Hacker News: kenmacd

New comment by kenmacd in "Running Gemma 4 locally with LM Studio's new headless CLI and Claude Code"

kenmacd — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:45:46 +0000

not to use the cli tool. You can install it and change the settings to point to pretty much any other model.

It's an okay-enough tool, but I don't see a lot of point in using it when open sources tools like Pi and OpenCode exist (or octofriend, or forge, or droid, etc).

New comment by kenmacd in "Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?"

kenmacd — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 20:34:23 +0000

@eieio: whatever email protection you're running is triggering on the extension info. For example I see:

> And they’re sent to servers that advertise the availability of the [email protected] extension. What if we just…don’t advertise [email protected]?

New comment by kenmacd in "UniFi 5G"

kenmacd — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 17:12:12 +0000

If you avoid Chinese-branded devices you should doubly avoid US-branded devices. See National Security Letters and Room 641A as a small subset of why.

New comment by kenmacd in "Reservoir: Smart electric water heater"

kenmacd — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 23:21:48 +0000

There are systems (like the sanco2) that use an indoor/outdoor pump.

> This sounds terrible for efficiency in winter, as you will need to reheat the room

Sure, but lots of people have some point of the year they want cooling.

Even during the heating season it's only worse if you're heating the living space with something _worse_ than what you're using to heat the hot water. If you have a heat pump for room heat then you're moving heat from outside, to in the house, to in the water heater.

If you're heating the room with electric then in the winter it's no different than using an electric water heater (100% efficient).

New comment by kenmacd in "Reservoir: Smart electric water heater"

kenmacd — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 23:14:16 +0000

> If I’m gone on a trip for 2 weeks my hot water bill is zero

You mention other advantages, but money isn't one. You're limited to 100% efficiency with tankless.

Although an idle hot water tank can waste ~70W (~1.7kWh) of power, this is way more than made up for by using a heat pump. Plus tankless strains the grid a lot more than any system with a buffer built in.

New comment by kenmacd in "Reservoir: Smart electric water heater"

kenmacd — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 23:05:27 +0000

Why do you care what size it is though? It's only the capacity that matters. For example a tankless only has a few gallons inside, but that doesn't limit how long of a shower you can take.

New comment by kenmacd in "Library creates double bound copy of 1984"

kenmacd — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 01:30:52 +0000

Borrow? I want to buy a copy!

New comment by kenmacd in "Qualcomm to acquire Arduino"

kenmacd — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 20:12:40 +0000

It is rather unfortunate. I haven't seen them mention moving manufacturing or their 'Arduino offices' (have you?), but even still I'd rather not support a country threatening to annex my homeland.

New comment by kenmacd in "One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day"

kenmacd — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 13:53:47 +0000

"Oh no: There's metal satellites falling from orbit! Also: wanna buy a metal coin, they were sent to the edge of space!". I find the juxtaposition more amusing then I probably should.

New comment by kenmacd in "Privacy Badger is a free browser extension made by EFF to stop spying"

kenmacd — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 18:12:21 +0000

That's really more of a "Want to pay more than your fair share of taxes? Help them commit tax fraud".

Cutting Google out of the mix can be seen as a net positive for the community. The same can't really be said for taxes that go to your local services.

New comment by kenmacd in "Find SF parking cops"

kenmacd — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 19:25:24 +0000

+11 and +4 seem check-digit-y

From the limited dataset it looks the last digit comes from:

last digit = ( + 2) mod 7

New comment by kenmacd in "Pass: Unix Password Manager"

kenmacd — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 15:33:10 +0000

If you can spare a USB port you can use one of their Nano keys that just stays plugged in.

Even if someone/malware was to steal my yubikey pin they'd still need to convince me to tap the thing over 1,000 times to steal all my passwords.

New comment by kenmacd in "US warns hidden radios may be embedded in solar-powered highway infrastructure"

kenmacd — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 13:59:10 +0000

Seems a little sparse on details. If the radios are actually cellular it seems it would be trivial for an entity like the US government to at least determine what SIM (and even data) any of these modules was sending.

Rather than anything malicious I'm thinking it's probably just a common module made for signs that can be updated over-the-air, and that feature just isn't enabled in the US signs.

New comment by kenmacd in "Ask HN: What would you look for in a hobbyist alternative to IDA Pro?"

kenmacd — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 14:46:11 +0000

My suggestion: asking for sacrifices for non-commercial users is the wrong approach. You want users to ask their employers to get licenses and adding a bunch of limitations will just make them more likely to use/learn something else.

New comment by kenmacd in "Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org"

kenmacd — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 14:41:31 +0000

Not sure on the reputation, but I personally haven't had any issues emailing people using gmail or microsoft. They have a good DNS Diagnostics page that checks all your domains DKIM/SPF/DMARC settings.

I've been using identities created in the admin panel, but they do have subdomain addresses where everything to *@user.domain goes to user@domain, and you can configure a 'Catchall' address (and of course 'plus addresses'). I haven't used either though.

New comment by kenmacd in "Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org"

kenmacd — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 02:03:10 +0000

I use identities for this:

https://migadu.com/guides/identities/

I can send as the address, and emails arrive in my normal mailbox. I also use them for giving self-hosted services their own address/password to email me.

New comment by kenmacd in "DeepSeek-v3.1"

kenmacd — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 01:16:01 +0000

And unfortunately no more half price 8-hours a day either :(

New comment by kenmacd in "Ask HN: GCP Outage?"

kenmacd — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 17:23:39 +0000

I dunno. If just your employers site is down then you'll be expected to fix it, whereas if everyone is down there's less pressure.

New comment by kenmacd in "Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update"

kenmacd — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 21:07:44 +0000

SponsorBlock (https://sponsor.ajay.app/)

It works amazingly well provided a video's been out for at least a half hour or so. It also has the option to skip the "like and subscribe" parts too.

I also tried the https://dearrow.ajay.app/ extension to replace clickbait titles, but decided I'd rather know when a channel/video is too clickbait-y so I can block/unsubscribe.

New comment by kenmacd in "IKEA ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes"

kenmacd — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 16:21:02 +0000

I've done everything using old Particle Xenon boards (nrf52840 microcontroller) and didn't encounter anything 'user hostile'. Originally I had all the 'hub' stuff on one of the boards too, but the newer recommended way is to have the board be the 'radio' and to use a normal computer for the routing.

The matter network is just an IPv6 network, so I run coap server on my matter devices and then control them with command like 'coap-client -m post coap://[]/open_button'.