Hacker News: squarefoot

New comment by squarefoot in "Migrating to the EU"

squarefoot — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 12:29:34 +0000

Don't forget civil forfeiture, which can (an does) happen whether they think you're an enemy or not.

https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/freq...

New comment by squarefoot in "Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control"

squarefoot — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 21:16:52 +0000

Access control and pervasive surveillance has been the plan since day one; child protection is the leverage. Also, I don't expect people who repeatedly hide the contents of certain files to care about children.

New comment by squarefoot in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

squarefoot — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 16:07:45 +0000

When the internal non replaceable battery dies the product dies; that's also one reason to prefer wired over wireless. I wrote product instead of headphones because the principle is applicable to every product whose battery can't be replaced by design. All those discarded single use vapes are a good example of that, and... surprise! All of them actually contain rechargeable cells but no recharging circuitry and port, the reason being that rechargeable Lithium cells are much cheaper than primary non rechargeable ones because of economies of scale. Just another example of greed being so damn efficient at producing e-waste.

New comment by squarefoot in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

squarefoot — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 20:06:55 +0000

Probably next generations of kids being fed PragerU studying material will. Something tells me we didn't see a fraction of what's going to happen in the decades to come.

New comment by squarefoot in "We Will Not Be Divided"

squarefoot — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 06:05:59 +0000

"All lawful uses" has no meaning when a malignant narcissistic sociopath in power controlled by ruthless rich psychopaths can now rewrite every law at will.

New comment by squarefoot in "Stephen Colbert says CBS forbid interview of Democrat because of FCC threat"

squarefoot — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:40:29 +0000

I'm not from the US as well but that's true: those tactics are used on both sides, although they may be more visible where protesting happens more often, which is the case today with the Trump administration. It's part of the way governments attempt to reduce support to protesters by painting them as all violent.

New comment by squarefoot in "Stephen Colbert says CBS forbid interview of Democrat because of FCC threat"

squarefoot — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 20:40:16 +0000

> It's like how the minority of Left-leaning people who burn cars and shoot public speakers are what most on the Right see the entire democrat party as.

That's the result of well known disinformation tactics by certain media in concert with police forces: wait or provoke a violent outburst in a otherwise peaceful protest, often triggered by carefully planned repetitive police charges, then be ready to film when protesters discharge their frustration against what they have nearby like shops windows and cars, make a enraging video out of it and show only that in prime time to families dining.

New comment by squarefoot in "uBlock filter list to hide all YouTube Shorts"

squarefoot — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 11:20:12 +0000

Same here with FreeTube. YT has become a toxic experience on any browser and recently it has stopped working on my laptop with Firefox and uBlock Origin, no matter if I surf it as logged in in my main google account or not. The same arrangement works on my main desktop, but i mostly use FreeTube there as well.

New comment by squarefoot in "Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine"

squarefoot — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 20:50:37 +0000

Interesting, I loved both HL1 and 2. Some games never die, brought to mind the Black Mesa remake of HL1 with the HL2 engine that gave it new life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKutLsub-80

New comment by squarefoot in "Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980)"

squarefoot — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 10:28:56 +0000

People is kept away from details by shortening their attention span with the production of continuous pervasive stimuli. Regarding Trump, when he does something apparently stupid (on behalf of the rich people pulling his strings, let's never forget this) he's just forcing the media and people consuming them to start talking about the next event without further exploring more important ones.

New comment by squarefoot in "Genode OS is a tool kit for building highly secure special-purpose OS"

squarefoot — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 18:51:52 +0000

Same here, had to look the 3rd time to realize. It's sad what the current events can imprint in our brains. Screw this timeline, really!

New comment by squarefoot in "MicroPythonOS graphical operating system delivers Android-like user experience"

squarefoot — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 18:40:55 +0000

It's FOSS, so you can use it primarily for output with real switches and knobs for input. But then just using plain LVGL would probably be more practical.

New comment by squarefoot in "Doin' It with a 555: One Chip to Rule Them All"

squarefoot — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:05:42 +0000

Dual gate mosfets were a godsend when building RF/IF mixers or preamps. Luckily I have a small stash as they're almost unobtanium and costly these days, but for most uses such as mixers and preamps they can be swapped with a pair or normal jfets in a cascode configuration like this one: https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Nyhg.gif

New comment by squarefoot in "A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth"

squarefoot — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 22:16:24 +0000

But needs towers, which in some disaster situations could be not working, or in others simply not trustworthy. If 5G phones radio modules were modified to allow point to point communication, the usable range would still be a small fraction of what is attainable with towers and their high gain antenna arrays.

New comment by squarefoot in "A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth"

squarefoot — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 16:11:34 +0000

A small USB pluggable module that supports LoRa plus an app using Codec2 or similar low rate codec for voice encoding could fill the gap, although having it bundled with the phone would make it a lot less cumbersome to use. For non phone portable solutions, the LilyGo T-Deck Plus/Pro come to mind, but they're not phones so that would imply a 2nd device to carry around.

New comment by squarefoot in "Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings"

squarefoot — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 04:09:15 +0000

That crap should be turned off regardless of the material being watched. It's just rubbish put there to write in the advertising crazy, and completely bogus, contrast and resolution numbers, or to fake audio features that have no other reason to exist than putting one more bullet point when advertising that model. I wish signage displays were a bit cheaper because as of today they're the best possible less enshittified screens to watch stuff on.

New comment by squarefoot in "My First Meshtastic Network"

squarefoot — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 10:59:47 +0000

I was just about to ask this: a non partisan honest comparison between Meshtastic and Meshcore for different use cases such as long/short range, congestion resistance with nodes growth, resilience against adverse condition, ease of integration with different software, etc. without fanboyism/hatred/shilling etc involved to form an opinion before starting buying hardware and diving into one of the technologies.

New comment by squarefoot in "Inside CECOT – 60 Minutes [video]"

squarefoot — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 15:22:30 +0000

Qbittorrent, Transmission etc. The Transmission daemon can be installed headless with negligible system load on a vast number of devices, from Raspberry Pi-like and smaller SBCs to Linux/BSD NASes, then operated from remote through the web interface or a phone app.

New comment by squarefoot in "US Administration halted largest Offshore Wind project in the U.S."

squarefoot — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 16:31:30 +0000

I feel bad for ruining someone's dreams, but you really have no idea how wrong you are.

New comment by squarefoot in "Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?"

squarefoot — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 12:32:12 +0000

When someone working for A is doing something that would clearly harm A to the benefit of B, I usually start wondering if that someone really works for A or there's something fishy going on. Mozilla is wasting a huge load of money coming from the Google agreement (another conflict of interests) to pay huge salaries to their CEO over the years. If there's something they lack it's openness about goals, not money.