Hacker News: mvexel

New comment by mvexel in "We’ll be ending web hosting for your apps on Glitch"

mvexel — Fri, 23 May 2025 14:24:09 +0000

Thank you for building the pico services. I use pgs for hosting my simple static website, and prose to host my blog, and it’s just such a wonderful experience.

Also it’s been a while since I mailed a check to pay for anything, let alone an online service!

New comment by mvexel in "Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative"

mvexel — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 14:20:25 +0000

After the most recent price hike ($16 to almost $30/mo for the "basic" organizer plan) I decided to quit Meetup as the host of two groups after more than a decade. It's not just the money, since you were asking about pain points:

* Notifications I get on iOS are pretty much the opposite of how I set them up; I ask for relevant notifications about people RSVP-ing and commenting on my events, instead I get notifications about their own AI / crypto virtual events. * When I do get notifications about a new comment in the 'event chat', I tap the notification, but the app just lands me on the event main screen. When I navigate to event chat (which is surprisingly hard to find) there will be an unread symbol but more often than not the actual comment is nowhere to be seen. * Meaningless functionality being added (start an event with AI!) while pain points such as the above, and the core organizer experience overall, haven't seen meaningful fixes or improvements in years. * No way to slice / analyze member data. * Related to the above, you can download the member list, which gets you a file with an .xls extension but in reality is a broken csv file. * Increased focus on having group members pay, which is hard to manage and also very hard to get any metrics on (who has paid, when, how much?)

I could go on.

Overall, from an organizer perspective, Meetup is a buggy, stagnant and increasingly expensive platform that becomes a poorer value for money with every change they make. The only reason I've stuck with it for as long as I did is that it's really the only way for me to have people organically find my group without significant effort on my part. (I am in the U.S.)

New comment by mvexel in "DBeaver – open-source database client"

mvexel — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 15:36:22 +0000

This is what keeps me coming back to DBeaver as well. I don't know of any other clients that support display of PostGIS geometry types.

New comment by mvexel in "Every default macOS wallpaper"

mvexel — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 17:50:13 +0000

There is a link at the top for pre-OSX wallpapers. There was one in MacOS 7 or 8 that was called "platte pinda's" in Dutch meaning "flat(tened) peanuts)". That name mystified me at the time. Googling it now, there's only one result for that phrase, completely unrelated. Am I making this up?

New comment by mvexel in "Some strange Macintosh computers"

mvexel — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 22:25:49 +0000

You're right! It was probably a 603.

New comment by mvexel in "Some strange Macintosh computers"

mvexel — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 16:14:14 +0000

I was surprised that there was not more mention of the clones of the mid 1990s. The Pioneer clone mentioned in the article sure is an interesting curiosity, but clone brands like Motorola (Starmax) and Power Computing were much more widely available. My brother had a really generic looking beige tower that was a 68040 Mac, from one of those brands. They were equivalent to a mid-to-high-end Performa, but significantly more affordable. I would love to hear more stories of folks who owned one of those. The clone era was short lived, IIRC once they became too successful Apple ceased the licensing program and that was the end of that.

Here's a Starmax ad from 1997: https://archive.org/details/MacWorld9710October1997/page/n7/...

New comment by mvexel in "Live Map of Swiss Trains"

mvexel — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 15:53:10 +0000

There's one for The Netherlands as well -> https://en.treinposities.nl/. Relies on an open API so there's bound to be others. This one is good because it has some live webcam links on the map as well. At least one of the live cams use YouTube as a streaming platform and have active rail nerd communities chatting and answering questions, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UfHjV-oUmE

New comment by mvexel in "Fastmail Employees Form a Union"

mvexel — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 19:07:45 +0000

LinkedIn says Fastmail has 116 U.S. based employees. I may be completely off base here, but if you're that small an org and employees feel the need to form a union, wouldn't that indicate a significant problem with company culture?

New comment by mvexel in "Historical code from reddit.com"

mvexel — Wed, 31 May 2023 21:37:39 +0000

Ha! I was hoping to see some web.py / Aaron Swartz code. This is cool too, though.

Little A’Le’Inn

mvexel — Mon, 29 May 2023 15:33:11 +0000

Article URL: http://www.littlealeinn.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36114923

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by mvexel in "Show HN: Gis.chat – a Geospatial Community"

mvexel — Wed, 24 May 2023 19:24:26 +0000

You may be interested in joining the Spatial Community slack if you haven't already. There's a self-invite link at https://thespatialcommunity.org. There's a ton of channels there spanning a range of GIS related interests.

New comment by mvexel in "We're Drowning in Subscriptions"

mvexel — Sat, 18 Mar 2023 22:51:27 +0000

Check out your local library website. They likely offer free access to popular newspapers, magazines, services like consumer reports, streaming movies.

New comment by mvexel in "All you may need is HTML"

mvexel — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 19:37:15 +0000

prose.sh hits a sweet spot for me. Not just in the minimal-but-rich-enough presentation of blog posts[0], but also (off-topic for this thread I guess) the simple interface: just scp your markdown to prose.sh.

[0] example post from my blog https://mvexel.prose.sh/20230227-keeping-osm-database-uptoda...

New comment by mvexel in "The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans (2012)"

mvexel — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 00:02:30 +0000

Thanks for sharing this. I've read this account quite a few times now and I've always wondered if his attitude towards the SAR teams was completely justified. I don't have any personal experience, but I read about rescue efforts by local SAR teams in the local news almost weekly. The risks and danger these volunteers expose themselves to in order to save others are incredible. And often they deal with people who are wholly unprepared and end up in situations requiring rescue that could have been easily avoided. That must be very frustrating sometimes. Thank you for your work!

New comment by mvexel in "The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans (2012)"

mvexel — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 21:38:30 +0000

I read this after seeing a previous link to it on HN. One of the most haunting tales of folks getting lost in remote places[1]. I live in the West and love to explore remote places. But being from Western Europe originally, it took me a while to fully appreciate what "remote" means. You're dozens of miles away from water, cell service, human settlement. You're on your own. Be prepared. Bring an InReach and know how to use it. (Or, these days, an iPhone, if you can accept the limitations.)

[1] Another haunting one is the Chretiens in 2011 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/seven-...

New comment by mvexel in "Is AM radio dead?"

mvexel — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 01:46:12 +0000

They used to have an AM transmitter that reached most? of Europe, but it was shut down in 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orfordness_transmitting_statio...

New comment by mvexel in "Paper map sales are booming"

mvexel — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 16:51:06 +0000

For hiking and other back country activities, I rely on Gaia GPS, but there's others that offer offline capabilities (sometimes as part of a subscription) like AllTrails, OnX and CalTopo.

New comment by mvexel in "Paper map sales are booming"

mvexel — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 16:48:02 +0000

Part of this resurgence can undoubtedly be explained by the ready availability of high quality open geospatial data sources like OpenStreetMap.

The United States has always had a lot of open geospatial data available, but it's patchy, can be hard to find, and is of wildly varying quality. In Europe, open (geospatial) data has become the norm, but that wasn't the case even 10 years ago. And in spite of harmonization efforts, it can still be hard to cobble together map data that is consistent across countries from government sources.

New comment by mvexel in "The cost of cheap TVs"

mvexel — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 21:54:46 +0000

I wonder how much data traditional cable companies collect these days. Their services sure haven't gotten any cheaper.

I was very happy to ditch Comcast a few years ago but the streaming landscape has become so confusing that I am about to give up on trying to figure out what subscriptions I need to cobble together to watch the sports I am interested in.

New comment by mvexel in "The cost of cheap TVs"

mvexel — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 21:51:36 +0000

The 55" LG I purchased at Costco for less than $400 a couple of years ago works great and I've never connected it to the internet.

[edit] looked it up, it's this one: https://www.lg.com/us/tvs/lg-55UM7300AUE-4k-uhd-tv

Of course, who knows if they've since updated the OS and make it impossible to use without establishing a network connection..