Hacker News: gschizas

New comment by gschizas in "Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block"

gschizas — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 05:41:09 +0000

> run your own DNS

Can you expand on that? How would you go about running your own DNS that wouldn't be affected by football leagues?

New comment by gschizas in "Font Smuggler – Copy hidden brand fonts into Google Docs"

gschizas — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 14:13:38 +0000

You can still pay Microsoft a one-time-fee instead of a yearly one. You can even go to a physical store and get a physical box with Office (granted, it doesn't contain anything inside it anymore )

New comment by gschizas in "TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe"

gschizas — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 07:47:56 +0000

The difference is that IRL establishments don't sell off that data to anyone else, nor do they have the ability to collate that data with data from other establishments to make a profile of you.

(at least not yet)

New comment by gschizas in "Guido van Rossum Interviews Thomas Wouters (Python Core Dev)"

gschizas — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 13:52:14 +0000

What's the story with Eric Raymond?

New comment by gschizas in "DOS Memory Management"

gschizas — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 09:16:54 +0000

'MZ' has been confirmed to be the initials of Mark Zbikowski, there's no question about it. It's not "Memory" + "Last".

New comment by gschizas in "Four Column ASCII (2017)"

gschizas — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:49:48 +0000

There's no 0x80-0xFF in the UTF-8 encoding. Only up to 0x7F (127) it's the same.

New comment by gschizas in "Four Column ASCII (2017)"

gschizas — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:48:48 +0000

UTF-8 is not technically a character set (because it has way more than 256 characters). Characters 32-127 in UTF8 are the same as ASCII, which is the same as the OEM/CP437 and the ANSI/ISO-8859/CP1252.

The characters in CP437 (and other OEM codepages) actually come from the ROM of the VGA (and EGA/CGA/MCGA/Hercules before them).

What you are referring to is those (visually), right? I'm missing some characters in the first line, because HN drops them.

    0123456789abcdef
   0...♥♦♣♠•◘○◙..♪♫.
   1►◄↕‼¶§▬↨↑↓→←∟↔▲▼

As far as I know, the equivalent control characters (characters 0-31) don't have any representation in CP1252, but that's also dependent on the font (since rendering of CP1252 is always done by Windows)

As to their origin, originally the full CP437 character set was taken from Wang word processors. I don't know where Wang took it from, but they probably invented it themselves.

EDIT: There's a more complete history here: https://www.os2museum.com/wp/weird-tales/

EDIT 2: The CP437 character set didn't seem to come directly from Wang; it's just that they took some (a lot) of characters from Wang word processors character sets. The positions of those "graphic" characters was decided by Microsoft when they made MS-DOS (at least according to Bill Gates).

New comment by gschizas in "Four Column ASCII (2017)"

gschizas — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 13:50:04 +0000

ASCII 60-63 is just <=>?

You probably mean 28-31 (∟↔▲▼, or ␜␝␞␟)

Unless this is octal notation? But 0o60-0o63 in octal is 0123

New comment by gschizas in "uLauncher"

gschizas — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 13:48:35 +0000

The character "μ" itself is called μι or μυ (both pronounced "me"), and is the exact equivalent of Latin "m". For some reason, English speaking countries tend to pronounce it "mew" (they also pronounce "π" as "pie"). But English speaking countries mispronounce so many words it's par for the course anyway.

Pet peeve: I really hate when they replace "μ" with "u". Completely different letters. Of course replacing capital Latin "E" with capital Greek sigma ("Σ") is even worse.

As to the μlauncher: It's anyone's guess as to how the author meant for it to be pronounced. I'd call it "me"launcher or "micro"launcher (micro is also pronounced wrong in English BTW, it's not MY-crow, it's more like mee-CRAW )

New comment by gschizas in "DoNotNotify is now Open Source"

gschizas — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 09:45:29 +0000

Android 15/16 does allow you to control notifications even lower, at the level of notification category, but indeed the app must have chosen to use them.

New comment by gschizas in "A web server on a single floppy disk"

gschizas — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 16:22:20 +0000

3.5" floppies are still floppy. The case may be hard, but the floppy flops.

New comment by gschizas in "The Cscript Style Guide – CScript is the standard C"

gschizas — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 10:15:52 +0000

Given that CScript is the name of the "Console Based Script Host" for Windows, that can run JScript (Microsoft's old variant of JavaScript) and VBScript, and supposedly other pluggable scripting languages (I've never seen one in the wild), calling this "Cscript" is not a good idea.

New comment by gschizas in "Show HN: Xenia – A monospaced font built with a custom Python engine"

gschizas — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:22:36 +0000

There's no Greek in there, so that's unfortunately another skip for me. I know most people won't care, but at least try for a WGL4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Glyph_List_4) charset! All Greek-derived alphabets (Greek, Latin, Cyrillic) have very similar characteristics (unlike other writing systems such as Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese or Korean), and it should be much easier to expand your system to cover those.

EDIT: As many people have said, the "custom Python engine" would be far more interesting than the font itself.

New comment by gschizas in "Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files"

gschizas — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 22:40:41 +0000

Could be worse, it could be syncing to Google Photos.

Oh, you want to download all photos so that you can free the cloud space? Too bad, you can only download them one by one. Or use Google Takeout and leave half of them undownloaded.

New comment by gschizas in "A4 Paper Stories"

gschizas — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 15:33:16 +0000

Security!

(read the article)

New comment by gschizas in "Show HN: uvx ptn, scan a QR, get a terminal in your phone"

gschizas — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 19:31:37 +0000

I had already fixed the sources file manually, but the "any" distro should probably work as well (I put "noble" when I did the manual edit).

Thanks though for the fix.

New comment by gschizas in "Show HN: uvx ptn, scan a QR, get a terminal in your phone"

gschizas — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 15:05:39 +0000

This command:

  lsb_release -cs

Doesn't work for Linux Mint 22.2

What you want is UBUNTU_CODENAME from /etc/os-release (in the case of Linux Mint 22.2, it's "noble")

EDIT: Actually, I'm not even sure you can do $(command) inside /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*

New comment by gschizas in "In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999)"

gschizas — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 11:42:16 +0000

> What is or was The Homer?

It's a reference to a Simpsons episode where Homer Simpson designs a car, and it's supremely hideous: https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/The_Homer

New comment by gschizas in "Stop Breaking TLS"

gschizas — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 09:31:49 +0000

The fact that most tools have completely different ways to allow them to add certificates is the biggest pain. Git, Python and Rust also have large issues. Git doesn't default to "http.schannel". Python (or rather requests, or maybe urllib3) only looks at its own certificate store, and I have no idea how Rust does this (well, I use uv, and it has its own problems - I know about the --use-native-tls flag, but it should be a default at the least).

New comment by gschizas in "Europe: WhatsApp opens for third-party apps"

gschizas — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 15:15:10 +0000

I'm in Europe and I see the same page. I don't think it's geoblocked.