Hacker News: loansindi

New comment by loansindi in "Chopping up books when they're physically too big"

loansindi — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 21:34:57 +0000

In middle and high school when I was reading my way through my parents' fantasy and scifi collection, I got to a point where I'd just make a note of the page number when I set the book down and was able to recall it next time I sat down to read. I don't remember if I kept that up through college, but I've been reading pretty much exclusively on a kindle since 2010 or so.

New comment by loansindi in "Steam and Electricity, Part 1: Electric Light"

loansindi — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 15:55:44 +0000

Even with a modern short-arc lamp and an electronic ballast, you can get a little whiff of ozone when the lamp starts, I'm not sure what the mechanism is.

New comment by loansindi in "Air Accident Investigation Branch: film lights caused window damage on A321neo"

loansindi — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 20:33:08 +0000

Carbon arc was definitely a whole different ball game. I'd think the fixtures were filtering at least most of it, or else everyone on set would have pretty much the same problems as someone doing arc welding without a mask and sleeves in short order.

New comment by loansindi in "Air Accident Investigation Branch: film lights caused window damage on A321neo"

loansindi — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 19:41:37 +0000

"Film lights" are pretty likely to be 5kW+ arc lamps. Lighting fixtures definitely include filters to keep the UV out of the beam, but film still loves giant HMI fresnels.

New comment by loansindi in "Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?"

loansindi — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 21:16:04 +0000

If you're ever interested in publishing anything about this to aid others in recreating it, I'm sure there'd be ample interest (for better or worse). Professional controllers are hilariously expensive for many hobbyists and the options for DIY control surfaces tend to be limited (especially with motorized faders).

I'd certainly be interested in reading about how it works, even without anything approaching build documentation.

New comment by loansindi in "Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used"

loansindi — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 14:54:28 +0000

Our office is near their head office/distribution facility. If we order before noon, most stuff shows up same day.

New comment by loansindi in "Homebrew USB DMX Interface with Sparkfun FT232RL"

loansindi — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 17:35:51 +0000

You'd be surprised what kind of terrible things can happen on a run of DMX cable. I've seen enough transceivers exploded out of their sockets to be wary. The leading US manufacturer of lighting controls continues to use socketed DIP rs-485 transceivers exactly because they tend to take hits and fail.

New comment by loansindi in "Hikaru Nakamura's Forbidden Platform"

loansindi — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 13:17:32 +0000

The biggest benefit, in my opinion, of doing puzzles is building pattern recognition. If that obvious dumb guess is consistent for the structure presented in the difficult-but-guessable puzzle, then I think there's still value to doing it.

New comment by loansindi in "Technicolor Tokyo"

loansindi — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 14:32:09 +0000

Shooting RAW gives you much more freedom to choose how a photo will be processed than letting the camera make some set of default choices about color rendering so it can spit out a JPG.

New comment by loansindi in "Everything Has Fresnel (2010)"

loansindi — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 22:07:55 +0000

> "Fresnel" is not a noun.

It is in stage and film lighting [0], which made this headline confusing to read.

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

New comment by loansindi in "4x4 Macro Pad Kit"

loansindi — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 20:02:22 +0000

They're available[0], but they're expensive

[0] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/programmable-disp...

New comment by loansindi in "What Happened to the 100000 Hour LED Bulbs?"

loansindi — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 17:01:09 +0000

A current limiting resistor isn't ideal for LEDs bright enough for home lighting. It's not very efficient compared to a proper constant-current LED driver. Losing the terrible power supplies in most LED lamps wouldn't be a bad thing, though.

New comment by loansindi in "SiriusXM to Acquire Pandora"

loansindi — Tue, 25 Sep 2018 18:31:01 +0000

There are specific locations where I lose signal extremely consistently. Like the right-turn lane of a road near my office. No bridge, no particularly tall buildings - just a small spot where the radio cuts out every time.

New comment by loansindi in "How to Recognize Burnout Before You’re Burned Out"

loansindi — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 19:14:00 +0000

Not to mention being seen as responsible for interpersonal problems among the membership.

New comment by loansindi in "How to Recognize Burnout Before You’re Burned Out"

loansindi — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 14:07:31 +0000

Having been on the board of directors of a decently-sized hackerspace, I do not recommend it to folks looking to avoid burnout.

New comment by loansindi in "What makes the perfect office?"

loansindi — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 16:43:24 +0000

If you're happy with the color, there are also neutral density filters in a variety of transmission levels: http://www.stagelightingstore.com/Rosco-Supergel-398-Neutral...

New comment by loansindi in "Hyper 1.0.0"

loansindi — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 17:57:07 +0000

It's a terminal emulator that's configurable/extendable with JS, HTML and CSS.

New comment by loansindi in "Smartwatch sales are tanking"

loansindi — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 21:23:57 +0000

This would have been my response. I've got a Pebble and I charge it ~2hrs a week and the time is always visible.