Hacker News: titchard

New comment by titchard in "Repairable Flatpack Toaster"

titchard — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 10:38:53 +0000

This reminds me of this book I read a few years back -https://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/

How much work actually goes into the cheapest toaster the chap works to make every element from scratch into a toaster.

New comment by titchard in "Celebrating the timeless allure of Tintin's aesthetics"

titchard — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 14:02:01 +0000

Bizarre coincidence but on way back through town today on lunch break saw several volumes of Tintin in a charity shop window and took it as fate after reading this article.

New comment by titchard in ""Twelfth Night Till Candlemas" – A 40-year book-quest"

titchard — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 11:13:17 +0000

I am glad the book was found in the end, I had a similar case that took me years to track down. My great grandmother used to always send on christmas a Penguin Classic childrens book and 100 brand new pennies in a handcherchief - for years I tried to track down one of the books describing wolves crowding round a dying explorers fire - which turned out to be White Fang by Jack London.

New comment by titchard in "Base 3 Computing Beats Binary"

titchard — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 14:29:16 +0000

its been a while since I read some of this book and enjoying it, and I remember it refering to 3bit computing in the soviet era but it might be right up your street https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262534666/how-not-to-network-a-...

New comment by titchard in "Show HN: Pie Menu – a radial menu for macOS"

titchard — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 07:55:18 +0000

I really like the idea, but as a left handed person I found it needed to have a keyboard shortcut accessible from the right hand (maybe this can be an option in the menu?)

New comment by titchard in "Stop Acting Like You're Famous"

titchard — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 09:06:54 +0000

I think this is spot on - how many times have people (and I include myself) stopped on a project that is even remotely public facing because it isn't perfect-grade work before you've even learnt the first steps?

New comment by titchard in "Drawing and illustrating in the pre-digital time (2019)"

titchard — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 10:24:27 +0000

Thank you for this, I am very much an amateur comic artist and prefer "analogue" methods so this list of items is exceptionally helpful for items I haven't seen before4 / didn't know the name of.

New comment by titchard in "Game Font Forensics"

titchard — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 09:58:27 +0000

Really great site - I can 100% recommend this book on the subject, really interesting https://www.counter-print.co.uk/products/arcade-game-typogra...

New comment by titchard in "Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children"

titchard — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 15:01:37 +0000

Scratch is a great tool for teaching the entry level elements before you move onto a written code. I have been running after school classes for kids using Scratch (under the Raspberry Pi charity arm codeclub.org) and they take to it very quickly.

New comment by titchard in "TurboWarp Desktop"

titchard — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 10:34:28 +0000

I've been teaching an afterschool class for the last six or so years for kids using scratch, whilst yes its aimed at that level - it does allow you to understand concepts so easy, especially as you can build, rearrange and change like lego bricks.

I find out stuff I didn't know when I am just noodling around designing lesson plans for the next week - what you learn will follow you and help with other coding.

New comment by titchard in "Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories"

titchard — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 01:25:17 +0000

Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I had totally forgotten about this when Charlie Brooker spoke about it as plotting out Bandersnatch.

I am a Senior Learning Technologist and currently working with lecturers for good ways for plotting out virtual home visits etc for health workers, and this is going to be a much better solution than what I was constructing at the time.

New comment by titchard in "Dasung just released a 25 inch eInk monitor"

titchard — Sun, 27 Dec 2020 11:18:17 +0000

Agreed, it does exist - but that model you speak of is £849 for me - that is not an accessible price.

An iPad pro that is the same size is only £100 more for me, but then thats not what I am after.

As ePaper and eInk has been around for a while now, I would expect that much like TVs the price per inch drops over time but it seems fixed at that 7" mark then the price rockets.

I get that a larger format eReader is a smaller market than the standard book, but I don't get how I can get 10 kindles (or similar) for the same price as that Sony one just because of size. If someone can enlighten me why I'd be grateful, if after a certain point the screens get harder to manufacture maybe?

New comment by titchard in "Dasung just released a 25 inch eInk monitor"

titchard — Sat, 26 Dec 2020 11:31:04 +0000

This is what frustrates me - I would love eInk panels, or a reader in a larger format than your standard kindle and kobo affair so I could read textbooks properly.

An A4 or slightly larger eReader should have existed (and not cost ridiculous money) years ago.

New comment by titchard in "UK supermarkets report a surge in vegan food sales while expanding ranges"

titchard — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 18:16:45 +0000

I agree, mostly plant based here but rarely rely on the "fake meats". The closest is seitan, which I make myself anyway.

New comment by titchard in "Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?"

titchard — Sun, 05 Jul 2020 22:01:52 +0000

Designing a combat robot for the UK Antweight division, which is only 150g max weight. (or 175g for some groups).

Despite this tight weight budget, I intend to build something rather interesting, but it is causing me to spend a lot of time in Fusion designing the parts along with slicing and reslicing 3D printed parts to shave partial grams of components to save a bit of weight.

New comment by titchard in "Ploopy: An Open-Source Trackball"

titchard — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 10:23:59 +0000

I have just found the one you use - will do some research! I do a lot of Fusion 360 work and I always feel like a trackball would help.

New comment by titchard in "Ploopy: An Open-Source Trackball"

titchard — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 08:51:26 +0000

This is an interesting project - my first thought would be to flip it, as I am left handed and would benefit from it being oriented that way.

New comment by titchard in "The worst sales promotion in history: Hoover's free flight fiasco"

titchard — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 14:49:48 +0000

That's a fantastic way of doing it - I'd imagine you'd put on some old clothes to do the diving anyway.

New comment by titchard in "New Raspberry Pi Model B+"

titchard — Wed, 14 Mar 2018 10:18:08 +0000

That is interesting, I didn't even know that was a feature that was capped on the RPi.

I can see that being made into very compact 3D Scanners very quickly after launch if that was added as a feature.