Hacker News: jbl0ndie

New comment by jbl0ndie in "DaVinci Resolve 21.1"

jbl0ndie — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 22:47:30 +0000

I agree. I enjoy creative play and learning how to emulate what the masters can do in film, music, art, engineering and computer science. When it's so easy to take so much for granted, I find it an excellent if somewhat time-consuming way to deepen my appreciation and admiration of their work.

New comment by jbl0ndie in "The Color of White Light"

jbl0ndie — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:18:32 +0000

When I worked in commercial lighting design, we were fairly certain that fluorescent lamp manufacturers were mixing their phosphors to score higher on the CRI test.

New comment by jbl0ndie in "Hop.earth – OpenStreetMap based car racing game"

jbl0ndie — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:03:08 +0000

I love this. Just cancelled a trip to Austria. At least I can drive the K pass now. Going off road, rolling and then carrying on is a really nice touch. It has RV There Yet vibes.

New comment by jbl0ndie in "Hop.earth – OpenStreetMap based car racing game"

jbl0ndie — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:51:05 +0000

So that's either Hotel California by The Eagles, or that time when I tried Second Life and got stuck between the wall and the spiral staircase in the training level. I'm probably still there. Strange indeed.

New comment by jbl0ndie in "KOReader"

jbl0ndie — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 22:47:13 +0000

There's a search function hidden near the help menu. That was handy whenever I lost a menu item, which was frequently. I do like it now it's set up and it accurately reports the battery level, unlike the Kobo reader which says 40% then 0%.

New comment by jbl0ndie in "Show HN: Bento - An entire PowerPoint in one HTML file (edit+view+data+collab)"

jbl0ndie — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:29:10 +0000

I love this.

I hope you don't get cease and desisted by MS for mentioning PowerPoint.

New comment by jbl0ndie in "Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux"

jbl0ndie — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 07:10:38 +0000

I bought a subsidised Windows EeePC 901 and stuck Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it. Much more useable. Windows was laughably bad. It limited the number of open applications!

There was also a EeePC specific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EasyPeasy which was even better.

Since then I have installed various things for amusement, including a cut down Chromebook OS and the OLPC Linux. The limit was always the tiny root partition (4GB SSD). I had some limited success joining with the second SSD (16GB) using btrfs.

I think the albeit tiny SSD was this machine's saving grace compared to HDD models, in terms of speed.

New comment by jbl0ndie in "Why Vancouver is always a stand-in for San Francisco in movies and TV shows (2021)"

jbl0ndie — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:36:46 +0000

The city that never plays itself, a classic episode

New comment by jbl0ndie in "The great Scouse pasty war"

jbl0ndie — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 22:47:32 +0000

And Scotch eggs

New comment by jbl0ndie in "Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI"

jbl0ndie — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 23:14:14 +0000

Possibly not. Buying yourself out of employment and commercial rental contracts can give rise to costs.

In the UK, statutory redundancy pay, after 2 years of service, is 1 week of pay per year of service and 1.5 weeks if you're over 41.

For a long duration commercial lease it might be worth paying to break the contract rather than the running costs for an unused building.

These are probably short-term costs, with longer term savings projected from the reduction in headcount and premises.

New comment by jbl0ndie in "Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar"

jbl0ndie — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:09:22 +0000

You could also blame the constant negative press covfefe

New comment by jbl0ndie in "Hacking an old Kindle to display bus arrival times"

jbl0ndie — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:35:18 +0000

Could you adjust the refresh frequency based on your usage patterns? So refreshing less frequently outside your main transit times. An extension of your current pause at night.

New comment by jbl0ndie in "Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents"

jbl0ndie — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 21:17:10 +0000

Impressive seeing as last week we heard that AI had killed SAAS.

New comment by jbl0ndie in "Qwen-Image-2.0: Professional infographics, exquisite photorealism"

jbl0ndie — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:36:29 +0000

Sounds like you're describing the uncanny valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

New comment by jbl0ndie in "Systems Thinking"

jbl0ndie — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 07:18:51 +0000

I'd argue it's more malleable than a skyscraper.

How rapidly has business software changed since COVID? Yet how many skyscrapers remain partially unoccupied in big cities like London, because of the recent arrival of widespread hybrid working?

The buildings are structurally unchanged and haven't been demolished to make way for buildings that better support hybrid working. Sure office fit outs are more oriented towards smaller simultaneous attendance with more hot desking. Also a new industry boom around team building socials has arrived. Virtual skeet shooting or golf, for example.

On the whole, engineered cities are unchanged, their ancient and rigid specifications lacking the foresight to include the requirements that accommodate hybrid working. Software meanwhile has adapted and as the OP says, evolved.

New comment by jbl0ndie in "IKEA for Software"

jbl0ndie — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 06:36:33 +0000

Twilio's Flex isn't far off this concept. For building simple voice and text message applications, it does quite a lot out of the box. It's their full telephony stack but presented at a much higher level of abstraction.

New comment by jbl0ndie in "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout"

jbl0ndie — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:51:24 +0000

That looks significantly more like a long-term energy strategy than grabbing oil from Venezuela and Greenland.

New comment by jbl0ndie in "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout"

jbl0ndie — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:47:37 +0000

Only there is no forever when you're talking about a finite resource, like fossil fuels.

New comment by jbl0ndie in "Welcome to Gas Town"

jbl0ndie — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:01:34 +0000

That's brilliant insight, thank you. I enjoyed reading Steve's extensive read me.

Also I'm planning a trip to Cambridge so I've bookmarked one of the pubs for a visit.

New comment by jbl0ndie in "Show HN: Similarity = cosine(your_GitHub_stars, Karpathy) Client-side"

jbl0ndie — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 18:59:33 +0000

Excellent. Found me three other stars and one to that I knew from before but hadn't started. Nice!