Hacker News: mm0lqf

New comment by mm0lqf in "MacBook Neo and how the iPad should be"

mm0lqf — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:58:50 +0000

this. it took me 2 years to notice my T14s even had a touchscreen

its useless

flexes too much to actually use it

New comment by mm0lqf in "You Want to Visit the UK? You Better Have a Google Play or App Store Account"

mm0lqf — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 11:43:23 +0000

EU and US do the same to the UK

New comment by mm0lqf in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

mm0lqf — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:15:19 +0000

doesn't really mean anything, Mac randomly autocorrects dashes to em-dashes (caused me a world of pain once when it did that in a GUID in a config file)

New comment by mm0lqf in "The Falkirk Wheel"

mm0lqf — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 13:24:00 +0000

> My understanding is A roads in the UK are much like USA interstates.

Not in Scotland, some of them aren't dualled (just a single carriageway in each direction), narrow, windey, full of terrible potholes and animals you can hit etc... its a 5-6 hour drive in reality

source: Live in Edinburgh

New comment by mm0lqf in "DIY NAS: 2026 Edition"

mm0lqf — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 11:57:17 +0000

Tape drives are generally SAS so you will need a controller card

I've got a HP StorageWorks Ultrium 3000 drive (It's LTO-5 format) connected to one (LSI SAS SAS9300-4i), in my NAS/file server (HP Z420 workstation chassis). Don't go lower than LTO-5 as you will want LTFS support.

About £150 all in for the card and drive (including SFF-8643 to SFF-8482 cables etc..) on EBay

Tapes are 1.5TB uncompressed, and about £10/each on Ebay, you'll also want to pick up a cleaning cartridge.

I use this and RDX (1TB cartridges are 2-4 times the price, but drives are a lot cheaper, and SATA/USB3, and you can use them like a disk) for offline backup of stuff at home.

New comment by mm0lqf in "GNU Screen 5.0 Released"

mm0lqf — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 15:57:23 +0000

when I worked in the embedded software industry long ago, I spent lots and lots of time connecting over serial ports to dev boards, using software like Minicom. Being able to do that in screen itself would be neat. Tmux does it.

New comment by mm0lqf in "Puget Systems' Perspective on Intel CPU Instability Issues"

mm0lqf — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 12:54:54 +0000

Was common with AMD CPUs in the past, the Ryzen 1000 range had a widespread problem where many made in 2017 would randomly segfault from time to time under Linux, it was a whole drama, and you had to RMA them until you got lucky.

New comment by mm0lqf in "Psion 5mx Emulator"

mm0lqf — Wed, 22 May 2024 13:36:47 +0000

Probably lots, my first Palm was a TX in 2006, and I remember it was ~£300. I used it with a IBM T60 which was was I recall £1200+

I had an IBM R30 before that in ~2000 and recall it being ~£1500 as well.

Laptops weren't cheap!

New comment by mm0lqf in "Morse code is designed so that you can decode it with a binary tree"

mm0lqf — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 16:28:25 +0000

In real morse messages, you aren't always sending full words, most of the time you are sending prosigns (abbreviations) - Think like early SMS chat. "DE" means this is, you hand over with a "K", "SK" means you are going offline, "HIHI" is like LOL, "XYL" means significant other, etc...

Things like Q get used a lot in Morse for example (look up Q-Codes) compared to real English.

So, traditional letter frequencies are not applicable (Also because the code itself is language-agnostic)

Using a tree like this to decodee also sucks from a speed perspective. You need to learn the sounds /not/ count the dits/dahs if you want to get a good word per minute.

source: radio ham who knows morse and can do 20+ wpm.

A lot of weird stuff in morse and things also comes from older comms methods like Semaphore - The reason we have M in Scottish callsigns for ham radio is because M is the saltire (Scottish flag) symbol in Sempahore, for example.