Hacker News: wowczarek

New comment by wowczarek in "Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)"

wowczarek — Thu, 14 May 2026 02:44:49 +0000

*.eu.org, was (is) an early attempt at something similar this side of the pond, starting in the early 2000s, also free although community managed, but still surviving. Used to be a good way to get a free "proper" domain delegation rather than a shitty iframe alias soon to become ad-ridden, or banner-ridden in those days should I say. Good for 1337 IPv6 hostnames for IRC as well.

New comment by wowczarek in "Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)"

wowczarek — Thu, 14 May 2026 02:34:47 +0000

Sadly ENUM is dead or buried or both for many countries.

New comment by wowczarek in "They Live (1988) inspired Adblocker"

wowczarek — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:38:33 +0000

I came here to chew bubblegum and say this ad revealer is a great idea, and I'm all out of bubblegum.

New comment by wowczarek in "Nucleus Nouns"

wowczarek — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:56:16 +0000

Makes me wonder if a similar level of analysis was done in reverse to conceive these, hopefully not word yahtzee. At least they don't end with "ly" - the horror.

New comment by wowczarek in "Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)"

wowczarek — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:10:48 +0000

For the "pretty" argument - sure, why not, but as to changing keybinds... Well, it's like this: ^a is for screen, ^b is for tmux. You can remap everything to your taste, but you're not going to build tmux muscle memory. You're going to remember your own, erm, thing. Why does this matter? For a localhost admin it doesn't, but if you work on many systems, often either fresh or not your own, you need to be agile and you're not going to have the time or opportunity to drop your own dotfiles, plus the systems will be locked down, offline or both, and so it pays off to learn the tool at its defaults. Why nicm went for %/" I will never understand, but he did, and that's that. After screen I had X and Xpra and and Terminator at hand for nearly two decades straight and couldn't be bothered moving to tmux, and when I did, I was considering remapping it to Terminator, but I resisted, and I don't regret it. My personal config has some colours, notably different background for the active pane, a UNIX timestamp clock and mouse on and some buffer and title tweaks, but no keybind changes. But to each their own.

New comment by wowczarek in "A truck driver spent 20 years making a scale model of every building in NYC"

wowczarek — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:27:39 +0000

Synecdoche, New York. We all have our magna opera, but those types I really admire. A great form of therapy as well.

New comment by wowczarek in "IPv6 address, as a sentence you can remember"

wowczarek — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 02:25:52 +0000

Commented with the same without reading through the comments first; now deleted.

That is a lot of words for ::1.

Edit: there was another one below, haha :)

New comment by wowczarek in "My DIY FPGA board can run Quake II"

wowczarek — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:25:27 +0000

It's just that I see so many people today with those new fangled, asynchronous, rusty thingummywuts full of unicode and sixels and kitties and whatnot that sometimes I wonder, but an orthodox FM is the only life I understand and my neural pathways for NC + MC key shortcuts run deep. I'm also a diehard mcedit user and I refuse to vi* unless forced, so that might be the weird bit. It's all good.

New comment by wowczarek in "My DIY FPGA board can run Quake II"

wowczarek — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 01:41:09 +0000

Good to see I'm not the only weirdo still using Midnight Commander.

New comment by wowczarek in "My DIY FPGA board can run Quake II"

wowczarek — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 01:39:02 +0000

I have the album on my phone. When I get called in to put out a fire and save the day, I like to put on March Of The Stroggs in the car when arriving at the destination. It's a great soundtrack for two reasons - the first one is sweet, wasted youth and the second is it's a great soundtrack.

New comment by wowczarek in "The Cost of Indirection in Rust"

wowczarek — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:59:23 +0000

Regardless of the language, optimisation of this kind has always been a trap for me when moving back and forth between old or otherwise small, embedded systems and modern hardware and toolchains. When we were learning C, compilers weren't as smart as they are today, and every little bit helped - old habits die hard. The lesson is simple - just see what the compiler does with your code first. But also, weigh the real performance pinch points vs. readability and convenience, and as much as it's tempting, don't optimise prematurely - of course I always do; its fun.

New comment by wowczarek in "Lil' Fun Langs' Guts"

wowczarek — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 23:44:40 +0000

Whenever a programming-related text mentions self-hosting and bootstrapping, I always search it in advance for any occurrences of "forth". Just in case. Once grasped and taken hold, Forth does strange things to one's mind.

New comment by wowczarek in "Man accidentally gains control of 7k robot vacuums"

wowczarek — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 03:50:45 +0000

Many WiFi-based "smart" devices can run locally without Internet access just fine and are supported by HA or other such platforms, which then doesn't require you using the vendor's app, which might have you need to be on the same broadcast domain as the device. They can use multicast (few home users will have multicast routing between VLANs), or direct broadcast - meaning you will likely give them Internet access because your phone needs it - well unless your WiFi is smart enough to limit individual clients. So a restricted VLAN plus HA or some such solves this.

The real problem is those devices that actually don't let you control the device locally - Tuya being one notable example. There are thousands of products that just went and dropped in a Tuya board.

Tuya is completely cloud-controled. To control these locally you need a "local key" that is buried deep in their developer platform, and changes every time you re-pair the device, and getting it without registering the device is, on purpose, near-impossible without tricks like using an Android emulator with an old version of their app that stores the key, and even then requires effort to exfil the file out of Android. Horror. A device you physically own, only responds to control from the mothership.

So yes, you don't get those kinds of issues with RF protocols, of course unless you put the vendor's "bridge" on your network...

A friend of mine found Zigbee unreliable where he was, and just wired the home for 1-Wire. Temperature sensors, relays, heating PIDs etc. Not only it just won't die, but good luck to anyone hacking it without extra equipment and ripping wires from walls, and firstly being inside, unsupervised and undetected.

New comment by wowczarek in "Microsoft team creates data-storage system that lasts for millennia"

wowczarek — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 22:11:12 +0000

Corning is. As to pyrex, that depends: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45310995

New comment by wowczarek in "How to take a photo with scotch tape (lensless imaging) [video]"

wowczarek — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:03:46 +0000

I was wondering if it would work with Sellotape...

New comment by wowczarek in "7zip.com Is Serving Malware"

wowczarek — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 21:26:34 +0000

The .com site serving malware aside, it's how people even get to downloading this. PC builder [...], USB stick [...], YouTube tutorial for a new build [...] instructed to download. Makes me wonder, is this how "PC builders" build PCs, or was this a regular user person. Archive managers are such basic software that I'd think surely someone would keep a stash of (trusted) installer files for the basic tools to be installed in a new environment. At least that's what we used to do, like, 25 years ago. Or use choco, winget or whatever. Malware hygiene habits remain almost unchanged - don't click that link.

New comment by wowczarek in "Exploring a Modern SMTPE 2110 Broadcast Truck"

wowczarek — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 02:53:55 +0000

Today's broadcasting truly is a beautifully evolved piece of engineering. For a guy like me who dabbles in time / frequency synchronisation, this is a great example of a use case that physically malfunctions without sync.

...but the first time I learned about SMPTE, was from Frank Zappa's song "Baby Snakes" - interestingly it mentiones both SMPTE and sync. Every time SMPTE is mentioned, this plays in my head.

New comment by wowczarek in "A web server on a single floppy disk"

wowczarek — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 17:47:44 +0000

All the way up to 2004 or 2005, my home router was an old 486dx box running FREESCO (https://freesco.info/) - and it was, indeed, booting from a single floppy. Linux 2.0.something.

To my surprise I discovered today that FREESCO was still releasing updates all the way until 2014.

New comment by wowczarek in "A web server on a single floppy disk"

wowczarek — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 17:32:54 +0000

Hey, my oscilloscope has one of those!

New comment by wowczarek in "Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux"

wowczarek — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:32:44 +0000

Linux user since about 1998, leaning towards BSDs today. Network engineer + R&D + software dev. Daily driver (desktop) about 2002-2010 - work made it too difficult later. Very occasional gamer. Corporate world will give you a Windows VDI or web cloudy things if need be. Win10 on my laptop out of habit, mostly using terminals + WSL and a browser. Lightroom user, but flexible. None of the other gear I own runs Windows, and the numbers are significant (racks). I run my laptops until they die - the current one is 10y and hasn't died yet but won't run Win11 without going through hoops. Next laptop will not be running Windows outside of a VM.

Win7 was a workhorse, moving to win10 felt unnecessary - and I still remember how the laptop vendor had a system performance tuning app for win7 that you could use to put it into limp mode and have it run on battery for a full day and most of the night. No such thing on win10 on the same hardware. Everything has its time, and hopefully I'll never even get to experience the joy that apparently is win11. The times for software freedom of choice are as good as they have ever been.