Hacker News: morganw

New comment by morganw in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

morganw — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:54:08 +0000

+1: I'm so glad I happened to watch Mr. French's video first.

New comment by morganw in "Talking to strangers at the gym"

morganw — Mon, 04 May 2026 23:20:30 +0000

> FWIW this book came out in the 1930s, long before "red pilling" was a thing.

but long after The Prince was a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince

New comment by morganw in "New iPad Air, powered by M4"

morganw — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 15:55:56 +0000

> does it have a camera bulge that makes it wobble?

Yes https://www.apple.com/v/ipad-air/af/images/overview/closer-l... from https://www.apple.com/ipad-air/

New comment by morganw in "Banned in California"

morganw — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:41:08 +0000

>> The USA being richer, can afford to do it right and safer

> We cannot.

Apple can afford to do test fabrication while abiding by the rules, but chooses not to. https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/apple-fine-over-bay-area...

New comment by morganw in "When a video codec wins an Emmy"

morganw — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:56:13 +0000

These days, even phone-class CPUs can decode 4k video at playback rate, but they use a lot of power doing it. Not reasonable for battery-powered devices. For AC-powered devices, the problem might be heat dissipation, particularly for little streaming boxes with only passive cooling.

New comment by morganw in "Using a laptop as an HDMI monitor for an SBC"

morganw — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 17:52:53 +0000

There's also the issue of chroma subsampling, giving you YUV 4:2:0 or 4:2:2 instead of YUV or RGB 4:4:4

This page https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/capture-card-document... warned me about it, but I haven't seen any updated info on the newer AVermedia or Magewell interfaces, for instance https://www.magewell.com/products/usb-capture-hdmi-4k-pro This gives 4k60 4:4:4 only on the loop-thru output, higher resolutions require 20GBps USB 3.? but my Mac only goes to 10. I'd need Thunderbolt capture which start around $1000 https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1500555-REG/blackmagi...

I'm using an Elgato CamLink 4k at 1080p60 for now & I'm wondering if the awful mouse feel in Linux (with a Mac for display) is maybe due to delay. Going to get a cheap-ash monitor to simplify. I thought it would be nice to have my 6k Pro XDR display have windows from all computers, but it's just too messy.

New comment by morganw in "John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta"

morganw — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 15:46:41 +0000

Computer History Museum interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh8nhK7WS80

Worked on DEC Alpha, AMD K7 & K8, Broadcom, P.A. Semi, was in turn purchased by Apple. Jim spent four years at Apple before first returning to AMD, then on to Tesla, Intel and finally Tenstorrent.

Keller keynoting TSMC's 2022 Open Innovation Summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32CRYenTcdw

New comment by morganw in "John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta"

morganw — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 15:38:20 +0000

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39385382 Here's Hector Martin (marcan) talking about their tooling: https://asahilinux.org/2021/08/progress-report-august-2021/

Running macOS in a hypervisor controlled from a second machine (proxy mode + verbose==on) to watch drivers talk to the hardware:

https://asahilinux.org/docs/sw/m1n1-user-guide/#running-a-ma...

New comment by morganw in "National Park Service Will Cite AWD Drivers for Driving on 4WD-Only Trails"

morganw — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 04:48:59 +0000

Audi's with Torsens only lock front-to-back (but then so do a lot of 4WD vehicles). They use brakes to stop slipping wheels so the other side will get torque. A long time ago, they had lockers for the rear for low speed use.

New comment by morganw in "The efficacy of duct tape vs. cryotherapy in the treatment of the common wart (2002)"

morganw — Mon, 20 May 2024 17:17:05 +0000

You took 10mg/kg ? Any stomach upset or other side effects?

[edited to remove comment about Recommended Daily Allowance (USA) which is about a different form of zinc.]

New comment by morganw in "Synth wars: The story of MIDI (2023)"

morganw — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 21:04:10 +0000

> Korg noted that the use of jack plugs to transmit the required signals would cause noise in the system.

No more detail on this, but it was huge for MIDI not to end up "becoming a nightmare of endless fine-tuning better suited to electronics engineers than musicians" like CV/gate was.

https://midi.org/midi-history-chapter-6-midi-begins-1981-198... spells it out in more detail:

Mieda-san from Korg responds on behalf of the Japanese companies to the meetings at the 1981 Gakki Fair with Sequential and Oberheim and confirms the discussion that were they had at the Gakki Fair.

• 19.2kbps is too slow

• ¼” Jacks will have ground loop problems

• There is no concept of synchronization, clock or the ability to start and stop sequences

---

Ground loops are the bane of musician's lives and sometimes the mitigation is the end of their lives

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_lift#Safety

New comment by morganw in "Boeing wants FAA to exempt MAX 7 from safety rules to get it in the air"

morganw — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 18:59:30 +0000

Reminder that McDonnell-Douglas, operating as Boeing, owns Boeing Defense Space & Security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Defense,_Space_%26_Secu... which consolidates

"Boeing Military Airplane Company; Hughes Satellite Systems; Hughes Helicopters minus the civilian helicopter line (which was divested as MD Helicopters); Piasecki Helicopter, subsequently known as Boeing Vertol and then Boeing Helicopters; the St. Louis–based McDonnell division of the former McDonnell Douglas Company; and the former North American Aviation division of Rockwell International."

making it not just too big to fail, but too important to US and allies' defense to fail. I guess defense could be split from commercial aviation which could be reduced to producing parts to keep fleets in operation until Airbus can replace all planes over 30 or 40 years. Some of McD-D's commercial planes have a second life as military, though, e.g. the P-8 Poseidon based on the 737-800.

I took a couple of cross-USA flights recently, some on 737-800 and some on 737 MAX 8 and noted that the 800's cruising speed is faster (cf. United's Hemispheres magazine). I suppose the carbon footprint of the MAX is lower, but whatever happened to flying at mach 0.9 ?

New comment by morganw in "MP3 vs. AAC vs. FLAC vs. CD (2008)"

morganw — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 20:10:31 +0000

The problem is not the values delivered to the DAC. It's the aperture error of when the DAC was clocked. This affects what those sample values actually represent. If the clock is being extracted from the pattern of pits and there's a way to reduce the jitter, you will get a more accurate signal.

However, I'd hope that anyone that cares about fidelity has a CD player that does a little more to generate a DAC clock. NCO run by a software PLL or a hardware PLL with a good loop filter are things I've heard of, but control systems is not my specialty.

New comment by morganw in "An Alerting Vista of macOS Sonoma"

morganw — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 01:44:14 +0000

Used to be something Vista was laughed at for. Oh, how the turn tables https://youtu.be/0eEG5LVXdKo?t=637

New comment by morganw in "The first Oxide rack being prepared for customer shipment"

morganw — Sun, 02 Jul 2023 02:38:44 +0000

Can you expand on what is not MPL licensed? I recall (foggily) reading about struggles with incomplete data sheets for Nuvoton controllers & I see the discussion about CVEs for NXP microcontrollers with secret patch ROMs.

New comment by morganw in "WebXR"

morganw — Sat, 27 May 2023 22:57:19 +0000

https://twitter.com/AdaRoseCannon

https://twitter.com/fernandojsg

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=208988

https://webkit.org/status/#specification-webxr Status = "In Development"

New comment by morganw in "DIY 1,500W solar power electric bike (2022)"

morganw — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 04:24:04 +0000

For a bike with a more reasonable solar area (with tilt functionality) for a significant contribution to motive power, check out https://ebikes.ca/suntrip.html

New comment by morganw in "Massive Southwest Airlines disruption leaves customers stranded"

morganw — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 06:27:03 +0000

This one affected a lot of people traveling to the 2021 US Grand Prix in Austin & it supposedly didn't affect Southwest [my Alaska flight was cancelled after four hours of "any minute now"]:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2021/10/2...

New comment by morganw in "New MacBook Air with M2"

morganw — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 16:56:12 +0000

I have a Pro Display XDR for working at home w/ a 16" MacBook Pro M1 Max. I use it with my personal MacBook Air M1, too. I like my spreadsheets for personal finance BIG.

It's not just the GPU that shares memory with the CPU. The "media engine" buffers are in there, too at 18 megabytes per frame for 4k reference pictures in the decoded picture buffer. The decoder, scaler, GPU, and DRAM are fast enough to have several tracks of 4k (which even the iPhone 11 & SE can shoot), so don't let RAM size be your limit. I'm happy to see a max of 24GB vs. the M1's 16GB.

New comment by morganw in "TinyPilot: Build a KVM over IP for Under $100"

morganw — Sun, 29 May 2022 20:07:59 +0000

No mention of chroma sub-sampling for either pikvm (M-JPEG) or tinypilotkvm (H.264).

I have an Apple Pro Display XDR and it's just not worth the hassle trying to use it with Linux or Windows machines. Instead, I plan to use an HDMI capture device to get 1080p windows on a Mac. OBS's [guide](https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/capture-card-document...) shows some devices that capture RGB at 1080p60 like the $170 AVerMedia Live Gamer Ultra (GC553) and $300 Magewell XI100DUSB-HDMI. Uncompressed 24bpp x 1920 x 1080 x 60 is almost 3 megabits/second, so OK for USB SS, but not great for networking over a distance, but my application doesn't need remote.