Hacker News: zbuf

New comment by zbuf in "What Happened to the Largest Tube TV? [video]"

zbuf — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 20:03:47 +0000

Yes, a shame. I honestly expected this could get picked up as a mainstream news story over Christmas (except I think the actual story is older than this video);

Young people with talent and ingenuity, using modern skills and tools to acquire and maintain something with a history behind it.

I've bookmarked it for next time some old guy complains that young people aren't smart or motivated etc. etc.!

New comment by zbuf in "What Happened to the Largest Tube TV? [video]"

zbuf — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:33:52 +0000

The best of the internet, engineering and humanity... all in one video.

New comment by zbuf in "Xwax Is an Open-Source Digital Vinyl System (DVS) for Linux"

zbuf — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 11:01:50 +0000

It was magical and very exciting seeing these things emerge!

New comment by zbuf in "Xwax Is an Open-Source Digital Vinyl System (DVS) for Linux"

zbuf — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 11:00:39 +0000

Acquiring one of these "ScratchAmp" boxes that was missing its software is what started the whole project. These earlier systems deserve a lot of credit. If I'd had access to the software I don't imagine I would have dug so deeply into the concept.

New comment by zbuf in "Xwax Is an Open-Source Digital Vinyl System (DVS) for Linux"

zbuf — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 10:56:03 +0000

It's something I have seen before! Seeing xwax reduced to very small hardware is interesting. Thanks for sharing here.

New comment by zbuf in "Xwax Is an Open-Source Digital Vinyl System (DVS) for Linux"

zbuf — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 10:54:52 +0000

I don't know of any these days, though in the past I received some great photos of packed large venues with xwax laptops on display.

Check the xwax built-in Jack module, likely to be the easiest way to bridge with other applications.

New comment by zbuf in "Xwax Is an Open-Source Digital Vinyl System (DVS) for Linux"

zbuf — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 16:15:38 +0000

The records used by xwax have about 100 kilobytes of data on each side of a 12" record. However, the goals are very different here; it's designed to decode the position under specific conditions such as being moved very fast, in reverse and changing direction rapidly. There would be a more efficient encoding if your goal was to fit as much data as possible and relax the other requirements.

New comment by zbuf in "Xwax Is an Open-Source Digital Vinyl System (DVS) for Linux"

zbuf — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 15:26:04 +0000

Pre-dating xwax and Mixxx there was "TerminatorX", sounds like it might be what you're interested in.

New comment by zbuf in "Xwax Is an Open-Source Digital Vinyl System (DVS) for Linux"

zbuf — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 12:56:49 +0000

How do you propose that you'd select and load tracks? Or view time remaining. Even if you don't care about a waveform display, some sort of computer (ie. display) seems to become necessary at some point. Perhaps you could check the PiDeck project, which puts xwax into smaller hardware.

New comment by zbuf in "Xwax Is an Open-Source Digital Vinyl System (DVS) for Linux"

zbuf — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 11:22:23 +0000

xwax /is/ meant for end-users, but right at the beginning it only had actual live professional use in mind. I was literally DJ'ing in clubs at the time and I wanted the digital equivalent of playing vinyl records.

I was collaborating with a friend on the early versions, to see if it could be commercialised to provide a "house" system for radio studios and clubs (much like the house provides CDJs or turntables). Today that's superseded by DJs bringing their own laptops, of course.

I don't know much about Mixxx these days; that project was always much better set up to grow through a range of contributors (eg. with its scripting engine). But I think it's technical architecture is probably quite different.

Whereas, xwax was designed from day 1 with the idea it was a realtime system with very tight latencies, taking input from one audio interface and responding to it on another. That was fun on Linux (and FreeBSD!) systems of the early 2000s.

New comment by zbuf in "Xwax Is an Open-Source Digital Vinyl System (DVS) for Linux"

zbuf — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 10:59:13 +0000

xwax author here, nice to see it submitted to HN front page. Must be 20+ years now since I wrote the original code for DJ'ing live. Very happy to answer questions

New comment by zbuf in "Strlcpy and strlcat added to glibc 2.38"

zbuf — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 07:05:17 +0000

Interesting to see the implementation is basically a two-pass process: strlen() to count the source string, followed by a memcpy().

My intuition would be to give some importance to not looping on the source string radically beyond the length of the destination buffer.

https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=string/strl...

New comment by zbuf in "Cool, but obscure X11 tools (2019)"

zbuf — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 16:23:52 +0000

Fair, I was thinking that because its not actually an X11 GUI (though it is X11 of course)

Its fun to query or set information on a remote. The same applies to xdpyinfo, xset, xrandr and many more support the -display option (if they don't then set the DISPLAY environment variable).

New comment by zbuf in "Cool, but obscure X11 tools (2019)"

zbuf — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 11:28:12 +0000

If you're thinking of an X11 GUI, I think perhaps you mean xfontsel?

New comment by zbuf in "Cool, but obscure X11 tools (2019)"

zbuf — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 10:47:29 +0000

Not necessarily obscure, still rather useful. xterm & xv remain my daily tools, and xosview is still maintained here:

https://www.pogo.org.uk/~mark/xosview/

New comment by zbuf in "The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes"

zbuf — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 14:31:07 +0000

There's lots of smaller VPS and VM providers -- even local IT companies. Mythic Beasts and Bytemark have been good for me.

If you want to use Linode for your CPU time and disk, probably there are providers for outbound SMTP that you pay a small amount for to use as a smarthost.

New comment by zbuf in "The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes"

zbuf — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 23:11:27 +0000

Don't throw in the towel, switch ISP.

You can do everything right but are being judged by the history of your IP address with it's neighbours in the same AS block.

New comment by zbuf in "The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes"

zbuf — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 19:26:15 +0000

Who are you hosting on?

New comment by zbuf in "Freaky Leaky SMS: Extracting user locations by analyzing SMS timings"

zbuf — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 19:19:38 +0000

I can call the phone and tell which country you're in

New comment by zbuf in "Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage"

zbuf — Fri, 26 May 2023 18:19:26 +0000

That's how you don't make a profit