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aquamo

77 karma · joined April 16, 2017

military and unix sysadmin veteran technologist -- [ my public key: https://keybase.io/danmack; my proof: https://keybase.io/danmack/sigs/RH05NYa7lq4WS7inQLd3Af16IeTrK5CxfPdglji2HOQ ]
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aquamo··on Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone
Loved this story! Also good timing as a lot of us are watching the HBO mini-series now. I especially liked this quote: "The reason it's so beautiful and so peaceful is precisely because we can't consume it. Like, perhaps, all real paradises everywhere."
aquamo··on I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet
I like the ambition, has some similarities to this project:

  http://freedomcontroller.com
aquamo··on 1980 Atari 800 ad: “It will never become obsolete”
I couldn’t afford the ATARI 800 but my 400 still works today. Just played some missile command, star raiders, and Miner 2049 on it a few months ago. I learned BASIC and 6502 on mine so will always have a soft spot for them.
aquamo··on GNU Awk 5.0
Congrats! Long live {,g}awk !
aquamo··on The MacBook keyboard fiasco is way worse than Apple thinks
On my 2016 MBP, I also map CapsLock -> Control and Left_Control to ESC. It's goofy having ESC down there but I need a physical key as I do not look at the keyboard while typing in vim - there is no haptic feedback from the glass surface.

I am 50/50 VIM / EMacs so the it's important for my control key to be on the home row.

I'm not sure why keyboards even have caps lock. It's rude in chat right :-) I started with Sun keyboards where control was on the home row. I guess if one spends hours typing long capitalized acronyms daily, then it makes sense.

It's personal preference in the end. I certainly wont buy another MBP - my 2016 has had 4 trips to the Apple store since I bought it for key replacements.

aquamo··on The de Havilland Comet
When I first saw the headline I was thinking it was this Komet :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_163_Komet

Also an interesting aircraft.

aquamo··on A Year-Long Undercover Plot to Blow Up Eve Online's Most Notorious Space Station
One reason a small corporation might want a structure is to pursue industrial activities (building stuff, refining ore, etc.) that are either not available in the area or for a lower tax rate. You are correct that it wouldn't be to protect assets.
aquamo··on MX-80 – Ahead of its time: A small, lightweight computer printer
I saved up money to buy one of these in college, was amazing, fast, sounded like a well tuned race car :-) Still have some CSCI homework and projects on paper printed on this from my Atari ST.
aquamo··on Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names – With Examples
One option might be to use a hash of one's DNA sequence and be done with it. The name identifier can then just be an image with any markings made by the person. This would then move name / id search from a character set problem to an image recognition problem. Works for me :-)
aquamo··on Bali’s 'magic' bamboo homes [video]
My guess is no. Concrete fails under tension and with the irregular and natural assembly process the structure probably would have issues with tension and all the extra weight. The cost of filling each bamboo void would also make it costly and less renewable. My gut feeling.
aquamo··on Two men are trying to become the first person to cross Antarctica alone
How to the skis they use differ from classic style cross country skis? In the image they look a little wider than any I've owned.
aquamo··on SMT Solving on an iPhone
Thanks for this - with the release of the A12X Bionic, I've wanted to do something similar - i.e. build some specialized tools to leverage that CPU for atypical / non-mobile use cases.

I wish Apple would get on with it and include Terminal.App and the FreeBSD user land and Xcode for iOS so we can start running a shell and doing interesting things with this new hardware :-)

aquamo··on iPhones are allergic to helium
Wow. This is good to know. As a TriMix SCUBA diver, we should keep our iPhones away from the fill station and away from us when we are venting / testing our mixes :-)
aquamo··on Mutiny at the big five is part of the future of work
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

I had to look that up.

aquamo··on Google’s Jeff Dean’s undergrad senior thesis on neural networks (1990) [pdf]
I worked in the UofM CSCI department in those days. Vipin's parallel programming research brought in some cool hardware for the time including clusters of RS6000s, IRIX Challenge servers, an IBM SP2 and even a small nCUBE. Also we had a variety of interconnects available including HiPPI, early fibre channel, and even bleeding edge 100 Mbit Ethernet to run MPI and PVM over :-)
aquamo··on Google’s Jeff Dean’s undergrad senior thesis on neural networks (1990) [pdf]
enscript -2Gr yeah -). used to be my default mode as well!
aquamo··on Why Gov.uk content should be published in HTML and not PDF
I'd like to see version controlled text files used for important legal documents and many other government docs. Allow the presentation layer to be handled on the end points. Maybe something like markdown will be sufficient.

I always look up to the fixed width font model used by IETF RFCs. They are extremely readable and searchable and last for a long time.

aquamo··on MacBook Pro with faster performance and new features for pros
As a long time emacs user, I've always had cap-locks mapped as my control key (plus the emacs key-bindings work in html forms and in anything using gnu deadline) which is a bonus. So on my MBP with touch-bar, I have had this mapping so I can have a physical ESC key:

CAPSLOCK -> CTRL LEFT CTRL -> ESC

It's not great, but it works. The last time I had to deal with a company who put the ESC key in a weird place was back in college where we have several of these HP Apollo/720 keyboards:

https://alum.wpi.edu/~tfraser/Machines/hpapollo720.jpg

:-)

aquamo··on MacBook Pro with faster performance and new features for pros
IMHO the touchbar requires more effort and distraction to control the brightness and volume. What previously was one key-press to dim/brighten or mute/volume - all without me having to take my focus from the screen now requires a multi-stages process with no tactile feedback.

No thanks. Plus the keyboard will likely have the same issues my 2016 version has. I’ve had keys replaced 4 times already.

aquamo··on Suicide rising across the US
It's interesting they didn't mention the high rates amongst veterans.

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_veteran...), in 2012 there were 6,500 which seems like enough to get a slice in a pie chart.

aquamo··on Things no one tells you before an Antarctic expedition (2015)
Yes indeed! One of the advantages of diving underwater with a re-breather is that you lose less heat through respiration compared to open circuit SCUBA diving. Also the type of gases you have in your mix matter but that's another topic altogether.

For the record, I've eaten butter camping in the winter - long lasting dense energy source for sure :-) My favorite is Kerry Gold Irish unsalted :-)

aquamo··on No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself
After reading some of the responses to the google demo, my first reaction was to assume this natural language processing magic was just a placeholder until the business had a proper api in place. After all, that would be more efficient, right?

Google doesn't take human phone calls so why should anyone else have to? And as good workers, efficiency and productivity should trump any expression of humanity we might have left in this end game of automation :-)

aquamo··on Writing FreeBSD Malware [video]
Nice presentation.

Is the hardenedbsd web site's security feature comparison table up to date?

Edited to remove comment about my confusion that Carolinacon14 -> 2014; not the case. It's 2018.

aquamo··on Why (blank) gets you root
Nice play-by-play analysis of the problem; thanks! Apple's authentication is not simple nor clearly documented (at least not where I could easily find it), I learned a lot following along.
aquamo··on Sugar industry withheld possible evidence of cancer link 50 years ago
When reading a book about Alan Turing, I came across a reference to "Natural Wonders, 1928" by Edwin Tenney Brewster (free in iBooks and on the web) - where he refers to Chapter 38: Of Sugar and other Poisons :=)

It's not surprising that after we made fat the demon, the supply change replaced fat with with sugar (at least in yogurts) and type 2 diabetes is now rampant.

:-)

aquamo··on Fossil – Next Generation
I use fossil for small projects and I often import trees from GitHub into fossil-scm to visualize and reason about the history.

I really appreciate the mindset that Dr. H and friends have brought to both SQLite and Fossil - that is - minimal and efficient code with very low dependencies.

I first came across fossil-scm when I was looking for a simple way to host some development repos for a small group; it is so much easier with the integrated cli/server than what I found with git. Also, I love the ease of setting up replication and the he single file format.

Keep up the good work, glad to see there is some focus on the next generation!

I'd like to second the feature request mentioned elsewhere in this thread about having some for of access control on sub-trees or files within a fossil project - but - maybe that could be accomplished by simply doing a separate project / vendor tree type pattern IDK.

aquamo··on I cured my tech fatigue by ditching feeds
Feed fasting helps me too; I log into FB every 60-61 days or so. I'm thinking about limiting Twitter to days that start with a 'T' just make it fun. And hacker news is okay on days that end in a 'y' :-)

Given that these attention grabbers are now weaponized, it's good to fight back; I think we benefit from periods of boredom and deep thought.

aquamo··on Ask HN: What alternatives to Powerpoint/Prezi are there?
Emacs org-mode w/Beamer or reveal.js export.
aquamo··on Suicide Linux
1) death by accident (or rm -rf'ing) is not suicide 2) has the bar been lowered that much now? a simple bash configuration makes a new O/S or distribution?

:-)

aquamo··on Plain emails not only save time but work better (2016)
I try to force email to look like an RFC (e.g. https://www.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc-index.txt) or UseNet posting using GNUS or some other text only mail reader. Getting rid of all the animated images, markup noise, etc. allows me to focus on the pure information in the email. If the images are valuable, I'll open them up but it's surprising not that important most of the time. YMMV.
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