidiary, which would only license the technology under absurd terms. They assumed that lithium-based battery technologies wouldn't be suitable. Oops.

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

New comment by flyinghamster in "The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)"

flyinghamster — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 12:41:25 +0000

And the silly thing is, as ridiculous as they are for mouse click/drag or touch use, those kind of dial controls are actually reasonable when coupled to a scroll wheel (like you can do in GNURadio). But Apple has never wavered from "one mouse button and nothing else is good enough for everybody," and scroll wheels aren't really an option for a touch interface.

New comment by flyinghamster in "The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)"

flyinghamster — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 12:34:42 +0000

Seriously, why not just link to the Reddit thread instead of this? It seems like every damn site has become a Torment Nexus.

New comment by flyinghamster in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

flyinghamster — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:54:41 +0000

Ah, I see. So still a dick move, then, even if I never use it in the first place.

New comment by flyinghamster in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

flyinghamster — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:06:43 +0000

> I remember when Google disabled call recording in Android, so you no longer could record scammers.

Citation needed. My Pixel 7a with the latest updates has settings for call recording in the phone app. Since I never screwed around with it, I'd assume these are the defaults:

Call recording is turned on, with "asks to record calls" set

Automatically delete recordings is "never"

Automatically record calls with non-contacts is off

No specific numbers to automatically record calls are set

There is also a note that you have to agree to their ToS to use it, and I'd also suggest being careful if you live in a jurisdiction that requires two-party consent for recording.

In any case, I'm of the opinion that if F-Droid goes, I'm basically going to treat this as a feature phone and stay away from third-party apps in general aside from "musts" like banking.

New comment by flyinghamster in "TCXO Failure Analysis"

flyinghamster — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:53:58 +0000

It's also something you want to look for if you're buying an SDR. Getting one with a TCXO will eliminate frequency drift, and the better-made SDRs will also have little or no need for frequency correction.

New comment by flyinghamster in "Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?"

flyinghamster — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:26:47 +0000

I was a big fan of msged on my Net 115 point. https://github.com/jrnutt/msged

BinkleyTerm was another favorite of mine, but I'm not sure of this version's lineage: https://sourceforge.net/p/btxe/code/

New comment by flyinghamster in "Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?"

flyinghamster — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:20:16 +0000

As with so many old things, it's still alive, but it's down to the die-hards. I still miss it, though - I participated in Net 232 (Champaign-Urbana) for a while, then Net 115 in Chicago. We had some great gatherings back in those days, but in the Chicago area, the scene blew away pretty quickly when the internet opened up.

New comment by flyinghamster in "Payphone Go"

flyinghamster — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:16:46 +0000

That's happening piecemeal in the US as well. Any "landline" phone service at this point will be coming from a box hooked up to your internet service, quite the flip from the old days of dialup internet.

New comment by flyinghamster in "Reading English from 1000 AD"

flyinghamster — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 14:11:37 +0000

That's a nice reconstruction. My old dead-tree Webster's Collegiate Dictionary has an essay in its foreword that covers the evolution of English in reverse order, ending with texts in Old Anglo-Saxon. The further back, the more alien it seemed. I'd need a lot of help with Middle English, and anything older would require the sort of major effort/rewriting discussed here. William the Conqueror set a huge linguistic change in motion with his little dust-up.

Really, even early Modern English (e.g. Shakespeare or the King James Bible) is pretty thick for today's English speakers.