Hacker News: gia_ferrari

New comment by gia_ferrari in "A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste"

gia_ferrari — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:38:30 +0000

For most people, waste -> filament recycling is a red herring (cost and time). Happy to see people thinking more laterally. I use an old toaster oven ($5 used) to fabricate round stock (fill old aluminum drink cans with waste, melt it down) and sheet stock (crush the melt between flat surfaces). I then use this material for all sorts of things (it makes beautiful marbled vases on the lathe, for example). There's almost zero net waste in this process (I recycle the cans).

More uses I have in mind:

- PLA drift sleeves for go karts (they're typically ABS, which, if you care about plastic in the environment, is a laughably bad choice for something which is intended to be ground to a fine powder in use)

- Stool (melt plastic into shallow cylindrical mold, push legs into melt)

- Decorative trim/picture frames (need a profiled router bit)

etc etc

Check Brothers Make on YT, they are the source of my inspiration.

New comment by gia_ferrari in "The state of modern AI text to speech systems for screen reader users"

gia_ferrari — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 19:05:17 +0000

Audio synthesis speed is one thing, but is the output _intelligible to a human_ at 1,000wpm? That's the sort of thing Eloquence is being used for, according to the article.

New comment by gia_ferrari in "A shift in developer culture is impacting innovation and creativity"

gia_ferrari — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 17:14:17 +0000

There are current efforts along these lines! For example, permitting is a huge bottleneck - software could be part of the solution (carefully and thoughtfully integrated, of course).

Disclosure: I work at govstream.ai - we work in this space [we're hiring!]

New comment by gia_ferrari in "Nintendo Switch 2 Dock USB-C Compatibility"

gia_ferrari — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 18:30:13 +0000

I recently bought a really cheap Android Auto screen for my car. It had a USB-C power input. Suspicious, I opened up the supplied cigarette power adapter. The USB power pins were hooked straight to the car battery rail. On most vehicles that's connected straight back to the alternator. Hilarious. I wonder how many people fried their phones because they thought "oh, I forgot my charging cable, but I can borrow my nav screen's for a bit"...

New comment by gia_ferrari in "Ask HN: Do custom ROMs exist for electric cars, for example Teslas?"

gia_ferrari — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 16:00:26 +0000

For full open source, there's Speeduino and FOME (newer). I've used both for my cars. https://speeduino.com/home/ https://wiki.fome.tech/

New comment by gia_ferrari in "Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?"

gia_ferrari — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 16:47:14 +0000

+1. My basic structure is a big share/ directory that is mounted on all my machines (over sshfs + tailscale if need be). There's some basic top-level organization (Projects, Financial Documents, Photos) but other than that, the key thing for me was a Projects/Active/, Projects/Ice/, Projects/Done folder that I move things between. If I don't know where to file a thing, I just make a new folder under Projects/Active/, keep an eye on your workflow, and reorganize if you see an issue. Stick to the process, not the plan[1].

The absolute worst approach I tried was to curate things. Nothing got filed. Embracing the chaos allowed the pattern to evolve around my revealed workflows, and now after a couple years I pretty much know where to instantly find or file things.

[1] https://youtu.be/7D8sXR0ozeE?feature=shared&t=4474

New comment by gia_ferrari in "Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team"

gia_ferrari — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 18:11:45 +0000

Not op, but in my bubble:

- DRM. - Owner-unfriendly device locks (such as manufacturer-controlled secure boot or locked-down OSes). - Inability to audit network traffic from one's own devices, i.e. an IoT device. - Remote attestation, when in opposition to open computing.

I could also see folks seeing the use of cryptography as "having something to hide" - I don't personally agree.

New comment by gia_ferrari in "Windows XP Professional"

gia_ferrari — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 18:02:54 +0000

On a whim a few years ago I wrote an engineering proposal on my Pentium MMX using Word 2003. It opened within 2 seconds via the aging hard disk. Today even LibreOffice feels a bit overwrought. I've found AbiWord delightful recently - it's the WordPad analog of LibreOffice.

New comment by gia_ferrari in "Splice: Cable Harness Design Made Simple"

gia_ferrari — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 02:35:00 +0000

Super, I'll check it out. I'm on Firefox in Linux (Kubuntu) using a plain old mouse - pretty sure I tried a right click pan. I tried again and it still didn't work. Also- clicking around on the canvas I get: Uncaught ReferenceError: TouchEvent is not defined Ks https://splice-cad.com/assets/SvgPage.zgJCQbB-.js:302 Ia https://splice-cad.com/assets/SvgPage.zgJCQbB-.js:302

New comment by gia_ferrari in "Splice: Cable Harness Design Made Simple"

gia_ferrari — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 19:41:01 +0000

Thanks for the reply! If this information were available on the landing page, I'd have felt a lot more comfortable investing the time to try the tool out. I do appreciate how far you can explore even without an account.

Couple more ideas for the landing page:

- Provide links to examples of generated exports in the formats you support, so folks can get a feel for how it might integrate into their workflow.

- The elements under "Everything You Need for Cable Design" animate as though they're interactive, but clicking them does nothing. Confused me for a bit.

- Page is very hard to read on mobile.

Other thoughts:

- I wasn't able to figure out how to pan the editor view around.

- Adding some sort of json/yaml/xml import/export would open up a lot more workflow possibilities. For example, I want to associate a harness version with a git tag, without needing to manually make a copy of a harness version in the app. Git (and/or github) integration would be great. Honestly, even an opaque blob export would be tolerable.

New comment by gia_ferrari in "Splice: Cable Harness Design Made Simple"

gia_ferrari — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 18:58:01 +0000

Separately from the software itself, I'm left with questions about the context in which this tool is provided.

- Is this a passion project? Commercial? Is it free? Will it always be free? What's the pricing model? - How do I get in contact? - Is there a company behind this? - If I start using this, can I hold on to/export the data in usable form?

New comment by gia_ferrari in "Splice: Cable Harness Design Made Simple"

gia_ferrari — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 18:54:45 +0000

They specify different things. The wire side of a bulkhead connector may be male or female. Some connectors (i.e. the Molex ones you used to see at Radio Shack) are even designed so you can make a custom arrangement of male/female contacts within one connector housing.

New comment by gia_ferrari in "Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion"

gia_ferrari — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 21:15:56 +0000

Or unplugging the internal antennas. Only on equipment you own, of course.

New comment by gia_ferrari in "Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion"

gia_ferrari — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 21:07:44 +0000

If you're on a cheaper lower speed subscription, you can often find compatible modems at thrift stores for a couple dollars. People upgrade to faster tiers and unload their old perfectly serviceable equipment good for a couple hundred megabits - fine for most needs.

New comment by gia_ferrari in "Show HN: I’ve built an IoT device to let my family know when I’m in a meeting"

gia_ferrari — Wed, 14 May 2025 04:21:39 +0000

I just rigged up something similar: a DBUS listener for PulseAudio mic activity that publishes MQTT events to Home Assistant via discovery. No device config needed. I use hallway RGB lights to signal status ("purple = I'm in a meeting"). Quick and easy setup, I already had the RGB lights for mood lighting. Runs as a user systemd unit.

New comment by gia_ferrari in "YouTube DRM added on ALL videos with TV (TVHTML5) clients"

gia_ferrari — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 22:32:48 +0000

I use it indirectly via Tube Archivist to get vastly better search. I've mirrored most technical stuff I've seen, and I can do fine-grained text search over video descriptions, audio transcripts, and even comments. This happens live, in milliseconds, and vastly outperforms Google's own search (which is optimized on vibes). Very helpful when I want to quickly and directly jump to a part that mentions a keyword.

I also use it to archive videos of personal significance.

Finally, I sometimes use resource-constrained computers (say, in my shop). The native video players are much more responsive than the official website.

New comment by gia_ferrari in "Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?"

gia_ferrari — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 23:41:39 +0000

I trained a Markov chain on a rushed project's JIRA backlog and created a game for our team celebration. The game, playable on a Zipit Z2 handheld (think GameBoy SP with a keyboard, ran Debian), challenged players to distinguish real tickets from Markov-generated ones. Its popularity, even among executives, underscored my point: the tickets lacked utility.

New comment by gia_ferrari in "London–Calcutta Bus Service"

gia_ferrari — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 21:57:31 +0000

There are photos in the article references! I didn't find one of the kitchen.

https://curlytales.com/this-was-the-worlds-longest-bus-route... https://www.techtraveleat.com/story-of-london-culcutta-bus-s...

New comment by gia_ferrari in "With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work"

gia_ferrari — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 20:06:45 +0000

I run a local Tube Archivist mirror and having live, predictable full-text search of descriptions, transcripts, and user comments has been a breath of fresh air (it's backed by ElasticSearch, so you can go full-contact if needed). I appreciate YouTube's official search for its accessibility, speed, and spooky "it knew what I meant" ability, but it's a tragedy that this is the only supported way to search their library. I consider YouTube's archive a wonder of the world, and it's a shame that it is locked behind an engagement-polluted interface.

New comment by gia_ferrari in "Tiny Undervalued Hardware Companions"

gia_ferrari — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 21:25:22 +0000

They're also a cheap and easy source of tape heads for projects/replacements.