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arantius

1,113 karma · joined March 23, 2008

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arantius··on Right to Repair: The Price Is Not Right
Part of me loves this idea. I've had things fail, and would have been happy for warranty coverage. But:

* What about the market for truly inexpensive things? Do I get e.g. my plastic knife replaced every time it gets dull, for 20 years? Does a consumer still have the option to buy a truly inexpensive (and low quality) specialized tool, that they know(/expect) they'll only need once? (Or will they all be expensive, because it's now illegal to make something that won't last for 20 years?) * How does this affect expensive things? What will a car cost, if I have to pay for all the possible issues that will come up with it over 20 years up front? * How will this be enforced? Just form a corporation that "goes out of business" every year or two, and is magically replaced by another distinct corporate entity. Sure the warranty lasts 20 years but if the company servicing the warranty doesn't ... (The even more significant proliferation of e.g. HOOLEEZOO branded items?)

arantius··on Ask HN: Why do computers/tablets/etc "freeze up" as they get older?
In at least one case (I've most clearly observed this in cheapish Android tablets): inexpensive flash storage.

I've been able to observe, most obviously with my first gen Nexus 7 but also with other devices, that pure CPU benchmarks are still fine, but "disk" benchmarks show terribly low (~100kbps) throughput. Lots of modern software assumes flash/SSD is fast, but inexpensive flash wears out to the point that this assumption fails.

At least once I've seen a thorough wipe very temporarily restore some performance in such a case.

arantius··on Switch off bad TV settings
It took me several tries to find it but the Projectivy launcher ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spocky.pro... ) is a great replacement for the Android/Google TV launcher like it used to be, with no "suggestions" -- just your content.

But definitely use the "override current launcher" setting. The description implies this is a "only if you're having problems" option, but I find it makes a variety of subtle things work the way they should.

arantius··on We No Longer Need a Big Carrier's Wireless Plan. Discount Ones Are the Way
Not OP, and they said what they use (Red Pocket) but I also pay $5/mo for service from Tello ( https://tello.com/ ). 500MB/mo, data only, calls through Google Voice via data. (100 minutes of voice $1/mo extra.) Lots of choice in building your own plan.
arantius··on Detecting SSH Tunnels (2017)
You're aware that (Open)SSH can have its behavior, including port forwards, modified at runtime after launch?

See e.g. https://linux.die.net/man/1/ssh section "Escape Characters" and "~C' Open command line. Currently this allows the addition of port forwardings ..."

arantius··on Introduction to HTTP Multipart
Streaming. What if the part(s) are being generated on the fly, and don't exist to have a length? Requiring that the sender specify the length up front requires the length to be known. Maybe I'm (e.g.) tarring/zipping up a lot of data, and I don't want to hold it all in memory/write it to a temporary file first.
arantius··on There’s no universal cordless power tool battery – why?
> ... batteries that use flat cells (called "Pouch Batteries") ...

They are but I think the more official/rigorous term is "prismatic cell".

https://www.google.com/search?q=prismatic+cell

(As opposed to cylindrical like 18650 et. al.)

arantius··on Volkswagen’s ID. 2ALL Is a $26,000 EV Hatchback You’d Want to Drive
FF is "front front", i.e. engine in the front, drive wheels in the front. (Or: ~all regular every day cars.) FR is front-engine rear-wheel-drive (i.e. "sports" cars), etc.
arantius··on Doom the Way It Was Meant to Be Played – v1.1 Multi-Monitor [video]
Doom was from the early 90's. The internet wasn't a common thing, so TCP/IP was not as thoroughly established then as it is now.
arantius··on Folders with high file counts
I've used WinDirStat but not Wiztree before -- Wiztree is so much faster!
arantius··on Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...

"to cook something in hot fat or oil; to be cooked in hot fat or oil"

Because of what the word means?

arantius··on What Is a Wildcard Person?
Is this true? I've heard this story/anecdote before, more generally and not ascribed to any particular person, and to a general big company, not Ford specifically. (Just a general "know where to draw the chalk X" kind of thing.)

A search gives me only what I see as lowish reputation sources, like the fandom wiki you linked.

arantius··on Show HN: A color picker for named web colors
Missed this good series of questions for a while but:

* The "?" about link says a lot of this. * It was an old idea that somehow solidified recently, after spending enough time with color wheels and other things, to assemble this. * This is initially based on an HSL (hue/saturation/lightness) color wheel arrangement. But several web colors have identical H/S, so I tweaked it to spread those (especially, as you noticed, the greys) out artificially. * One of the things I wanted was to use a "real" (HSL) arrangement, to leave the values arranged visually. Close colors are close on purpose, so e.g. you can see that e.g. "tan" is a little silly, by how small its area is (there's a lot of colors very close to it, crowding it out) as compared to e.g. "crimson" which is large (not many reds, around that hue).

arantius··on Show HN: A color picker for named web colors
Interesting, can you be more specific? Developed in Firefox, reports that Chrome is OK. I don't have a Mac to test with.
arantius··on Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
This sounds interesting. Sadly the link (to the tweet) in that article is broken. This appears to be a screenshot of the tweet in question: https://old.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/a4y3n8
arantius··on T-Mobile will start charging a $35 fee on all new activations and upgrades
I do this, except Google Voice for calls over data, usually via WiFi.
arantius··on Electrolyser development: 200 times less iridium needed
I am a native English speaker, but I also despise this phrase. Exactly because it's so awkward that it's hard to truly know what the speaker means. This pattern is unfortunately common. In my experience when used, they mean "reduced by a factor of 200" but they say "200 times less" as...shorthand?
arantius··on Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?
> If you start "self hosting" on a cloud based instance ...

I can't anti-suggest this more. Everything I've done on anything labeled "cloud" is weird and special, in ways that would impede learning or dilute its quality. They're several wrapper layers above what's really going on.

Get a bare VPS (I'd start with one listed at LowEndBox for a couple bucks a month) or dedicated host for learning. After you've learned there, you can try learning the significant extra complexity of "cloud".

arantius··on Kill-sticky, a bookmarklet to remove sticky elements and restore scrolling
I wrote https://bookmarklets.arantius.com/unfix several years back. Ended up using the "nuke" variant in practice.
arantius··on Cryogenic CO2 could end rail delays caused by leaves on the line
But why is a brush/blade on _every train_ not good enough? Remove the leaves before they turn into a sticky pulp?
arantius··on Tell HN: All .fj domains have gone offline
https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq#dnssec

"Google Public DNS is a validating, security-aware resolver. All responses from DNSSEC signed zones are validated unless clients explicitly set the CD flag in DNS requests to disable the validation."

arantius··on Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code
Optimizing for time and optimizing for memory are different things. Choosing one over the other doesn't guarantee the author "did not care about performance".
arantius··on “I am literally losing sleep” over Java (1996)
> Remember all of the little miniature laptops in the 90s?

In the 90s? Laptops barely existed, definitely not "little minature" ones. I remember e.g. the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC launched in 2007, and many follow-ons after that.

arantius··on The weight of the clipboard
Fast/fuzzy search for pasting.

The clipboard manager I used on Windows, which only works there and hasn't been supported for a while, allowed a "Win+V, type, enter" workflow to very easily search for whatever I "type"d as a substring, and paste that entry. No interacting with menus, no up/down presses, no mouse. I miss that feature.

arantius··on DNS doesn't “propagate”
FYI There's an easier-to-remember URL for Google: https://dns.google/cache

The URL above is the documentation of the feature, which happens to also embed it.

arantius··on Ask HN: Why is everything changing too fast?
I agree, this is indeed very wise.

There's a second sort of form of this: even if your (first) goal isn't to make changes, but just to maintain what you've got (operations, reactions to security issues, keeping up with the new Android/iOS/Windows/Web 99.0 way of doing things) you might need a team of a few people.

But they won't need to be doing that 100% of the time. The work will come in spurts. You'll find something to do with the time in between, because you can't hire people just for the spurts. Thus sometimes-BS jobs.

arantius··on Widdler is a single binary that serves up TiddlyWikis
Looks good. I adopted https://github.com/sendwheel/tw-receiver a while back which is also pretty nice, but I had to disable most of its safety features as they false triggered too often. (Acceptable for a single-user note-taking situation.)
arantius··on Winamp source code leak
I actively use both. VLC is "for videos" for me. More: for random one-off things. WinAmp (2.x) keeps a playlist loaded, across launches, and is music only. (Opening a one-off video in VLC would destroy the playlist/state.)
arantius··on I moderate /r/kafka; people mistake it as a subreddit about kafka the product
I have the opposite position. I feel that meaningless (especially if there can be a subtle fun part) names are the only valid thing for internal projects. I've worked on so many that A) are difficult to impossible to name "descriptively" and B) over time, shifted away from their original purpose.

Meaning the long and awkward "descriptive" name becomes a lie over time. But the "code" name has no meaning, so it doesn't become wrong, you just need to maybe re-learn the meaning of the otherwise meaningless word.

See also: How do you descriptively describe the replacement/rewrite that does the exact same thing, but exists in some form while the other one does, also?

arantius··on Why SQLite does not use Git (2018)
For me: `git gui` and the stage. Incrementally building my commits line-by-line (often with other working directory changes I don't want) feels invaluable. Work forced me to go git->hg and it frustrates me every day.
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