Hacker News Reader

BuffaloBagelon Technology of water in ancient Iran from prehistory to the Islamic Golden Age

I think Persians of that era would not make a distinction between religious and governmental rule.

BuffaloBagelon Emergency measures needed to rescue Great Salt Lake from ongoing collapse

Utahn here. We don't have a water problem so much as we have an alfalfa problem. It consumes most of our water with very little economic benefit to the state as a whole.

BuffaloBagelon Novell NetWare: The King Returns from the Dead (2001)

Kuhnis rendering plant. I worked across the street from Novell at US Bureau of Reclamation.

https://www.deseret.com/2010/1/18/20365258/juab-county-anima...

BuffaloBagelon Rising steel prices, interest rates could push NuScale Utah project to $100/MWh

Dispatchable energy sir.

BuffaloBagelon Solving my truck’s TPMS sensor problem with the help of an RTL-SDR dongle

Tires do spontaneously lose tire pressure. 1-3 psi/month.

There was no margin on tire pressure. TPMS would absolutely have saved lives. General public runs consistently low tire pressure. Source: I am a member of general public and consistently forget to top up. Also, paid my way through college in the 1980s in a gas station back when full service was a thing.

BuffaloBagelon Solving my truck’s TPMS sensor problem with the help of an RTL-SDR dongle

I knew a Firestone / Ford Explorer widow. She had a flock of kids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_and_Ford_tire_contro...

BuffaloBagelon An Alleged Fraud Uncovered by a Short Seller Ends in Gunfire

Mormon here. Saw headline; said to myself "even odds Mormons involved". Read story, Mormons confirmed.

BuffaloBagelon Elizabeth Holmes Found Guilty of Four Charges of Fraud

Next up, Trevor Milton of Nikola fame.

BuffaloBagelon Gitlab servers are being exploited in DDoS attacks

My VOIP vendor, voip.ms, has been under attack for weeks. Wonder if this is the source?

BuffaloBagelon The ties that bind: Cradling in Tajikistan

https://imgur.com/a/e9p1vSx

I purchased the wooden smoking pipe looking device in the image at a Bazar in Tajikistan a few years ago. It's used for bundled male infants to direct urine out of the blankets.

BuffaloBagelon Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

Cool side story is the American tech millionaire who has dedicated his life and fortune to the recovery of Gorongosa National Park.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_C._Carr

https://gorongosa.org/greg-carr/

BuffaloBagelon Ray Ozzie's latest venture is a cheap IoT board with flat rate connectivity

@rozzie I deploy in the rural intermountain west where Verizon reigns supreme for connectivity. Are you on their network?

BuffaloBagelon Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

He told us he has just cashed out of an alarm company for $1M when he engaged us. Turns out that was typical Trevor hype... he had gotten nowhere near that amount. Would sometimes pay his invoices with stacks of $50 American Express prepaid cards. Drove my bookkeeper bananas. I assume the reason was rewards related. His claims for traffic on his Upillar platform were ludicrous; made out of whole cloth. Hired Glenn Beck to shill for him. Drove a comically lifted 4WD truck with UPillar emblazoned all over it and seem to always have plenty of motorized toys... boats, ATVs, etc. All funded by investors. At the end he poached one of our employees and left us. I was glad to be rid of him; the engagement was never comfortable for me.

BuffaloBagelon Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

My web services company built an eBay/Craigslist clone for Milton about 10 years ago. Trump level bullshitter but with an indomitable drive. Despite being a returned Mormon missionary Trevor has a loose ethical screw.

BuffaloBagelon Volvo and Daimler bet on hydrogen truck boom this decade

You've confused weight with mass.

BuffaloBagelon Stretch from Boston Dynamics

I regularly ship 50lb boxes which are 13x13x13 inches to Amazon fulfillment centers. No way they can be picked up and moved by suction on one side.

BuffaloBagelon When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

I know a guy from Africa named Test. That's a no-go on Facebook's platform so he is known by Tesst there.

BuffaloBagelon The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans (2012)

Telescope Peak hike one summer by myself is a fond memory. Super cool that there is an 11k ft+ delta from too to DV low point.

BuffaloBagelon Advancing electrolysis: Splitting water to store energy as hydrogen

INL (the site) put food on our family's table during my childhood in Idaho Falls.

BuffaloBagelon Heavy-lift ship lifts entire cruise liner out of the water [video]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogging_and_sagging

BuffaloBagelon Heavy-lift ship lifts entire cruise liner out of the water [video]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil#Bunker_fuel

BuffaloBagelon The Six-Fold Nature of Snow

Ice 9 is best ice.

BuffaloBagelon Reasons not to reveal your DNA

An unknown half-brother found me after an Ancestry.com DNA test. It's been a weird but very fulfilling experience for me. I realize it's not that way for everyone.

BuffaloBagelon No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

> (Also, why is Jeff Bezos using Medium? He owns a newspaper.)

Failure to immediately understand why this is bad idea boggles my mind. Maybe this is how we ended up with Trump in the first place.

BuffaloBagelon I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

US citizen here. I was in Mozambique, England, Romania and Denmark with my Fi phone in 2017. Despite being listed as a country Fi covered, I could never get service in Mozambique (Beria), despite spending a few hours with several courteous Google Fi customer support people. My experience in the European countries was satisfactory. I don't recall any issues and it was nice to have my US phone number just work in those places.

An earlier trip in 2016 to Tajikistan in central Asia with my Fi phone required purchasing a local SIM card.

I've since given up on Google Fi and switched my number back to Verizon and have been happily using a $200 Moto G5 Plus purchased through Amazon.

BuffaloBagelon SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating from distant galaxy

We don't know what we don't know.

BuffaloBagelon The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

I think you mean to say you are using these devices to simulate a camera?

BuffaloBagelon The Worst U.S. Maritime Disaster in Decades

Wonder why shippers don't have a 24/7 Operations Center employing meteorologists and tracking weather systems and ships and in close contact with ship's crew. It struck me that there was a lot of friction for the crew to just plot up-to-date weather/forecasts and the ship's course. Crew was constantly fighting for current data and good/correct visualization.