Hacker News: mwpmaybe

New comment by mwpmaybe in "Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)"

mwpmaybe — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:31:32 +0000

Holy carp.

New comment by mwpmaybe in "US asked Ukraine for help fighting Iranian drones, Zelensky says"

mwpmaybe — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 21:38:36 +0000

Is that a squeaker, or a squirter?

New comment by mwpmaybe in "The tech monoculture is finally breaking"

mwpmaybe — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 22:27:07 +0000

Yes, I want these for my kids so very badly. They have Yotos (similar to Tonie) for bedtime, and iPads for school work, but those are not ideal for a number of reasons. I want them to be able to experience music like I was able to with an FM+cassette walkman clone in the '80s and early '90s, or with my Nomads and iPods in the late '90s and early aughts. Hopefully someone here can suggest something!

ETA: OK, there are quite a few highly-rated options on Amazon, so I just need to solve the "putting music on there" problem and the "dropping it and immediately destroying it problem".

New comment by mwpmaybe in "What Happened to Abit Motherboards"

mwpmaybe — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 16:42:44 +0000

Unfortunately you had to run Windows NT, which was a leap for most folks and had poor support for games and some other software written for Windows 9x (e.g. software that required DOS mode and wasn't compatible with NTVDM). Windows 2000 (Pro) was a bit more approachable, and then of course Windows XP (Pro) smoothed out most of the remaining wrinkles.

I ran Slackware on my BP6 while I was in college. Of course CONFIG_SMP wasn't set in the default kernel config at the time so you had to build your own. Great for running bind, apache, sendmail, etc., and of course NetQuake servers. :)

New comment by mwpmaybe in "What Happened to Abit Motherboards"

mwpmaybe — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 16:22:11 +0000

> The Celeron 300A was the one most folks would go after for this.

Yes but they got hard to find in a hurry once word spread. I had two 366s in my BP6 overclocked to 550 but IIRC I had to buy a few to find two that were stable at this frequency.

> There was a whole cottage industry of folks modding these CPUs as a small side hustle for people who were not comfortable with soldering onto CPU pins if you wanted to put these into a SMP system.

No modifications necessary with the BP6.

New comment by mwpmaybe in "Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?"

mwpmaybe — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 20:12:04 +0000

They just renamed everything... the Pro Plus series is basically Latitude.

New comment by mwpmaybe in "Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?"

mwpmaybe — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 17:38:45 +0000

It's... not great. It's a dual-boot laptop that I take out into the field so I'd like to encrypt the Windows and Linux volumes with BitLocker and LUKS respectively, and ideally I would leave Secure Boot enabled for that extra bit of security. Ultimately I'll need to decide whether to disable Secure Boot or patch the kernel to let me override lockdown mode. I know SuSE has implemented it but I don't know if their patch series will apply cleanly to a mainline Ubuntu kernel.

New comment by mwpmaybe in "Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?"

mwpmaybe — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 17:18:42 +0000

I scored an "open box" Dell Pro 14 Plus on eBay for about 600USD. It's got two USB-A ports, two USB4 ports, built-in Ethernet, 4G LTE, upgradeable storage, and decent Linux support (on Ubuntu LTS at least). The battery is field-replaceable but the 32GB RAM is soldered. (There are other models with upgradeable RAM.)

It's got a middling display (the 2-in-1 display is better) and a somewhat dated Hawk Point SoC, but it's fine for running to a client's site for imaging or network troubleshooting or what have you. I still don't think it's going to last very long, but it's a nice complement to the MacBook I use for client dev work and it didn't break the bank.

New comment by mwpmaybe in "Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?"

mwpmaybe — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 17:13:00 +0000

> Power management on Macbooks is unbeatable in my experience, both Windows and Linux have really serious issues dealing with sleep and low power modes.

I've been dealing with this recently. Linux won't hibernate if you have Secure Boot enabled, even if your swap is encrypted. So I either have to leave my laptop plugged in all the time or remember to shut it down before unplugging it so it doesn't completely drain its battery while sleeping.

New comment by mwpmaybe in "Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?"

mwpmaybe — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 16:29:36 +0000

Yes, it's a race to the bottom for most. Lots of plastic and soldered, non-upgradeable components, and a lack of ports. The used market is tricky to navigate thanks to the proliferation of model names and numbers, so little to no salvation there either. Spend a bit more for something that will last a bit longer (MacBook) and/or be upgradeable (frame.work), or accept a cheaper model (e.g. Dell Pro) that will likely need to be replaced in a couple years.

New comment by mwpmaybe in "NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware"

mwpmaybe — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 21:12:07 +0000

You can still spin the damn encoder.

New comment by mwpmaybe in "NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware"

mwpmaybe — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 21:04:48 +0000

In theory but the odds of you having an HVAC control board that supports OpenTherm are extremely low.

New comment by mwpmaybe in "Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?"

mwpmaybe — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:02:28 +0000

I thought Google Wave was going to kill email and chat and a whole bunch of other stuff.

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

mwpmaybe — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 22:08:01 +0000

I see them on Amazon, sold by WayPonDEV. I've bought several NanoKVM brand devices from them and haven't had any problems (yet).

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

mwpmaybe — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 22:06:55 +0000

Came here to endorse the NanoKVM USB. It's a great little device. Wendell made a video[0] on it. The web interface is super handy.

I keep one in my tool bag and I've been meaning to buy a second one for a dedicated crash cart.

I can't speak to the Kiwi or the Openterface as I haven't tried those.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAbyQcpR-yQ

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

mwpmaybe — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 21:59:24 +0000

Different use-cases. The Sipeed product comparable to the GL-RM1 is the NanoKVM Cube. Comparable to the GL-RM10 is the NanoKVM Pro (Desk).

(Of course you could use the Cube on a crash cart, too. Just like you can use the butt of a screwdriver to hammer a nail.)

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

mwpmaybe — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 21:49:58 +0000

You can modify the internal electronics to accomplish this. YouTuber Luke Miani did it a couple years ago. A quick google brings up a few guides including a couple user-contributed-but-ostensibly-QC'd guides on iFixit.

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

mwpmaybe — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 21:44:57 +0000

> I've had poor luck with the couple of VGA-to-HDMI I've ever used over the years

Yes, they're terrible, but...

> latency, poor video quality

For a crash cart? Who cares. For everything else...

> Are there any known-working good adapters for VGA for these?

No, you're AOL.

New comment by mwpmaybe in "Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account"

mwpmaybe — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 03:24:25 +0000

I did the "start ms-cxh:localonly" trick yesterday on a fresh install of Windows 11 25H2 and it worked fine, so...?

New comment by mwpmaybe in "Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel"

mwpmaybe — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 20:03:00 +0000

For context, it was intended to be the successor to PA-RISC and compete with DEC Alpha.