Hacker News: ndegruchy

New comment by ndegruchy in "The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client"

ndegruchy — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:11:43 +0000

In addition to this guys app, there's also brutaldon[1]. A web1.0 client that serves as a web interface for mastodon.

New comment by ndegruchy in "Android now stops you sharing your location in photos"

ndegruchy — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:10:01 +0000

Yeah, toggling in any manner you see fit (a Shortcut would be useful in this case) the location services in its totality or in the context of the Camera app would accomplish the same result.

New comment by ndegruchy in "Android now stops you sharing your location in photos"

ndegruchy — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:51:50 +0000

Yes. You can turn it off for Camera if you don't want the geotag to be included in the photo when taken. You can also, as part of the share media picker, opt to include or exclude location data on the photo.

New comment by ndegruchy in "Show HN: Pgit – A Git-like CLI backed by PostgreSQL"

ndegruchy — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:57:55 +0000

Fossil is great. Not only is it a full suite of tools associated with the repository (discussions, tickets, wiki) but the tool is a single >10mb binary and can run as a web server (or CGI-like interface) for remote hosting.

New comment by ndegruchy in "Monosketch"

ndegruchy — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:01:29 +0000

Absolutely. Handy for making diagrams or just doodling and making custom headers for config files with `fig` and some boxes and shadows!

New comment by ndegruchy in "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"

ndegruchy — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:46:02 +0000

Just as a quick follow up, I completely forgot about the tool BackupLoupe[1]. It allows you to slice into your existing Time Machine backups and find out all manner of information on what's going on, what is backed up, when and what is taking up so much space.

[1]: https://www.soma-zone.com/BackupLoupe/

New comment by ndegruchy in "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"

ndegruchy — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 21:38:34 +0000

100%

My biggest gripes with Time Machine are the lack of visibility, the silent failures and the inflexible scheduling. I know there are methods to work around the last one, but the first two are paramount. It does do consistency checking, at least as far as the logs say, but it says nothing about the health of the backup container.

While most users don't really want to know about this stuff, I feel like it's important enough to have a more comprehensive UI to provide some insight into the feature and the associated health.

New comment by ndegruchy in "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"

ndegruchy — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 21:00:52 +0000

I would try to do some restores of random files. Kind of a "canary in the coal mine" test. If you have problems with restoring some files or folders, then you'll have a problem with doing larger restores.

New comment by ndegruchy in "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"

ndegruchy — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 20:58:13 +0000

This has been on my to-buy list for a while. Something I should probably do, because while recovery from the built-in recovery interface is fine, having an offline bootable backup is also great. It also doesn't interfere with having Time Machine be the "standard" backup.

I could probably setup a calendar appointment to dump a bootable image once a month to an external disk.

New comment by ndegruchy in "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"

ndegruchy — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 20:54:13 +0000

I get what you're saying. I will only quibble that the consumers in the market for a NAS, regardless of ease-of-setup, is still bordering technically inclined. My mother-in-law has enough trouble with her iPhone, let alone a server-type-device that she needs to administer.

I would imagine a more typical consumer would be buying a USB or Thunderbolt connected drive and following the prompts to set it up.

My impression is that companies like Backblaze and other backup-as-a-service solutions are more consumer-popular because it externalizes the complexity and pitfalls like the author is experiencing.

New comment by ndegruchy in "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"

ndegruchy — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 20:26:59 +0000

I'm not in devops. I don't even have a server aside from the basic usage I get out of my Synology.

However, I have lost data in my lifetime. If you value your backups, check on them.

Also, if you're the kind of person who has a Synology, it means you had to buy a NAS, drives, and setup all the associated machinery for Time Machine over your network. Therefore, I feel it's not outside of the expectation that you can check on your backups. Even if it's just a quick test of a restored file or folders.

New comment by ndegruchy in "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"

ndegruchy — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 20:22:23 +0000

I don't have a second machine to do a full restore. I just do spot checks every month to see if I'm able to restore files from various locations. It's not scientific, but it's helpful to know if a spot check fails, that there may be a larger issue.

Time Machine is absolutely for the layman, and something I feel can be improved upon with a bit more visibility in to the status.

New comment by ndegruchy in "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"

ndegruchy — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 19:51:57 +0000

I use the same setup and was able to restore some files I recently deleted. My SMB settings in Synology were set to what the recommended settings were already. Not sure what happened in this person's case, but it also seems like he backed up and didn't test the restores. Which isn't good practice.

New comment by ndegruchy in "Self Sanitizing Door Handle"

ndegruchy — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:54:06 +0000

An interesting take. There is also brass and coppers that self-sanitize, albeit more slowly: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11279221/

New comment by ndegruchy in "iCloud Photos Downloader"

ndegruchy — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 21:09:38 +0000

While not free, and not for any other platform than macOS. The program Parachute[1] in the App Store is very nice in downloading both photos from your library as well as files from the various locations.

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parachute-backup/id6748614170?...

New comment by ndegruchy in "GNU recutils: Plain text database"

ndegruchy — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 22:38:53 +0000

I love recutils. The database format is simple enough, it has a bunch of options for constraints, and it has Bash integration and a great Emacs mode to search, edit and verify the integrity of the database.

Sure, it's not as fast as SQLite or bigger systems, but often it's enough for smaller projects.

New comment by ndegruchy in "A beginners' guide away from scanf()"

ndegruchy — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:36:44 +0000

It's always interesting to see how many sharp edges that C, as a language, has still. I know it's a language that eschews a lot of the ergonomics found in more recent languages, but it makes me sad that we're still teaching beginners the poor form these basic operations.

I like C, but it feels like you have to have an unhealthy amount of paranoia to write it well.

New comment by ndegruchy in "Bitwarden Lite"

ndegruchy — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 19:42:24 +0000

Nice!

I wonder how this stacks up to Vaultwarden, which is really good.

New comment by ndegruchy in "Microsoft Will Preload Windows 11 File Explorer to Fix Bad Performance"

ndegruchy — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 16:54:24 +0000

Yeah, I've been using Directory Opus[1] for years on my Windows machine(s). It's hard to overstate how much faster these alternatives are, but not only faster but with better features. I get that explorer.exe needs to be simple, but it doesn't have to do that at the cost of being abysmally slow.

[1]: https://www.gpsoft.com.au

New comment by ndegruchy in "Microsoft Will Preload Windows 11 File Explorer to Fix Bad Performance"

ndegruchy — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 16:04:33 +0000

Yeah, same with OpenOffice for years. It was a hack to get the program already resident in memory and ameliorate some of the startup costs.

Again, this was a hack. They should really be looking at fixing the issues with the startup time and slow performance of explorer, because even on vastly lesser machines, we've had near-to-instant startup times with, effectively, the same application.