Hacker News: timonoko

New comment by timonoko in "Apollo Guidance Computer restoration videos"

timonoko — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:37:43 +0000

I suggested that after the Final Countdown first computers are made with Rope Memory and Mechanical Relays. But Ken Schirriff said NO -- you need semifast semiconductors to read the memory.

New comment by timonoko in "Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom"

timonoko — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 15:03:54 +0000

They forgot the ballpoint pen. In 1950 Sweden flowing ink and cursive was the mark of a civilized man. I remember teacher using magnifier to detect cheaters as evil ballpoint technology advanced.

New comment by timonoko in "Solar panels at Lidl? Plug-in versions set to appear in shops"

timonoko — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:15:25 +0000

Yes. But 20W panel is panel too.

Little worried about Lidl-quality also on larger scale.

New comment by timonoko in "Solar panels at Lidl? Plug-in versions set to appear in shops"

timonoko — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:06:46 +0000

Last time I bought a panel from Lidl, it worked only on very sunny day. Very Strange.

Inspection revealed it had two 6 Volt 10 Watt panels in parallel and then 12V to 5V USB-converter.

When panels were reconnected in series it was quite OK.

New comment by timonoko in "I don't use LLMs for programming"

timonoko — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:58:30 +0000

What? I mean it made its own version, but it was so full of incomprehensible squiggles that it was useless as a learning tool.

I just wanted to see what it would look like. Lesson learned.

New comment by timonoko in "I don't use LLMs for programming"

timonoko — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:28:13 +0000

Gemini parsed 5000 lines assembly program. And it understood everything.

I wanted to change it from 32-bit MSDOS to 64-bit Linux. But it realized that the segmented memory model cannot be implemented in large memory without massive changes which breaks everything else.

It was willing to construct new program with seemingly same functionality, but the assembly code was so incomprehensible that whole project was useless as a learning tool. And C-version would have been faster already.

Sorry to say, but less talented humans like me-myself are already totally useless in this.

New comment by timonoko in "Two Years of Emacs Solo"

timonoko — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:46:27 +0000

I tried (setq backup-directory-alist '(("." . ".local/share/Trash/files/"))). It would have been fun if backup files were also Thunar Trash.

But too many problems. Even Grok, Gemini and Chatgpt were stunned.

New comment by timonoko in "Emacs internals: Deconstructing Lisp_Object in C (Part 2)"

timonoko — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:55:43 +0000

You only need one bit tag and it is for number.

Symbols are just list of numbers. Variable is just a nameless place in memory, but often associated with a symbol.

Numbers in symbols are printed out as ASCII-characters when it seems appropriate, like after SETQ.

Or we could decide that number-list that ends with 0 and contains only range(0x21,0x7F) is printed out as symbol. Does not matter, it is just syntactic sugar.

And We do not need strings for much anything. We could of course decide that number-list with ord('"') is printed out as string. The reader could also follow this protocol.

I had all this figured out at one time. And I dont remember any major issues. B-)

New comment by timonoko in "British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time"

timonoko — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:41:48 +0000

I suggest installing Sun Dial on youres smartwatch. Especially when daytime is 4 hours, it somewhat aleviates the "eternal darkness" brain fuzz. I try to be awake on those few hours, and do not care about those other dials.

There is Sun Dial right there on Zepp Watchmaker on "editable components". From 9 to 15 seems to best amplitude as it reflects the sun's movement on the skies.

New comment by timonoko in "First Website (1992)"

timonoko — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 09:45:32 +0000

This was in Gopher first, where you had to click a link to view a picture. Then I heard about Mosaic, where you can have pictures and text on the same page. Some problems emerged, until I learned you use

to separate chapters: https://timonoko.github.io/alaska/index.htm

New comment by timonoko in "Four Column ASCII (2017)"

timonoko — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:24:50 +0000

In my screen there is indeed about thirty icons. When I executed the program on xterm, they were different and when I pasted them on LibreOffice they were again different. And now it seems this shit is also different in every country.

The world is broken.

New comment by timonoko in "Four Column ASCII (2017)"

timonoko — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 10:41:14 +0000

Ok this set does not even show on Android, just some boxes. Very strange.

New comment by timonoko in "Four Column ASCII (2017)"

timonoko — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 08:18:58 +0000

Opera AI solved the problem:

If you want to use symbols for Mars and Venus for example,they are not in range(0,0x20). They are in Miscellanous Symbols block.

New comment by timonoko in "Four Column ASCII (2017)"

timonoko — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 08:04:21 +0000

Just asking why they have different icons in different environments? Maybe it is UTF-8 vs ISO-8859?

New comment by timonoko in "Four Column ASCII (2017)"

timonoko — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 07:15:34 +0000

where does this character set come from? It looks different on xterm.

for x in range(0x0,0x20): print(chr(x),end=" ")

New comment by timonoko in "Twitter(X) Is Down"

timonoko — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 14:16:44 +0000

Grok will give solace and support. It assured me that I was not banned (yet).

New comment by timonoko in "I gave Claude access to my pen plotter"

timonoko — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 11:43:14 +0000

Nothing more fun than telling your dreams to ChatGPT. Especially if it already has learned the details of the dream-world you are often living in.

New comment by timonoko in "I gave Claude access to my pen plotter"

timonoko — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 08:54:12 +0000

The most famous literary expression of this idea comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. While discussing the tedious nature of listening to others recount their dreams, there is a general literary consensus often attributed to him (and other authors like Mark Twain or Henry James) that:

"Nothing is more boring than other people’s dreams."

-- by Gemini

New comment by timonoko in "Pink noise reduces REM sleep and may harm sleep quality"

timonoko — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 07:56:38 +0000

I have the best. Natural noise generator, which means microphones outside. With 3 layered windows the winter is just too silent, or rather: filled annoying multistory house noises. In summertime windows are open and that is about the suitable noise level.

Also there is the outdoorsman's reaction to silence. When birds go silent, there is something bad happening. Bears or wolf pack.

New comment by timonoko in "Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock"

timonoko — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:04:59 +0000

I asked Gemini to make sensible & readable version: https://github.com/timonoko/Jogwheel/blob/main/jogwheel_gem....

But did not improve much, except variable names are now less esoteric.