Hacker News: lapetitejort

New comment by lapetitejort in "My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded"

lapetitejort — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 20:30:13 +0000

I added a MIK rear rack with pannier rails. I bought a seat post collar with screw holes in order to attach it, only to realize the bike doesn't have a seat post collar! And the collar was 1/4 inch too wide for the seat post. I wedged some green tire protection strips in there and it works great. I biked home two full panniers and a watermelon in a basket from a farmer's market. Bad idea in retrospect as the whole bike wobbled from being back-heavy. And the kickstand cannot handle even the slightest amount of weight. I might invest in front pannier rails. So I guess I'm going in the touring bike direction!

New comment by lapetitejort in "My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded"

lapetitejort — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:40:22 +0000

In an alternate universe the cannonball runners, with their cars silent, unassuming, but blazingly fast won over the car modding scene

New comment by lapetitejort in "My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded"

lapetitejort — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:14:12 +0000

My ongoing midlife crisis vehicle swerves in a different direction: I bought a 1988 Nishiki 1207 at a yard sale for $40. Mostly stock save for a new seat. With the wheels out of true, the stickers plastered over with garbage, the brakes loose, the front tire visibly cracking, the rear cassette visibly rusted, and the rack mounts stripped, the bike needs some work. I am motivated to finally really learn bike maintenance after putting it off for 30 years

New comment by lapetitejort in "StreetComplete: Fixing OpenStreetMap, one tiny quest at a time"

lapetitejort — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 22:48:20 +0000

The amount things you can map in OSM is impressive. However I ran into two things that have no formal tags: time capsules (historic=time_capsule), and camera obscuras (camera_type=obscura). You can add the values, but they are not official. Time capsule is in the work [0].

[0]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal:Time_capsule

New comment by lapetitejort in "StreetComplete: Fixing OpenStreetMap, one tiny quest at a time"

lapetitejort — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:54:34 +0000

I had been using mapcomplete to add images of artwork, which in turn used panoramax. However I saw someone else use Wikimedia Commons, and to me that makes more sense. Wikimedia ties into more systems, so if you wanted to create a Wikipedia page about an artist, there will be readily available images to use.

On the flip side, panoramax can be used as an open source StreetView. Different sites for different purposes I suppose

New comment by lapetitejort in "StreetComplete: Fixing OpenStreetMap, one tiny quest at a time"

lapetitejort — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:24:01 +0000

I got into OSM and StreetComplete to flesh out intersections, stop signs, and sidewalks in my area. I always felt like I was doing something wrong though. I created crosswalks, then OSM would prompt me to connect the crosswalk to the road via a crossing. In StreetComplete, it felt like I was filling in duplicate data. I had to add whether the crossing had crossing lights not only at the middle crossing, but on the sides as well. This probably doesn't make any sense.

Basically, I am never confident I am editing OSM correctly. Am I supposed to manually draw out sidewalks, or tag the road as having a sidewalk? After adding sidewalks in my area, StreetComplete is now asking me if roads have sidewalks, which I clearly see on the map. Reminds me of editing the various Wiki pages. There's several ways of documenting something, only one way is correct, and it's undocumented.

edit: after playing with StreetComplete more, I noticed you can mark sidewalks as displayed separately. This is tagged as "sidewalk:both=separate" on the road. Whether this is the right way to do things I do not know

New comment by lapetitejort in "Nintendo announces new product revisions in Europe with replaceable batteries"

lapetitejort — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 20:00:02 +0000

There's been some recent developments with removing batteries glued to the device: use floss or some other thin string and saw through the glue. The string won't pierce the battery and can fit in tight spots.

New comment by lapetitejort in "San Diego photologs from the 1970s"

lapetitejort — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:05:59 +0000

I love looking at historical photos of Southern California if only to re-enforce this exact phenomenon. At one point the largest vineyard in the world existed in Southern California [0]. Just a small patch of green and some abandoned buildings remain [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guasti%2C_California

[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Guasti,+Ontario,+CA+91761/

New comment by lapetitejort in "Specs Augmented Reality Glasses"

lapetitejort — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:23:48 +0000

> The Original TV Hat works with portable media players, smartphones, Microsoft Zune, Apple iPhone, iPod touch and iPod nano.

See? It's possible to support older tech

New comment by lapetitejort in "Astronauts told to return to ISS after sheltering over air leak repairs"

lapetitejort — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:09:54 +0000

The differences in engineers for space versus the ocean are fascinating. You'd think space stations and submarines would be interchangeable because they both deal with pressure differentials, right? Wrong. They'd fail in fascinatingly different ways within minutes or hours in the opposite environment

New comment by lapetitejort in "The real cost of owning a home"

lapetitejort — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:19:48 +0000

In California, property tax can only go up 2% every year based on the original purchase price (prop 13). For my neighbor who bought their house in the 60s, this must be peanuts.

New comment by lapetitejort in "Trump Mobile exposed customers' personal data"

lapetitejort — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:14:35 +0000

Even if they are required, who will hold them accountable? The FCC?

New comment by lapetitejort in "Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods"

lapetitejort — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:28:41 +0000

Every time a city thinks flooding problems are fixed, nature invents a bigger storm

New comment by lapetitejort in "Museum of Pocket Calculating Devices"

lapetitejort — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:41:34 +0000

My dream is to one day own a Curta. I want to find an algorithm to approximate pi, one crank at a time. I had a chance to hold one at a vintage computer festival once. Smaller than I expected. Truly pocketable.

I just had a thought. Why hasn't a Curta simulator come out for the Playdate? I guess I am cursed with creating it

New comment by lapetitejort in "Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling"

lapetitejort — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:58:36 +0000

To be more effective, all drink prices should be reduced by 10 cents, then a 10 cent surcharge added for every disposable cup. The price remains the same for all customers, but the extra line item reveals the external costs.

New comment by lapetitejort in "Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing"

lapetitejort — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:54:28 +0000

With what we are learning about how gut flora, can a brain be considered conscious while detached from the digestive system?

New comment by lapetitejort in "Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling"

lapetitejort — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:34:55 +0000

The point is that we may not have plastic forever. Oil is a finite resource. An easy, cheap replacement hasn't been found yet. Either we abide by reducing and reusing (where we should be focused), or we should actually recycle.

New comment by lapetitejort in "Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI"

lapetitejort — Mon, 18 May 2026 18:55:30 +0000

Cross examination is one of the vanishingly few times you can see billionaires and executives act like human beings instead of sentient PR scripts.

New comment by lapetitejort in "Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better"

lapetitejort — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:47:41 +0000

I uploaded a PDF to archive.org that auto-OCRs with plenty of mistakes. I have found no way of updating the entire stack of documents produced. I wonder if Project Gutenberg is similar

New comment by lapetitejort in "Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks"

lapetitejort — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:25:57 +0000

Cory Doctorow recently published a history book on the topic [0]. Sorry you were left out. I am merely qubits floating in the void. Just finished reading Shakespeare's First Folio translated into Catalan for the tenth time. Wondering what to do next

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds