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birdman3131

978 karma · joined March 29, 2012

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birdman3131··on Wax motor
There are some lines of front load washers that use them as the door lock. And the ones they use have a habit of shorting out and taking the control board with them.

The idea is that so long as the washer is providing power the motor stays locked. But if you ever loose power within a few minutes you can open the door if you had to.

birdman3131··on Degraded performance for multiple models
cowork was 100%
birdman3131··on Waymo in Dallas
I can't say for a properly designed system but I can get anywhere in my city (~90k population / ~0.25m metro) in 15 minutes via car. (Some days traffic effects a bit.)

Many bus stops are up to 1:45 away.

Can and implemented are often worlds apart.

A 12 seater is not a microvan. That is in full size van territory.

birdman3131··on Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness
Don't know that I would say anyone. As I have never had any issue with any sort of motion sickness.
birdman3131··on Cloning a Sennheiser BA2015 battery pack
Should see the shure ones. Shure SB900C is like $115. And at least last I looked I never saw any aftermarket ones.

At 8 mics and 6 in-ear packs you can get a lot of alkalines.

birdman3131··on San Francisco streets with confusingly similar names
For my city it is Free Ferry for some reason.

Free Ferry Road

Free Ferry St N (Multiple not near each other)

Free Ferry Ln (Multiple sections as well.)

Free Ferry Cir

Free Ferry heights

Free Ferry Landing

I feel like I am missing a couple but google maps is being a pain right now.

birdman3131··on Show HN: GovAuctions lets you browse government auctions at once
The title claims to search every platform but I don't see any evidence of either https://www.govdeals.com/ or https://www.publicsurplus.com/ which are probably the biggest government auction sites.
birdman3131··on Kagi Translate now supports LinkedIn Speak as an output language
Everybody else looks for em dashes. For me that is the number 1 tell of AI.
birdman3131··on Roam 50GB is now Roam 100GB
Had that happen a few times but switching the use old reddit box off and back on fixes it.
birdman3131··on Cigarette smoke effect using shaders
A bit pedantic but that is a pipe smoke effect not a cigarette effect. Cigarette smoke tends to go horizontal for a ways before kinda going vertical.

It works well in the image they use to demo it but the image shows a pipe where it actually looks right.

birdman3131··on Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM
It seems nobody recalls how bad it was back in the day. CDMA phones (Mostly carriers like Alltel, Verizon and sprint.) did not have sim cards until 4g/LTE. Before that to migrate phones you had to get customer support involved.

AT&T and other GSM based carriers had sim cards on their phones and it was so much nicer.

Nobody has been able to convince me that esim is not just going back in time 15+ years. We moved to sim cards for a reason.

birdman3131··on I have to give Fortnite my passport to use Bluesky
By a verification service owned by epic games apparently. So not fortnite but its not a super stretch.
birdman3131··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
https://developers.telnyx.com/docs/programmable-fax/send-a-f... I use Telnyx. (Mainly because I also use them for voice.)
birdman3131··on Steam Frame
Thats not what he said. What he said was even rapidly moving his eyes around he could not spot the lower resolution part.
birdman3131··on iPhone Pocket
Its showing as $149 for me.

Which still feels outrageous for what is basically a knitted scarf.

birdman3131··on Gmail AI gets more intrusive
It started about a month ago for me. I am subscribed to emails from an IT as a Gig platform called Field Nation. Thought I might pickup a bit of side work but never did.

Recently it started adding them to my calendar and there is no way to turn off this feature without also turning off useful features such as package out for delivery notifications.

birdman3131··on Two billion email addresses were exposed
They do not want to have such a list as it makes them a target.

What they do have is a searchable password list not connected to any usernames.

birdman3131··on Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost
Modern DVR's are not the same as classic ones. As per this article from today shows that people have prerecorded are being pulled from their DVR's.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/youtube-tvs-disney-b...

birdman3131··on I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
As a note hetzner has a lot of auction servers and I believe they lack the setup fee
birdman3131··on Can we talk about the rude installers not asking for installation locations?
The main reason is wanting it on a second drive.
birdman3131··on Tesla Recalls Almost 13,000 EVs over Risk of Battery Power Loss
Given that it is a car post Internal Combustion Engine would be my first guess when seeing ICE but I can see where one might think of the other as well.
birdman3131··on Are touchscreens in cars dangerous?
So I don't personally find text hard to read or very much focus impacting.

However, it is very person dependent. Personally, I am one of the fastest readers I know.

It's also day dependent. I've had days where my ability to focus switch is significantly impaired.

The big issue is that while there are people that touch screens are not going to impair their driving, you can't gear your system to them.

You have to aim it at the lowest common denominator.

Personally, I am a fan of my current vehicle which while being at 2015 because it's one of the police interceptors still has the basic ish radio. And has twist knobs for volume, tune, fan speed and temperature.

And while I probably wouldn't mind having the actual Ford sync stuff, I don't find myself missing it either.

birdman3131··on Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it
So windows 11 easily bypasses this when taking a screenshot. Just switch to video mode. (Yeah yeah. Not technically a screenshot but same default software built in to windows.)
birdman3131··on Ask HN: What's a good 3D Printer for sub $1000?
No its not. Slicer software is just CAM software for 3d printers. It just creates Gcode like any other CAM software. Calling it " basically just your interface to the dials and knobs on the CNC settings for speeds and feeds." shows a deep misunderstanding of operating CNC's in general.

Your manual controls on pretty much all 3d printers suck. But that's because manual operation is considerable far down the priority list. I've never seen one that did jogging other than setting an increment and tapping a touchscreen button to make it move 1 increment.

Every CNC machine I have ever ran did way better with the jogging. Even the ones from the 70's. You set a speed with a knob and then hold down a button. It goes till you let up. Or you use a rotary wheel for fine control.

And don't even get me started on homing. The homing sequence on all the printers I have dealt with is home X and Y before homing Z. Most machinists will be aghast at this as if you are homing all 3 axis's at once you home Z first to get the tool out of the way.

birdman3131··on We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds
AI is not a replacement for a greybeard.

That said AI, Search and the like can be quite useful and helpful.

birdman3131··on Imgur's community was in revolt
Tinypic maybe? I know we used it a lot on Gaia back in the day.
birdman3131··on SSL certificate requirements are becoming obnoxious
One of the arguments to be made is that while " automation reduces the possible human errors." it also reduces the amount of human oversight as well.
birdman3131··on Cellular Starlink expands to support IoT devices
So that started out as unlimited. After people abused it to tether it got dropped to like 50mb of non amazon traffic a month.
birdman3131··on Apple introduces AppleCare One
The footnote implies that a video inspection is also an option.

"To verify “good condition,” products may be required to undergo a diagnostic check using a customer’s iPhone or iPad, or at an Apple Store, prior to being added to the plan."

birdman3131··on Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”
It ends up being bank dependant a bit. (USA here)

If I use either my cashapp or chime card I had better have the full $100-200 on there or it will fail the authorisation.

On the other hand my main bank is a local bank and they treat all gas station preauth's as a $1 charge. So I can have say $30 in the account and still get $25 in gas whereas many other cards/banks would just decline.

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