Hacker News: zrail

New comment by zrail in "Building a custom mount for a telescoping webcam"

zrail — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:34:04 +0000

Does this work? https://imgbox.com/p2O8aADv

New comment by zrail in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

zrail — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 22:18:49 +0000

I've thought about doing this a couple times but haven't followed through yet. What makes yours different/unique compared to, say, pi?

New comment by zrail in "Building a custom mount for a telescoping webcam"

zrail — Sun, 31 May 2026 01:56:23 +0000

Nice! I built something along these lines but far more janky. My setup is a clamp-mount mic boom arm and an L-shaped bracket, along with a mic-to-1/4" adapter. Boom clamps to the monitor arm, reaches over the monitor, then the short end of the L is attached to the arm via the adapter. My webcam has a 1/4" screw built in, so that attaches to the long side of the L.

I've been using it for years, works great to get the camera down for calls and back up out of the way when not needed. Only problem is that it's not super stable so I have a small spirit level insert glued to the top of the camera to make adjustments easier.

Edit: somewhat recent photo of my setup, including the webcam: https://imgur.com/a/ip3ff4F

New comment by zrail in "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"

zrail — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:58:47 +0000

Same. The prompt was essentially, every checkbox in this PLAN.md should be task in SQLite.

New comment by zrail in "MCP Hello Page"

zrail — Sat, 16 May 2026 22:57:44 +0000

Excellent. Tiny affordances like this should be more commonplace, IMO.

I think this probably also helps when truly clueless users drop the link into an agent directly, because then the agent will relay the message to the user.

New comment by zrail in "The Emacsification of Software"

zrail — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:35:32 +0000

It's not a new usage by any means. Like almost all slang it originated with Black drag and LGBT+ subcultures and only semi-recently (within the last 10-15 years maybe?) broke containment in the US.

As a verb, "to clock" means something like "to notice" or maybe in this case "to highlight, with specificity".

New comment by zrail in "The Emacsification of Software"

zrail — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:34:01 +0000

I feel like I'm way more cynical than most people around here about LLMs but if we accept the parent comment's framing, why can't we just use an LLM to write a throw-away converter to whatever new format is necessary? Yes of course it'll probably be lossy occasionally but the question will be, is that ok for the user doing the conversion?

New comment by zrail in "Running local LLMs offline on a ten-hour flight"

zrail — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 17:04:03 +0000

Sweet, free upgrades!

Edit to be slightly less obtuse: surely you're not implying that a common carrier be allowed to discriminate based on facts about a passenger's body without making reasonable accommodations. Surely you're not implying that obese people not be allowed to fly at all. Surely you're not suggesting that fat people should just remove themselves from society so you don't have to deal with them.

Therefore, obese people should get free upgrades to economy plus or better. Thanks for the idea!

New comment by zrail in "America's Geothermal Breakthrough"

zrail — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 01:37:39 +0000

Our house came with one and we upgraded the unit a few years ago. It's very efficient in terms of units of energy consumed, but in my area of the world gas is significantly cheaper than electricity so it ends up being expensive to run.

That said, we will install solar at some point and then it'll be "free" HVAC.

New comment by zrail in "The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)"

zrail — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:02:25 +0000

> they end up coming up with something equivalent to IPv6

Not just that. Almost every single thing people think up that's "better" is something that was considered and rejected by the IPv6 design process, almost always for well-considered reasons.

New comment by zrail in "IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark"

zrail — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:33:52 +0000

A reasonably fair comparison. The ISPs had a much stronger incentive to finish the migration, though, because the 3g spectrum could just get turned around and used for 4g after rollout. IPv6 doesn't really have that strong of an incentive structure now that CGNAT is a well-developed technology.

New comment by zrail in "IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark"

zrail — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:28:08 +0000

This proposal is absolutely wild.

New comment by zrail in "Protect your shed"

zrail — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:12:05 +0000

Out of curiosity, what makes Home Assistant a pain?

New comment by zrail in "My Google Workspace account suspension"

zrail — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:19:52 +0000

Passkey auth is also available as a first-class option.

New comment by zrail in "Solar and batteries can power the world"

zrail — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:45:56 +0000

Would you be willing to quantify what "mild" means to you, maybe in terms of a USDA zone? There are maps for both US and Europe:

https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/pages/map-downloads

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USDA_hardiness_zones...

New comment by zrail in "ESP32-S31: Dual-Core RISC-V SoC with Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and Advanced HMI"

zrail — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:53:04 +0000

You already can with nRF52 boards. Presumably they'll add ESP32 support soon too.

https://esphome.io/components/zigbee/

New comment by zrail in "I traced my traffic through a home Tailscale exit node"

zrail — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:42:37 +0000

The headscale API is very different than the Tailscale API so if you're automating setting up clients it's not quite drop in. Once a client is up, though, from what I've heard it's seamless.

New comment by zrail in "I traced my traffic through a home Tailscale exit node"

zrail — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:40:46 +0000

I think this is mostly a Wireguard thing and not specifically a Tailscale thing. Wireguard does what they call "cryptokey routing" where if you prove you possess a key that the other peer knows, you get the traffic (subject to firewall, allowed IPs list, etc etc). Wireguard stores the most recent address:port that it heard from a particular cryptokey on, but it natively lets peers roam, as long as only one roams at a time.

New comment by zrail in "How to turn anything into a router"

zrail — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 23:44:38 +0000

From what I can tell you're pretty much right. A linux bridge cannot possibly be as efficient or speedy as a dedicated switch asic. OpenWRT has support for a few different hardware switch kernel APIs, but you can't exactly buy one of those on a PCIe card and I've never seen one of those N100-class boards with one instead of a set of i226 ethernet controllers taking most of the PCIe lanes.

Mikrotik sells the CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe, which is a fascinating device:

https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_1g_2xs_pcie

It is a full Mikrotik router stripped down to just a board and hung off a PCIe interface. Iirc by default it exposes a virtual gigabit interface to the host and otherwise acts exactly like a CCR2004 running RouterOS.

Doesn't really buy you anything vs a RB5009 unless you can use the pair of 25Gbps ports, but it sure is neat.

New comment by zrail in "Order Granting Preliminary Injunction – Anthropic vs. U.S. Department of War [pdf]"

zrail — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 01:31:32 +0000

(not a lawyer) I _think_ this is a result of Trump v CASA, where the Supreme Court determined that preliminary injunctions and TROs without a bond of some sort (which until then were fairly common) were invalid and unenforceable.