Hacker News: orangewindies

New comment by orangewindies in "Flipdiscs"

orangewindies — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 07:15:32 +0000

The wire will crush over time and the connection will become looser. That will increase the resistance of the connection and in high current applications will cause heating. If you're really unlucky it will cause a fire.

New comment by orangewindies in "Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)"

orangewindies — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 13:28:04 +0000

You can't browse the modern web with Presto. I used to work at Opera and we were sad to switch to Chromium/Blink but a company the size of Opera just didn't have the resources to keep up with Google.

New comment by orangewindies in "How the Turner twins are mythbusting modern technical apparel"

orangewindies — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 10:09:28 +0000

For really low temperatures some of the traditional materials work really well. For example, at -30 °C you don't need a waterproof shell but you want something that's very windproof and breathable. So at the British Antarctic Survey in the late 90s we were still using cotton Ventile[0], it's tough and effective.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventile

New comment by orangewindies in "The Falkirk Wheel"

orangewindies — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 12:06:17 +0000

Why whisper? Everyone knows Stirling castle is better.

New comment by orangewindies in "Text case changes the size of QR codes"

orangewindies — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 10:41:02 +0000

QR codes were created for labelling automotive parts, not for URLs. Part numbers are usually uppercase alphanumeric, with a few punctuation characters.

New comment by orangewindies in "I hacked my washing machine"

orangewindies — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 13:18:08 +0000

> > EU 400V (380V) is 3 hots, neutral and ground.

> Three phase 230/400: 400V is line (hot) to line with 230V line to neutral. More for industrial use but I hear some homes can have this service for whatever reason.

It varies from country to country in Europe. In the UK you'll almost never find 3-phase in a home, in Sweden even apartments usually have 3-phase supply. In my Swedish apartment the only thing connected to more than one phase is the induction hob.

New comment by orangewindies in "YAML: The Norway Problem (2022)"

orangewindies — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 12:39:22 +0000

That's a Namibia problem, Nigeria is NG.

New comment by orangewindies in "Show HN: Itineraries.io – I built a joint trip planner in between surgeries"

orangewindies — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 15:53:10 +0000

It's an interesting idea but why would I sign up and give you personal data without any idea of the site's features or UI?

New comment by orangewindies in "Dumping Parallel NAND with Glasgow"

orangewindies — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 12:35:25 +0000

Although a lot of it was filmed in Glasgow.

New comment by orangewindies in "There’s a 30-year old dead Rabbit in Seven Sisters tube station"

orangewindies — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 13:30:30 +0000

Isn't the term "rabbit ears" more of an American thing? Can't recall anyone using it in the UK.

New comment by orangewindies in "Antarctic English"

orangewindies — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 14:41:52 +0000

Sounds like this is Antarctic _American_ English. The British jargon is quite different.

New comment by orangewindies in "Antarctic English"

orangewindies — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 14:39:20 +0000

Took me a while after arriving at Kerguelen to work out who all the people with the weird-sounding job titles were.

IIRC "Disker" (the head of the district) sounds like a slang word for DJ, so his official residence is the "discothèque".

New comment by orangewindies in "Show HN: Trains.fyi – a live map of passenger trains in the US and Canada"

orangewindies — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 13:47:26 +0000

Sweden: https://1409.se/

UK (not a map, similar view to what the signallers see): https://traksy.uk/live/M+58+STIRLNG

New comment by orangewindies in "UK Address Oddities (2018)"

orangewindies — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 12:55:09 +0000

Flats on floors in between usually have the floor number as the first part: "3FL" for third floor on the left or "2F3" for second floor, third flat. Or at least that's how it was when I lived in Edinburgh in the 90s.

New comment by orangewindies in "Air France denied my delay compensation, so I challenged them and won"

orangewindies — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 07:01:46 +0000

As other pointed out, this is probably just down to terrible airline IT. I don't know if AF/KLM are worse than others but it's remarkable just how bad it is.

Recently they had a bug where once you selected a seat for one flight in a booking you were blocked from any later seat selection in that booking. The only way to fix it was to call customer service.

I'm lucky enough to have access to the platinum line. You get to talk to people who are pleasant, competent and have sufficient authority to actually get things done. This should be the experience for every call to customer service but I guess it would be too expensive.

New comment by orangewindies in "Air France denied my delay compensation, so I challenged them and won"

orangewindies — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 06:35:16 +0000

There's ongoing work to update the regulations to remove a lot of the loopholes. For example, some airlines like to try to claim that pretty much any delay/cancellation is caused by "extraordinary circumstances", even though court decisions have limited when that excuse can be used.

The efforts to clearly define some of the vague parts of EU261 have been held up by intense lobbying from the airline industry.

One important addition that has been suggested would be to force airlines to publish the cause of disruptions, so that they can't lie about it later when passengers are trying to claim compensation.

New comment by orangewindies in "Office of the President of Mongolia: Top to bottom text on the web"

orangewindies — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 12:53:51 +0000

That was usually in draft mode, since the left-to-right and right-to-left lines wouldn't quite line up perfectly.

New comment by orangewindies in "Hacking the Nintendo DSi Browser"

orangewindies — Sat, 04 Mar 2023 20:01:23 +0000

Mini did some tricks so the "display" was much wider than the device display but text columns were wrapped at device display width. So you you could zoom out and see the whole page but the text was readable when you zoomed in.

New comment by orangewindies in "Last Flight Out"

orangewindies — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 13:18:49 +0000

"The Thing" was best viewed when alone on nightwatch just before walking across to the meteorological building in the dark at 03:00.

New comment by orangewindies in "The art of eating well in Antarctica (2022)"

orangewindies — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 13:09:01 +0000

Halley 5 was demolished in 2012, everything down to the snow surface was removed. So that iceberg has about 23 years of the steel legs that held the buildings up, various subsurface service tunnels and 23 years of frozen sewage.

Yes, it would have been Belgrano II we flew over. The only other stations I got to visit were some of the other British ones (on the ship in and out) and some of the French subantarctic ones on a later trip.