Hacker News: tengwar2

New comment by tengwar2 in "Emacs Bedrock 2.0"

tengwar2 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:52:46 +0000

Well, you know what they say: if Emacs is a religion, vi is a cult that is difficult to work out how to quit.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Holden's Lightning Flight"

tengwar2 — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 08:47:40 +0000

Also: every modern airliner has windows with corners in the cockpit.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding"

tengwar2 — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:12:26 +0000

With the important exception of "infinite tape". That always gets forgotten.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Run macOS Software on Linux"

tengwar2 — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:05:37 +0000

At a guess: the "killer apps" are things like MS Office and Photoshop, and since they are usually available on both Windows and Mac, there's not such a pressing demand to support similar functionality for Mac apps if the Windows version is easy to obtain.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Firefox 157 will include JPEG XL by default on all platforms"

tengwar2 — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 22:35:08 +0000

Hasn't been the case for some time.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Executable Is a SQLite Database"

tengwar2 — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:37:11 +0000

I understand what you are saying, but that's not close to the original meaning of the term, or at least not what I have seen in early papers. Originally the idea was a single central repository of information which would be used to run a company: so similar to systems like SAP, but obviously a lot simpler and with the assumption of running on a mainframe. It didn't refer to a particular choice of data structure, but to the way that multiple business processes would share information.

New comment by tengwar2 in "How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs"

tengwar2 — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 15:13:50 +0000

That's pretty much the situation in the UK if you are a sole trader. If you set up a limited liability company, that's a separate entity and has its own tax reporting requirement, but nothing onerous. I am a sole trader, and manage a small company separately from that.

One thing I have heard of in the USA is the need for a "business licence". I'm not sure what that is or whether it applies to all businesses, so I'm not sure what it would correspond to in the UK. Neither of my businesses needed any licences or permissions to start trading.

New comment by tengwar2 in "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI"

tengwar2 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 23:51:47 +0000

Yes, of course. In my case Waze to get there efficiently, OSMand App for topographic maps, and occasionally Apple Maps (works well with addresses in Calendar) and Sygic. I use them in the car, and on my bike: ruggedised CarPlay / Android Auto screens are rapidly displacing ruggedised satnavs on bikes. Playing audiobooks and podcasts is handy, as is getting text messages read out with dictation for reply, but it's navigation which is the killer app for ACP/AA.

New comment by tengwar2 in "A spectre is haunting Unicode"

tengwar2 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 14:32:53 +0000

Yup. Just checked on Streetview.

New comment by tengwar2 in "A spectre is haunting Unicode"

tengwar2 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:13:35 +0000

Sure, but I've never heard of a diæresis being added to a capital letter.

New comment by tengwar2 in "A spectre is haunting Unicode"

tengwar2 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 01:10:03 +0000

Before that, there was the case of ÿ and Ÿ in the base IBM character set (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ÿ). The former exists in a handful of proper nouns in French and Hungarian (as in about five proper nouns), but only as a y with a diæresis, which would normally be handled with a Unicode modifier symbol. It is also used in a couple of endangered languages in South America, which would not have influenced the character getting in to a PC character set. It is thought that possibly it was supposed to represent the Dutch "ij" character, but apparently that is never written as "ÿ" in print. Ÿ seems to not be used by any language.

New comment by tengwar2 in "Why does Mail app contact iCloud when sending a non-iCloud email?"

tengwar2 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:47:34 +0000

MS Office doesn't need permanent approval. I have Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Autoupdate and Update Assistant blocked from making any outgoing connection (on MacOS). That works for about a month, then I have to unblock briefly to let the licence check work. I don't use Adobe these days.

New comment by tengwar2 in "CP/M-386 – CP/M for 386 protected mode, derived from CP/M‑68K"

tengwar2 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:35:49 +0000

When I started using it, standard advice was to use Wordstar in text mode.

New comment by tengwar2 in "The Art of 64-bit Assembly"

tengwar2 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:06:02 +0000

I last used MASM back in about 1989 (with MS C on OS/2 1.0). Do you have any hints on how it has changed since then? What is nice about it, and why does the debugger not match up to CodeView?

New comment by tengwar2 in "BMW Is Showing Commercials on Their Car's Dash Screens as a Treat"

tengwar2 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:18:21 +0000

Skoda seem to have a small budget, perhaps $5/car, to add features in. Nothing major: an ice scraper / tread depth gauge under the fuel cap; a parking ticket clip on the side of the windscreen - that sort of thing. It tends to be disproportionately popular with owners.

New comment by tengwar2 in "A Dying Art: The last of the morticians"

tengwar2 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:48:37 +0000

Yes - in Ireland (both the Republic and Northern Ireland, and irrespective of religion), the funeral is usually within three days. I'm based in England, the south-eastern part of the UK, and here funerals are typically 3-5 weeks after the death, and getting later. This is partly because of needing to get a slot at the crematorium (though this is largely a manufactured problem in my view). However the main reason for delay is additional checks after a serial killer doctor was discovered in 1998.

New comment by tengwar2 in "About the security content of macOS Tahoe 26.6"

tengwar2 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 11:58:13 +0000

15.7.8 is out today as well, with these security fixes: https://support.apple.com/en-us/128071.

For context, there have been issues with MacOS 26 which have led many people to defer upgrading until MacOS 27 is available, and MacOS 15 is the previous version.

New comment by tengwar2 in "A Dying Art: The last of the morticians"

tengwar2 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 11:54:16 +0000

Interesting. This is one of the things that differs hugely between countries. I've taken about 550 funerals in the UK (I have what you might call a "portmanteau career"). I've only had one open-coffin funeral, and that was for a Caribbean family. It's not uncommon for the immediate family to visit the body before the funeral, but I haven't heard of restoration being used for that and I think embalming is quite unusual as well. In fact I was at the National Funeral Exhibition recently, and I didn't see anyone doing restorative services.

New comment by tengwar2 in "The World's 2,400 Castles"

tengwar2 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:06:32 +0000

For England as well, assuming a conservative definition like: Norman or later, mortared stone construction with remaining walls at least 4m high, not something like a fortified farm house for a single family. If you include Iron Age hill forts, the number becomes absurd.

New comment by tengwar2 in "NoiseLang: Where N = 5 is a Dirac delta"

tengwar2 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:50:18 +0000

Just checked, and it's gone from the list. Did you happen to find out what the problem was?