Hacker News: grandinj

New comment by grandinj in "I built a 10 inch mini rack from aluminium extrusions"

grandinj — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 08:35:16 +0000

One option is to stick a mini-UPS in-between the wall the devices. Such a thing is internally a handful of lithium cells and some DC outputs.

For powering a handful of things that consume less than 100W they are quite useful because they typically provide 2 or 3 DC outputs, and replace between 2 and 4 power bricks.

They also provide an hour or two of backup, quite useful in my country where the power sometimes goes out for a bit.

The downside is that I cant find decent ones in my country, and so I end up replacing mine every 2-3 years.

New comment by grandinj in "Email could have been X.400 times better"

grandinj — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 10:48:58 +0000

Yeah, as someone who had to implement a protocol stack to talk to a X.400 server, it was not fun at all. Weird encodings, monster spec, all sorts of weird server-specific stuff that you had to do exactly right if you wanted the server to accept your email.

Compared to that, when I implemented RFC821/822 (i.e. SMTP) mail, the hardest part was the weird line-encodings, but other than that, the spec was ___so___ nicely readable and pragmatic.

New comment by grandinj in "Composition Shouldn't be this Hard"

grandinj — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:07:58 +0000

So this is basically Pick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system) for the modern world. Which is a good thing, its about time we resurrected this idea. I wish them the best.

New comment by grandinj in "Making RAM at Home [video]"

grandinj — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 06:47:03 +0000

In a comment he says he is doing it for some research into a related thing (somethiing to do with GaN sheets?)

New comment by grandinj in "Why is IPv6 so complicated?"

grandinj — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 18:12:55 +0000

I was there, reading the ipv6 mailing list eagerly. Address space exhaustion was a smaller problem because NAT was pretty primitive, so called carrier grade NAT was not even a thing yet. But cisco had the largest routers and their biggest was not big enough for the core router fabrics projected growth. And there was not enough demand (yet) for very large routers fir cisco to want to design and build the nevessary chips. The IPv6 people thought they held all the cards and could mandate whatever they wanted.

But of course, it was s very long time ago and my memory may be inexact.

New comment by grandinj in "Why is IPv6 so complicated?"

grandinj — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 09:37:26 +0000

A couple of years later ipv6 became unnecessary. A big driver for ipv6 at the time was routers not being able to manage the increasing size of the core routingtable. Then 2 years later betterhardware and routing table compression became available and ipv6 became unnecessary.

New comment by grandinj in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

grandinj — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 07:03:36 +0000

Just get some clear nailpolish and apply it with the included brush. Not as good but dead easy.

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

grandinj — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:47:56 +0000

Collabora was unhappy about the LOOL revival, but not enough to leave.

It was only when TDF contrived reasons to expel Collabora people that Collabora decided to leave.

(Full Disclosure: I am one of the Collabora people expelled)

TDF ejects its core developers?

grandinj — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 10:45:07 +0000

Article URL: https://mastodon.social/@CollaboraOffice/116328945292238026

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599139

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by grandinj in "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"

grandinj — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 10:53:50 +0000

I suspect that Time Machine is no longer used by a sufficiently large % of their customer base for them to care, and they are slowly sunsetting it. They are quite aggressive about that sort of thing, so I expect it to to deprecated in favour of iCloud soon.

New comment by grandinj in "YASA beats own power density record pushing electric motor to 59kW/kg benchmark"

grandinj — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 06:46:21 +0000

motors do not like the impact loads that wheels see, which is why bicycles with hub motors do not have a long lifespan

New comment by grandinj in "People may age faster if their dad smoked during puberty"

grandinj — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 09:21:09 +0000

Or.... smoking may be indicative of people from poorer backgrounds, where health is generally lower. (cant say for sure, but thats the case where I am from)

Statistics 101: Correlation is not causation.

New comment by grandinj in "Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences"

grandinj — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 06:36:11 +0000

Unfunded pension and health care

New comment by grandinj in "PSA: Libxslt is unmaintained and has 5 unpatched security bugs"

grandinj — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 11:20:50 +0000

That is a pity. Clearly we need some kind of

   Home For Abandoned Code

:-)

New comment by grandinj in "PSA: Libxslt is unmaintained and has 5 unpatched security bugs"

grandinj — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 09:19:35 +0000

Is this not what the Linux Foundation was about at one stage?

Taking ownership of unmaintained projects so that at least they have the bare minimum of patches being applied, CI/CD running, releases being created?

New comment by grandinj in "Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me"

grandinj — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 06:41:29 +0000

There is a Chinese player that has taken effective control of various internet-related entities in the Seychelles. Various ongoing court-cases currently.

So the seychelles traffic is likely really disguised chinese traffic.

New comment by grandinj in "Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier goes half-fed"

grandinj — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 14:18:07 +0000

If you repair it yourself, you have more flexibility in terms of replacing spares with newer items i.e. replacing a whole module when it a part of that module becomes hard to come by.

Internal documentation ..... hmmmm.... LOL.... Often not, word of mouth is the rule.

If there is internal documentation, it's generally pretty rough. Getting it to the point where you can hand it to external parties is a lot of work.

New comment by grandinj in "Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier goes half-fed"

grandinj — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 14:12:58 +0000

Sadly the US military (like a lot of militaries) are in love with custom requirements. And there is very little leeway for negotiating them out. So unnecessarily custom solutions are the norm.

New comment by grandinj in "Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier goes half-fed"

grandinj — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 11:11:12 +0000

It was muuuch cheaper that way.

Because adding in repair stuff requires the supplier to provide documentation, frequently training, a parts manifest, guaranteed 10-20 year availability of spares, and probably about 50 other requirements I don't know about.

All of which add up to a rather large contract cost increase.

Possibly this boondoggle will result in the military putting in more reasonable "right to repair" terms in the contract, rather than insisting on the gold-plated thing I mention above, but more likely it will simply result in more cost overruns.

New comment by grandinj in "The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice"

grandinj — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 11:51:37 +0000

If you have specific performance issues and are able to share the associated documents, please log them at https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/.

Of course, we cannot always help, sometimes the slowdown is due to increased feature or stability or conformance, but often we can improve things greatly.