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Comment by dusted | Hacker News Reader

Apart from the social media and streaming stuff:

- Spectroid: A spectrum analyzer to help me identify "that annoying sound I hear" or "what's wrong with the sound in this place?" I'm not good at ignoring sound, but it helps me when I understand something about it, like "oh, that's a 10 khz harmonic" still annoying but slightly less.

- DiggieDog: Gopher client, extremely fast, good for when I'm somewhere with REAL bad Internet.

- Ulysse Speedometer: For driving.. I don't like the ones in cars because they're always somewhat wrong.

- Color Note: Maybe not a special app..

- Podcast Addict: Maybe also not..

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How could an app ("Ulysse Speedometer") be better at measuring the vehicle speed?? This seems so wrong!

Off topic but this is a real gripe of mine - analogue speedos that go all the way up to 240 kmph (~150 mph). I am only ever going to do half that speed, so why not just make the dial go to only 120/(80) and give the needle (and me!) twice as much precision!

You probably would better like a digital display that shows a number instead of a needle

Some cars also use unevenly spaced tick marks on an analog dial. Nice in that it gives you the sweep needle and range of scale without overly compressing the range of most interest.

Analog tachometers for race cars do/did the the same thing:

https://www.primusracingparts.com/Racetech-tachometer-0-8-rp...

Maybe limit the dial at 100mph?. Doing 80 on the Interstate near me will get you passed by the impatient. But the real question is why do you need that much precision?

Many gauges are typically designed to work best in the center 50% of their range.

Vehicle speedometers are factory made to display wrong info. I believe they add about 10% to your actual speed.

The reason is error-margin of speedometers, it's about 10% so they err on the side of caution.

Do you have sources for this?

Even if this is not just urban legends, a speed read from GPS data on a phone can only be much worse

https://www.drive.com.au/news/how-accurate-is-your-speedo-20...

Jeep Cherokee appears to be the exception here

My car is using the rotation of the front wheel axle to infer the speed. So it depends on tire diameter (tire type and wear), air pressure, temperature, and the precision of the mechanics involved, and it's generally nonlinear (difference gets larger at higher speeds).

My phone is sampling GPS position at a few Hz, and while the position itself may not be absolutely precise, the relative position from one sample to the next is very good.

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