Hacker News: julian_t

New comment by julian_t in "Dulce et Decorum Est (1921)"

julian_t — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:32:42 +0000

I've often played this after Ralph McTell's "Maginot Waltz", which really contrasts the optimism and patriotism with the reality.

New comment by julian_t in "Maine’s ‘Lobster Lady’ who fished for nearly a century dies aged 105"

julian_t — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 09:13:37 +0000

Some people lived through amazing change. My grandmother was born in the late 1890s in rural Wales, and died at 95. She remembered electricity coming to her village and the visit of the first motor car, the arrival of radio and telephones. She saw men land on the moon and towards the end of her life went to the USA on a 747. Yet when she was a girl she lived with older farm workers who had never been more than ten miles from where they were born.

New comment by julian_t in "Bugs Apple loves"

julian_t — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:22:27 +0000

I have a lot of undeletable old photos on my iPhone. The photos are there, but no photo app shows the trash can icon. They aren't on iCloud or any other current device, so I'm thinking that at some time I must have done something like sync an iPhone I no longer have with a Mac I no longer have. I've usually just cloned one phone to the next, but I reckon that next time I may be in for a manual copying job.

New comment by julian_t in "Pebble Index 01 – External memory for your brain"

julian_t — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 11:28:50 +0000

> Do people replace their phones because the battery isn't good anymore

Yes. I'm not bothered about the latest thing, and every phone I've replaced has been because of two things: the battery has degraded until it's unacceptable, or it no longer gets OS updates.

New comment by julian_t in "Post office in France rolls out croissant-scented stamp"

julian_t — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 07:28:10 +0000

Same with bagels here in the UK. Round bread with a hole in it, for the most part.

New comment by julian_t in "Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?"

julian_t — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 15:46:28 +0000

I used to rely on this on the old DEC systems, when editing and saving foo.dat;3 gave you foo.dat;4. It didn't save everything forever - and you could PURGE older versions - but it saved enough to get me out of trouble many times.

New comment by julian_t in "I spent the day teaching seniors how to use an iPhone"

julian_t — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 08:29:32 +0000

Dam' right (he says, still developing at 70). Getting older may be compulsory, but I regularly have to help the youngsters out with tech-related matters.

New comment by julian_t in "The Synology End Game"

julian_t — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 12:41:26 +0000

I got given a small Synology box by a brother-in-law, and have not been impressed by their OS or apps, so I just use rsync. It's OK, but as my needs are simple I'm thinking of using an RPi solution instead.

(What was amusing was that I kept finding it powered off, and spent quite a while trying to find why it could be shutting down. It turned out that, because I kept it on the floor under my desk, the Roomba would occasionally bump into it and hit the power button on the front)

New comment by julian_t in "Strange CW Keys"

julian_t — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 07:35:22 +0000

The comparison with mechanical keyboards is spot on! Despite having nothing to do with radio or morse in any way, I was given a Vibroplex and it is quite a piece of kit - solid as a rock and obviously a tool well suited to its one task. It reminds me of some of the old tonearms used on turntables, with many springs, counterweights and possible adjustments.

New comment by julian_t in "I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file"

julian_t — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 16:20:16 +0000

I currently have three editors open: nvim (because I've been using it since it was vi), VS Code (because that's what work mandates) and Emacs (for org mode only). Horses for courses, and all that.

New comment by julian_t in "Owls in Towels"

julian_t — Tue, 27 May 2025 16:14:56 +0000

Years ago we found a large heron with a broken wing on the road outside our house in Wales. It had probably hit a power cable, and was hopping around dragging its wing. It was basically a homicidal needle beak, obviously not in the best of moods.

An elderly lady come out to see what the fuss was about, saw the bird, went back inside and then reappeared holding a block of polystyrene foam. She marched up to the bird, which very soon after found itself with a lump of foam on the end of its beak. That gave others the opportunity to wrap it in a blanket (bit big for a towel) and take it to the vet.

Those old ladies are tough!

New comment by julian_t in "Inside One of America's Last Pencil Factories (2018)"

julian_t — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 16:18:17 +0000

My wife does silverpoint. A couple of bucks worth of fine silver wire in an old mechanical pencil, and you're set for years of drawing. Pretty much the cheapest way to do art (and it looks good, too)

New comment by julian_t in "Migraine is more than a headache – a rethink offers hope"

julian_t — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 11:31:30 +0000

I used to get these two or three times a year, but then I had heart surgery last summer and had five in the first day after I came round from the anesthetic, and two or three every day for weeks after that. They've now settled down to one every few days. Annoying, but they go away fairly quickly and just leave me feeling a bit tired and headachy for a few hours.

New comment by julian_t in "Hello, I'm Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers (2015)"

julian_t — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 21:38:31 +0000

I have several Indian coworkers who have a single name. Our company systems insist on first and last names, so they either end up with '.' as a last name, or the same name twice.

New comment by julian_t in "Invisible Electrostatic Wall at 3M plant (1996)"

julian_t — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 16:42:37 +0000

The Daresbury Laboratory in the UK had a giant Van de Graaff generator housed in a high concrete tower. I remember staying on site and waking up in the middle of the night with a really creepy feeling that turned out to be caused by that thing operating.

New comment by julian_t in "Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its schools (2023)"

julian_t — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 16:23:50 +0000

For me it's a bit of both. A programming book that I wrote over 10 years ago - the content is long out of date but the weight reminds me of the effort I put into producing it. Then there's my father's library, all 2000 books of it. I've kept about 50, on a wide variety of topics, and I value them both for the unusual content (Ancient churches of Wales; Jazz record catalogs from the 1940s; English artists from the early 20th century) and for the fact that they remind me of him.

New comment by julian_t in "Markov Keyboard: keyboard layout that changes by Markov frequency (2019)"

julian_t — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 11:10:36 +0000

Had this at an ATM recently, and it took a couple of tries at my PIN before I looked at the keypad and realized what was going on. One more wrong PIN and I could have lost my card.

New comment by julian_t in "Show HN: I designed an espresso machine and coffee grinder"

julian_t — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 08:54:35 +0000

And some have a manually-operated lever, which is completely silent.

New comment by julian_t in "Jaywalking legalized in New York City"

julian_t — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 08:24:41 +0000

I'm currently in Tokyo and it is the norm to wait for the green man, even if it is a two-lane road there isn't a car in sight. I can understand waiting at one of the mega intersections, where you can barely make out the pedestrians on the other side - definitely waiting for permission to cross there.

New comment by julian_t in "COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it"

julian_t — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 11:37:49 +0000

It's a very different (and foreign) environment. Job control language, how data is stored... if you come from a typical modern server environment you'd be pretty lost in the mainframe world.