Hacker News Reader

Dachande663on Pebble Mega Update – July 2026

It still pains me the only way to access some features is to have an account on Apple, Google, or Microsoft. No standard auth, no generic oauth.

Dachande663on Apocketlypse

https://m5stack.com/

A range of integrated ESP32 boards. Great fun to use.

Dachande663on Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything

I recently set up a new gaming PC, made from cannibalised parts of other machines. I installed Windows 11 as there was no point starting on an older OS (and Bazzite etc really struggled with the nvidia GPU so Linux was a non-starter even though I love my Steam Deck and Proton).

The one saving grace for all of this was Win11Debloat[0]. I cannot recommend this set of configuration changes etc more highly. It kills _almost_ everything that irked me about 11. Use at your own risk, but it's now part of my standard install practice.

[0] https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

Dachande663on Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock

Upvoted because this stinks to high hell of an LLM response. Half the GPs comments seem to be in a similar vein. It’s such a shame but you can’t fight the trolls so don’t take it to heart.

Dachande663on Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock

Yeah, it's super quick to start with a MK I eyeball to set them, but having a sensor just avoids any drift. I got away with using one by taking a reading and moving the other hand to check they weren't on top of each other already, and then doing a full rotation between readings.

Dachande663on Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock

I'm currently making something similar but using a BKA30D-R5 (a dual stepper motor used in car dashboards) and a hall sensor to zero the hands.

Dachande663on Automatic Programming

I used to aspire to reach the same and now I lose a bit more respect with their every drag of the AI-pipe.

Dachande663on 6 Years Building Video Players. 9B Requests. Starting Over

I want to like Mux. We use Mux. But everything feels half done.

- No 2FA support, at all. Support says it's not on their roadmap. Not acceptable in 2026.

- Editing subtitles requires a series of API calls, meaning I had to make a mini editor for our staff to change a word.

- Same with editing anything really. Playback restrictions, glossaries etc. There's no UI for doing it in-app. I understand that the majority of traffic is via the API, but having nothing in-app feels like an omission rather than a choice.

- Every video has multiple keys; uploads, assets, playbacks. And it's a pain moving from one to another.

Overall we use them, but I wouldn't choose to use them again.

Dachande663on iCloud Photos Downloader

I’ve been using this for several years now on a little unraid box to download new photos nightly. There’s a few docker containers that wrap in support for notifying when 2FA is required etc. Always makes me nervous, the access it has, but I’d rather have my photos backed up somewhere I own.

Dachande663on The Colonization of Confidence

(Re-)Poster, but not the author. This was submitted a month ago but I've just stumbled across it and was amazed it garnered no attention.

Dachande663on Video Game Websites in the early 00s

So many of these have… designs. Take the buttons, they have texture, they fit into a larger design element. They’re not a rectangle with rounded corners and maybe a gradient.

Dachande663on Video Game Websites in the early 00s

HBO was where I cut my teeth learning to write via fan fiction. Such a shame to see it languishing now.

Dachande663on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

I’m very been trying to get into hardware more. This years project was a speaker which is nearly done (with a few weeks to spare).

Next years (and probably a couple years after) is an electro-mechanical smart watch. Sourced some Ronda GB22 gearbox motors and tritium tubes and planning on using a pcb for the face. What could go wrong.

Dachande663on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

I love this concept and the execution.

Dachande663on MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

Does anyone have any recommendations for a simple S3-wrapper to a standard dir? I've got a few apps/services that can send data to S3 (or S3 compatible services) that I want to point to a local server I have, but they don't support SFTP or any of the more "primitive" solutions. I did use a python local-s3 thing, but it was... not good.

Dachande663on Chaining FFmpeg with a Browser Agent

ffmpeg is the only community where I've asked for help and been told "if you have to ask, you're too stupid to use this project". Needless to say, it was a welcoming community I continued engaging with.

Dachande663on U.S. Sanctions Cambodian Conglomerate, Citing Role in 'Pig-Butchering' Scams

https://archive.is/2025.10.14-150019/https://www.wsj.com/bus...

Dachande663on When Computer Magazines Were Everywhere

I miss the days of eagerly picking up the latest PCFormat from the cornershop. The guides, the reviews, but mostly the CD running some old Macromedia Shockwave/HTML website with random apps and tools I could never download in the few minutes a day of dial-up time. Wish I’d kept some of my favourite issues.

Dachande663on The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

Page seems to be down now.

Archive link: https://archive.is/UjCgv

Dachande663on How Hyper Built a 1m-Accurate Indoor GPS

Apple use UWB[0] for nearby location sensing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon#Apple_U1

Dachande663on The current hype around autonomous agents, and what actually works in production

OP here. I posted this, this morning and then promptly forgot about it. How come the title has been changed from the blog posts own?

Dachande663on Exposing a web service with Cloudflare Tunnel (2022)

(2022)

Dachande663on XSLT

Many, many years back I used Symphony21[0] for an events website. It’s whole premise was build an XML structure via blueprints and then your theme is just XSLT templates for pages.

Gave it up because it turns out the little things are just a pain. Formatting dates, showing article numbers and counts etc.

[0] https://www.getsymphony.com/

Dachande663on ChatGPT is my static site generator

I remember a lot of them initially struggled with the switch to CSS (but then got much better) and then eventually responsive design just hit them hard. Normal users just didn't know how to handle making things flow and the tools struggled to explain the necessary primitives to them. IMO.

Dachande663on Pentagon Has Been Pushing Americans to Believe in UFOs for Decades, New Report

The original WSJ article for those who want it:

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/ufo-us-disinf...

And a paywall pass:

https://archive.is/vTPII

Dachande663on OpenAI is retaining all ChatGPT logs "indefinitely." Here's who's affected

Question for the crowd: if using the OpenAI service in Azure, is that included in the retention? OpenAI say API access but don’t specify if that’s just their endpoints or anyone running their models.

Dachande663on We identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job

From somewhere in the depths of an old reddit thread, someone recommended asking candidates "How fat is Kim Jong Un?" Instant hang-up.

Dachande663on Reverse geocoding is hard

Fun fact that was dredged up because the author mentions Australia: GPS points change. Their example coordinates give 6 decimal places, accurate to about 10-15cm. Australia a few years back shifted all locations 1.8m because of continental drift they’re moving north at ~7cm/year). So even storing coordinates as a source of truth can be hazardous. We had to move several thousand points for a client when this happened.