Hacker News Reader

aquabeagleon Upgrading OpenBSD on a Pentium 133

While this article is about OpenBSD's floppy support, if you already had OpenBSD on the machine and working networking, upgrading it without any external devices is as easy as:

    ftp -o /bsd.rd https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.7/i386/bsd.rd

Then reboot and at the boot> prompt, just type "bsd.rd".

On 6.6 and newer, just type sysupgrade and that's it.

aquabeagleon My dad got scammed for $3k worth of gift cards

Seems like the FTC or some other government agency could save a lot of people a lot of heartache with a PSA targeted at elderly people. Commercials during daytime TV basically saying no one will ever legitimately call you and ask you to buy gift cards as a method of payment.

aquabeagleon Space Jam's 1996 website is still alive

As is Heaven's Gate's website - http://heavensgate.com/

aquabeagleon Updating the Language of SPI Pin Labels to Remove Casual References to Slavery

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century

aquabeagleon GE Fridge DRM Workaround

I think we're supposed to call them "allowlists" now.

aquabeagleon Audio Engineers Built a Shield to Deflect Police Sound Cannons

And making a video about how to defend against them can get you sued.

https://twitter.com/bennjordan/status/1268961057743294472

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sqIvak-4Ek

aquabeagleon Haiku R1/beta2 has been released

I've tried Haiku a few times and liked it, but it feels like the beta label has been around forever and is not doing them any favors. It's 2020, you're not publishing software as a big-box release in stores, just cut a release already and then keep iterating!

From Wikipedia:

It wasn't until September, 2009 that Haiku reached its first milestone with the release of Haiku R1/Alpha 1. Then in November, 2012 the R1/Alpha 4.1 was released, while work continued on nightly builds.[8] On September 28, 2018, the Haiku R1/Beta 1 was released.[9] On June 9, 2020, Haiku R1/Beta 2 was released.

Almost 11 years and it's still not out of beta?!

aquabeagleon Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

Google is king of NIH.

aquabeagleon OpenBSD is more to blame for Pale Moon absence, due to their hatred of GPLv3

So one hack that forks a project and just changes the name on everything to call it their own, talking about a browser fork that did the same thing. Do these people actually contribute any useful code?

aquabeagleon I made a font based on my handwriting

There was a free website many years ago that I used, where you print out a form with blocks on it and write each letter, then scan it and upload it and it gets turned into a font. I can't seem to find it now (or maybe it went paid).

Microsoft has an app that lets you do this with a Windows tablet:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/microsoft-font-maker/9n920...

aquabeagleon Why I Use Suckless Tools

Seems like having to use a bunch of popular patches is counter to the author's other praises about how simple and minimal the software is. Why doesn't upstream integrate them and let everyone use them without having to patch?

aquabeagleon OpenBSD 6.7

Which of the hundreds of Linux distributions that have free/volunteer resources split amongst them do you run?

aquabeagleon Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

Immediately sold them and kept the cash

aquabeagleon IoT Emergency Alert Button with RPi and Notify17 (who launched on HN last year)

Notify17 seems really expensive for just proxying push notifications. You only get 75 free per month?

aquabeagleon Apple's MacOS Server has a 1.5/5 rating on the Mac App Store

Because macOS Server was a large reason why companies bought the Mac Mini.

aquabeagleon Senate leadership pushing a surveillance bill as Americans focused on Covid-19

Which was largely written by Joe Biden in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/andrewkaczynski/surveil...

aquabeagleon A backup rotation filter for the Unix shell

tarsnap desperately needs something like this included with it.

aquabeagleon Stop Using Encrypted Email

If you consider PGP something that mostly works, and Signal the fringe contrarian view

We're talking about email here, so yeah, the number of encrypted emails I've received with PGP is non-zero and through Signal is zero.

aquabeagleon Stop Using Encrypted Email

Typical security industry contrarianism.

"Stop using that thing that mostly works as intended and is integrated into lots of email clients and systems, and has a number of independent implementations, and has the decentralized properties that match email."

"What should we use instead?"

"shrug You can send encrypted stickers in Signal, isn't that neat?"

If you're going to advocate for everyone to stop using something that they rely on, make sure there's a viable alternative for them to switch to first (or throw your weight behind making/enhancing one). Otherwise you're just telling people to stop using plastic straws and giving them shitty paper straws in exchange. People know they're bad but the alternatives are worse to them so they stick with the bad thing.

aquabeagleon Flight Simulator 2020 – New Development Footage

It's the Boss Level.

aquabeagleon Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Adds WireGuard Support

And yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22175431

aquabeagleon Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?

Now take that F-ckwad, and remove the Anonymity by requiring them to use their real name. And bingo, now you live in Interesting Times.

https://www.reddit.com/r/insanepeoplefacebook/ would like to disagree.

aquabeagleon Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?

I wish I would have not fought the tools so much.

I started Android programming from the command line using make/ant and testing on a device because I didn't like Android Studio. This ended up wasting a lot of time and energy over the years as I had to integrate more 3rd party libraries (including Google's own crap).

Same thing for iOS. I didn't like building GUIs in Interface Builder so I did everything in code. Over time as iOS devices came in different sizes, this became harder to do properly. I should have given in early and learned to use Interface Builder, auto layout, etc.

aquabeagleon OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

The title on this story makes it sound like OpenBSD stopped updating Firefox altogether. That's not the case, it just stopped backporting non-ESR Firefox updates to its -stable branch.

aquabeagleon Removing the Linux /dev/random blocking pool

On OpenBSD:

    $ ls -l /dev/*random*
    lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel         7 Dec 10 15:05 /dev/random@ -> urandom
    crw-r--r--  1 root  wheel   45,   0 Jan  6 15:30 /dev/urandom

aquabeagleon Authentication Vulnerabilities in OpenBSD

That you primarily know of Tavis from his FVWM config and not his security work is really weird.

aquabeagleon A tiny pharmacy is identifying problems with common drugs

It's in ports/packages now, but it used to be in base.

aquabeagleon Git repository summary on your terminal

It's trying to be like neofetch for showing off your terminal theme on /r/unixporn

aquabeagleon Sudo vulnerability

Fun fact: sudo is maintained by an OpenBSD developer

aquabeagleon TUI for lobste.rs, Written in Rust

If it says CLI, I tend to think of it as a normal command that runs and spits out some output (or nothing). A TUI means a full-screen, long-running, interactive application.

So if this were a CLI for lobste.rs, I'd assume it just fetches the stories and prints them.