https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gregkbHacker News RSShttps://hnrss.org/hnrss v2.1.1Sun, 04 Oct 2026 06:09:23 +0000had such a great time with Pyxel! was great fun to recreate some of the demo scene effects from my childhood. easy to setup and get coding and make some pixels "move" quickly. it has some inherit limitations (eg. how colours and bitmaps are organised) which gives you some satisfying challenges. just enough to satisfy your 8-16bits assembly nostalgia. maybe I should go back add a few more parts to my demo: https://github.com/greg76/megademo

]]>Fri, 02 Oct 2026 11:53:16 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49932469gregkbhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49932469https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49932469I remember this somewhat differently. I'm still grateful for my time at Nokia at that I had the chance to work in the vicinity of one their 3 (if I remember correctly) design centers. I was young and reckless and on one occasion I started to taunt one of the industrial designers who I was sitting at the next desk. I was telling them, hogy NTT Docomo is already pushing out mobile phones with color screens, polyphonic ringtones and Nokia is just doing n+1 iteration on low-res monochrome displays and beepers. The guy didn't say a word, reached for a key, opened one of the closed drawers and pulled out a Japanese phone. "Who do you think this was designed by?" Turned out that the same guys were doing the design for Nokia's Japanese phones, even for Docomo, under the "NO" moniker. (Docomo enforced a two letter + 3 digits model naming scheme) Nokia for a long time (as other manufacturers as well) thought that there is no interest in such devices in the US and European markets. The pricier phones targeted business users with a more reserved design. This wasn't (yet) cost cutting, more like how they have read the market. As for Symbian, others has already explained its shortcomings. There was an internal debate how it would be able to take Nokia to the next generation of smartphones and they have been working on the Linux based Maemo operating system. There were internal prototypes and maybe there was a limited run on N900 released. However, moving to a completely new platform seemed risky. I think ~2-3 years before the iPhone the decision was to try fixing Symbian instead of moving every service and partner to a yet unproven new platform. It was more of a "we have invested in it too much, we can't write it off" case.

]]>Thu, 24 Sep 2026 20:59:23 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49836649gregkbhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49836649https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49836649wow, had a very similar idea, but smaller in scope. (focusing on shell script usage) I've documented my own journey over here https://github.com/greg76/aii

]]>Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:29:41 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47641856gregkbhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47641856https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47641856