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BenjiWiebe

2,884 karma · joined February 17, 2017

Located in central Kansas. Work with cheese/neighborhood IT guy/hobby programmer. Born and raised on a dairy farm (and ~1/3 of the milk gets turned into cheese). Random qualifications: Amateur Extra (ham radio), volunteer firefighter in a very quiet area for 5+ years, Rubik's cube PB 19 seconds, can pick open an American Lock 1100 series if given enough time. Contact: itsme at (my HN username).com.

Family business: www.jasonwiebedairy.com

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BenjiWiebe··on Barcodes are about to go extinct
When you generate a QR code you can choose the level of redundancy. So a code can be generated that is super picky and needs to be perfect to scan, or one can be generated that can be read even when badly damaged.
BenjiWiebe··on Reasons I didn't become an EMT, ranked
If you're in a small enough rural enough volunteer fire department, fundraisers are fairly rare. And also no medical training needed (or even firefighter training for that matter!)
BenjiWiebe··on Show HN: What 482 hospitals charge vs. what insurers pay, from their own files
My friend is the administrator of a small hospital (~15 beds).

He says with insurance one of the problems is that the insurance company will sometimes pay out less than the cost of the service, and there's nothing they (the hospital) can do about it.

He says they actually have a slightly better rate of payment for services for non-insured patients.

Also he said there's a serious problem with people not paying their share of the bill, when the deductible has not yet been met.

BenjiWiebe··on Alternatives to GPS are around the corner
Paywalled. And archive.is doesn't seem to be able to archive it.
BenjiWiebe··on 'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees
Why do you have to cancel your second card?

The chance is incredibly small that your second card just happens to get hacked at the same time as your first card.

I have 6 (I think) credit cards, and mainly use 3 of them.

BenjiWiebe··on The case against JPEG XL
I'm guessing HEIC.
BenjiWiebe··on I fixed a tractor using John Deere's self-repair service. Farmers aren't sold
Some newer equipment has no service manual available.

It's a subscription, with a DRM system so you have to use their app to browse the manual, and you can't print/save more than a couple pages per month.

BenjiWiebe··on I fixed a tractor using John Deere's self-repair service. Farmers aren't sold
And those get taken down when JD finds them.
BenjiWiebe··on I fixed a tractor using John Deere's self-repair service. Farmers aren't sold
How about; if it's already documented, make it available to the end user.

The right to repair cases that bother me most is where the company goes out of their way to prevent end-user repair (cryptographic pairing of modules!?), or where service manuals/information exist but are only available to dealers.

BenjiWiebe··on Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead
One thing Fedora does now, is use zram.

In my experience it works really well. I wonder why my computer is a bit sluggish, and find out I have several gigs in zram.

If that was in swap on a disk, it would be really painful.

BenjiWiebe··on Flock worker calls police on investigator filming public camera installation
For that, call 911. It's a fire risk, and if the tree pushes the line down to the ground, it's an electrocution risk.

At least in our county, the non-emergency number calls the same people as the emergency number.

The emergency number has recording and location and all that fun stuff. And a different ringtone.

You needn't be afraid of calling 911.

Story time: I've called 911 and immediately said "this is not an emergency" when the call was picked up. I then said that the high speed chase "bad guy" had taken the exit and killed his lights. The 911 dispatcher relayed the info over the radio and the cops all hit the brakes and made a u-turn in the median immediately.

BenjiWiebe··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
There's different types of mental illness.

For example, don't you think a person with depression would be better at diagnosing depression in others, than someone who has never experienced it?

BenjiWiebe··on Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
Human scale wait timers aren't a big issue for bots. More parallel requests. Or more websites being scraped in parallel, if the website doesn't allow multiple timers going at once.

Whereas number crunching actually ties up some CPU time.

BenjiWiebe··on Why are there no flow batteries with symmetric ferrocyanide electrolytes?
Have to abbreviate it as FCN. Cyanide is ~320 times more toxic than ferrocyanide.
BenjiWiebe··on Why are there no flow batteries with symmetric ferrocyanide electrolytes?
*ferrocyanide Less toxic than cyanide.

Potassium ferrocyanide: 1.6g/kg LD50 Potassium cyanide: 5mg/kg

So cyanide is approx 320 times more toxic.

BenjiWiebe··on A Small Telescope That Surprised Me
Though with how much labor it is, you do have to value your time at $0 pretty much.

Which is fine if you want to make it yourself as part of the hobby. But if your only purpose is to save money...

BenjiWiebe··on Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones
Remember there's also BeiDou, Galileo, and GLONASS as well.

Our RTK base station (a Ublox ZED-F9P receiver, with a cheap patch antenna on the roof) can currently see 45 GNSS satellites.

BenjiWiebe··on AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint
I'm using uMatrix. Works fine for me.
BenjiWiebe··on Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word
It's the industry-standard (for grocery stores at least) term; doesn't mean it isn't wrong, but it's the way they use it.

Could be deceptive, could be ignorance, but it's multiple unrelated grocery store owners, talking to me as a seller.

BenjiWiebe··on Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months, up to 10x the lowest ever tracked prices
I've seen some fail. Might have had to do with the fact that the computers were literally flooded (river came up faster than the sandbaggers could keep up) while running.
BenjiWiebe··on GPS and the Lost Art of Getting Lost
Really? I was under the impression, and Wikipedia supports me on this, that geocaching was always about using GPS.
BenjiWiebe··on RustDesk now supports true unattended remote access on Wayland
Well, there could be quite a range of performance between a mid-tier laptop GPU (his consumer GPU), the average consumer GPU, and the average (gamer's) consumer GPU.
BenjiWiebe··on Dear people who work at the airport
What, your stock camera app gives you step by step directions?!

Feels like your explanation is missing a few steps.

BenjiWiebe··on Dear people who work at the airport
Perhaps it's newer software, better at flagging and identifying things?
BenjiWiebe··on Picking berries is my meditation
Actually they literally quoted the 'food' bit. There's actually people who hunt for food, and enjoy it also.

You can fish for sport, or for food, or you can have fun/sport fishing for food.

BenjiWiebe··on Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot
Certificate Transparency logs
BenjiWiebe··on uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
Yes it does. Hobbyists are willing to spend their own money, hence their blog doesn't need ads.

Businesses make money by selling products/services, so they don't need money.

Wikipedia is donation supported.

GP is pretty much saying - if it can only survive by running ads, let's do without it.

BenjiWiebe··on Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word
That's actually a 50% profit margin. Also known as a 50% markup, even though you marked the price up by 100%.
BenjiWiebe··on Should you stop cracking your knuckles?
Tripping and falling can mess you up for a long time. And I don't mean broken bones.
BenjiWiebe··on Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak
A1 steak sauce. Been around for 195 years, hence the GP didn't feel the need to expand.
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