Hacker News: flyinghamster

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.

New comment by flyinghamster in "Access to a Shared Unix Computer"

flyinghamster — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:01:04 +0000

Strange that the Balance was largely reliable. I recall one or two hiccups, but nothing that caused me lost work. There were other machines floating around, but they were pretty much reserved for faculty/staff/grad students, and undergrad plebes weren't welcome to use what passed for the internet at the time (but Usenet was was available, albeit via Ray Essick's "notes" software). Also, any student could get an account on the CDC Cyber 170, but few courses used it for actual coursework by the time I was there. Then there was PLATO, a world unto itself... it also ran on CDC hardware, with bespoke way-ahead-of-its-time touchscreen plasma display terminals, online forums, instant messaging, and multi-player online games.

We only had a few of the 5620s in the 3B2 lab, and I remember a wacky mechanical mouse with a metal ball that I can't imagine would have held up in the long run. The PLATO touchscreens were optical, with a grid of infrared beams to pick up touches.

New comment by flyinghamster in "Access to a Shared Unix Computer"

flyinghamster — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:53:56 +0000

Eeeeeep. I was lucky that my big CS courses were done on a Sequent Balance 8000 equipped with six NS32032 CPUs and room for six more. Yup, SMP in the mid-1980s. That machine positively flew on loads that would bring the neighboring Pyramid 90x to its knees.

I had an account on a 3B20, and it did not impress me in the least, but the 3B2/400 boxes in one lab were pretty reasonable for being small systems. What a shame that the WE32000 didn't get any traction.

Before I went down to UIUC, the junior college had a Prime 650, and all compile jobs were run through a queue precisely to avoid having the machine get crushed.

New comment by flyinghamster in "How did Joann Fabrics die while Best Buy survived? It wasn't Amazon"

flyinghamster — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:03:24 +0000

If I'm going to a brick-and-mortar store, if I go online at all, it's only to check stock/availability or look up a product's specs/foibles. No, $STORE, I don't want to create an account. No, I don't want your app. A web browser should be all I need.

New comment by flyinghamster in "How did Joann Fabrics die while Best Buy survived? It wasn't Amazon"

flyinghamster — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:52:35 +0000

Except that Jo-Ann Fabrics was most definitely not walking dead when it was LBO'ed. I'd call this one vampire capitalism rather than vulture.

New comment by flyinghamster in "Sizing chaos"

flyinghamster — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 01:11:35 +0000

My own experience with men's jeans in recent times has been that the waist size is accurate, but the fit type is critical. I won't fit into any type of "slim fit" and "regular fit" needs to be one waist size up. "Relaxed fit" or its newer cousin "athletic fit" each work for me perfectly. That has been the case for two brands of jeans, at least.

New comment by flyinghamster in "Ring owners are returning their cameras"

flyinghamster — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 13:32:52 +0000

Here we have a problem: Hollywood tropes. Shows like The Big Bang Theory aka "Blackface for Nerds" make it nearly impossible to even talk to normals without sounding like Sheldon F. Cooper.