Hacker News: zxcvgm

New comment by zxcvgm in "Visopsys: OS maintained by a single developer since 1997"

zxcvgm — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 04:59:32 +0000

Ahh this OS is small enough that a university professor used it as the basis for his class assignments: write a device driver for it, or a pipe implementation, if I recall correctly. I thought it was pretty genius at the time, and it was certainly quite a challenge for the students too.

New comment by zxcvgm in "Power over Ethernet (PoE) basics and beyond"

zxcvgm — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 11:14:30 +0000

I use the FDMQ8205. It's an old part, a little pricey, but keeps the board footprint low. It also has a sufficiently high UVLO, so it acts like regular diodes during the classification phase and you don't need to factor those in to the Rcls values.

New comment by zxcvgm in "Samsung Removes Bootloader Unlocking with One UI 8"

zxcvgm — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 12:51:13 +0000

Xiaomi apparently have also stopped unlocking their bootloaders, so the "workaround" was to go to an official store and ask them perform a downgrade, and before the staff can relock the bootloader, grab the phone and run:

https://x.com/kobe_koto/status/1949154478298456531

Absolutely hilarious.

New comment by zxcvgm in "GTK Krell Monitors"

zxcvgm — Fri, 16 May 2025 09:04:08 +0000

Aahh this brings back memories. I first started out using Linux on my desktop and I found this fancy system monitor that made my desktop look cool. There's a section which displays filesystem usage with a button that allows mounting/unmounting with a click. I used it to mount floppy disks but it wasn't working for me, so I read the source to figure out what was wrong, then emailed Bill to contribute a patch to fix it.

It was one of my first open source contributions, and it was then that I understood the value of open source - being able to read the code, debug and then fix it yourself (and for others).

New comment by zxcvgm in "Show HN: Undetectag, track stolen items with AirTag"

zxcvgm — Fri, 16 May 2025 05:24:50 +0000

Probably. Or something like the TPL5110 might actually suffice, purpose-built timer for power gating at 35nA, but only goes up to 2hr at max.

New comment by zxcvgm in "Linkwarden: FOSS self-hostable bookmarking with AI-tagging and page archival"

zxcvgm — Thu, 01 May 2025 18:06:36 +0000

Cool, looks like text highlighting is a new addition in 2.10. There aren't any examples in the demo site of this, but can it capture the highlighted text snippets and show them in the link details page? That would help me recall quickly why I saved the link, without opening the original link and re-reading the page. I haven't really seen this in other tools (or maybe I just haven't looked hard enough), except Memex.

New comment by zxcvgm in "Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row"

zxcvgm — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 04:36:23 +0000

Well, WhatsApp backups claim they are E2E encrypted, but there’s a flow that uses their HSM for the encryption key, which still feels like some escrow system.

https://engineering.fb.com/2021/09/10/security/whatsapp-e2ee...

New comment by zxcvgm in "De-smarting the Marshall Uxbridge"

zxcvgm — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 18:47:09 +0000

I have the same thoughts about the approach, and I'm actually working (on the back burner) a similar thing. It's a harman kardon "smart" speaker with a similar design where the brains are on a separate daughterboard and that's now fried.

I've already figured out the control signals and have designed a new daugterboard with an ESP32 to drive the I2S output. I just need to figure out how to downmix the audio to mono and to DSP the L/R channels into tweeter/bass outputs, or to find some code already out there that does this. Any help/pointers here would be appreciated!

New comment by zxcvgm in "JSON parsers that can accept comments"

zxcvgm — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 08:36:46 +0000

I’m surprised HuJSON wasn’t mentioned in the list. Tailscale uses it for their config files. I did a hacky workaround by preprocessing my JSON config with regex, but found HuJSON later.

https://github.com/tailscale/hujson

New comment by zxcvgm in "EUCLEAK Side-Channel Attack on the YubiKey 5 Series"

zxcvgm — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 19:16:22 +0000

Yeah. That's what I came here to say too.

Previously when their Yubikey 4's were found to be suceptible to the ROCA vulnerability [0], they issued replacements [1] for any customers who had affected devices. I had a few of those devices and they were replaced for free.

I guess that's a disadvantage of having a non-upgradable firmware. They can't fix these devices that are already out in the field.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROCA_vulnerability

[1] https://support.yubico.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021803580-In...

New comment by zxcvgm in "How the Totem Compass Works"

zxcvgm — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 20:43:23 +0000

When I initially watched the demo video, I was wondering how the devices might locate each other. I thought it was using ultra wide band (UWB) like iPhones but now I see it’s just GPS. I’m not sure how many of these events are indoors vs outdoors, but it definitely won’t work indoors. Wonder how they might try to make it work indoors if there’s no additional hardware onboard.

New comment by zxcvgm in "The Luckfox Pico Mini B – Linux in a Thumbnail"

zxcvgm — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 19:23:13 +0000

I think the Luckfox Pico series is the lowest cost ARM-based board you can buy (that runs Linux) at the moment. Even the Pi Zero is $10. Prior to this, it was a board based on the Allwinner F1C100, but I don't think anyone made and sold a dev board except for a DIY business card [0].

[0] https://www.thirtythreeforty.net/posts/2019/12/my-business-c...

New comment by zxcvgm in "SSH agent extensions as an arbitrary RPC mechanism"

zxcvgm — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 18:44:32 +0000

Doesn't look like it, but the author uses the Go SSH agent library [1] which _does_ have some example code there and looks pretty straightforward, based on what was described in the post.

[1] https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/crypto/ssh/agent

Go small with Embedded Swift [video]

zxcvgm — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 19:21:38 +0000

Article URL: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2024/10197/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40650346

Points: 10

# Comments: 2

New comment by zxcvgm in "LPCAMM2 is a modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops"

zxcvgm — Tue, 07 May 2024 16:50:14 +0000

I remember when Dell was the first to introduce [1] these Compression Attached Memory Modules in their laptops in an attempt to move away from soldered-on RAM. Glad this is now being more widely adopted and standardized.

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/693366/dell-defends-its-cont...

New comment by zxcvgm in "Google is feeling pretty pumped about a new way of showing you ads on YouTube"

zxcvgm — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 14:46:16 +0000

This sounds like what Roku had patented, except it injects ads when it detects that a HDMI-connected device has paused: https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/roku_tv_ad_patent/

New comment by zxcvgm in "Server-side sandboxing: Containers and seccomp"

zxcvgm — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 17:36:16 +0000

It's pretty easy to apply seccomp to a process using systemd by adding SystemCallFilter= in its unit file. There's a reasonable set of permitted syscalls for general system processes, aptly called `@system-service`, but you can tweak that to suit your needs [1]. I generally use this, among other settings, to further lock down system services [2].

[1] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...

[2] https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/mastering-systemd

New comment by zxcvgm in "Raspberry Pi 5"

zxcvgm — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 06:29:42 +0000

Interestingly the Pi 5 has moved most I/O like Ethernet, USB, MIPI and GPIO into a custom I/O controller chip called the RP1. It talks to the main CPU over 4-lane PCIe. They also have a custom PMIC (Dialog DA9091) with a built-in RTC and support for external backup battery. Everything else seems pretty standard.

New comment by zxcvgm in "iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus"

zxcvgm — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 04:04:44 +0000

It is available on Windows too, in iTunes. You need to connect the cable once to enable it. I’m using this to sync my music and backup my iPhone.

New comment by zxcvgm in "System76 Open Firmware"

zxcvgm — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 07:40:03 +0000

I'm impressed to see this paragraph in the README:

> System76 customers may request board schematics for their system by sending an email to firmware@system76.com with the subject line "Schematics for model", where model is one of the supported models listed above.

> Please include the serial number of your system for verification.

This means that you can actually troubleshoot and repair the board yourself, if you're so inclined.