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blackfawn

220 karma · joined December 1, 2017

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blackfawn··on SDCC – Small Device C Compiler
SDCC has been a nice resource for a variety of MCUs. I wish it had support for some of the 8-bit PIC chips like the PIC10 and PIC12... maybe one day!
blackfawn··on AI Robots – When will they be in our homes
Wow, the way this site scrolls and pollutes the browser history is pretty terrible! I gave up trying to go back and just closed it and started a new tab
blackfawn··on Vermell – Minimal, dependency-free C++ web framework using epoll
This looks really nice, I'll definitely try it out! I take it by the examples that minimum is C++20? Have you done any benchmarks compared to any others?
blackfawn··on US House of Representatives takes step to make daylight saving time permanent
Arizona is on permanent standard time, which many seem to prefer over DST or permanent DST. This new law is trying to force permanent DST, which the US actually already signed into law back in 1974 and then repealed it within a year because no one liked it. Also, while permanent standard or DST may work in southern states, it becomes more problematic in northern states, particularly close to the edges of time zones. You could see sunrise as late as 9:30 am in some of these cases with permanent DST.
blackfawn··on Ask HN: How many of you hold an amateur radio license in your country?
While PO boxes work, you would have had to set one up prior to getting any licensing since past addresses are retained in the system as well. And then you are paying an unending fee to maintain a PO box just to try and maintain some slight privacy online.

It really is baffling they are so stuck on having full address available to the world. City/state, zip code, Maidenhead locator squares, or a number of other options would be more than enough to place one into a local area without an exact address listed publicly. Until that happens, I definitely will continue to refrain from mentioning it on any online accounts to help keep all the data miners a little more at bay.

blackfawn··on Ukranian controls Home Assistant over LoRa radio when their power grid goes down
Very neat setup! I've been using Meshtastic and Home Assistant but never thought to mix the two.
blackfawn··on Rural Americans are trying to hold back the tide of AI
The corn that was used in ethanol production, now called distillers grains, is then used as livestock feed for cattle, cows, pigs, poultry, fish, etc.
blackfawn··on Ask HN: Who do you follow via RSS feed?
This site, xkcd, liliputing, some various forums, etc. but the big problem I've started having w/ RSS is when sites set up Cloudflare and the RSS feed ends up behind the Cloudflare validation prompt - I've even emailed some sites but none have bothered to fix or exempt RSS.
blackfawn··on Ask HN: What are your best purchases under $100?
Neat looking flashlight! Can you turn it on and off without having to cycle through other modes? One thing I dislike about a lot of LED flashlights is having to go through dim, strobe, etc. modes before I can turn the light back off.
blackfawn··on Gnome and Mozilla Discuss Proposal to Disable Middle Mouse Paste on Linux
Chromium and those based off it (Chrome, Brave, etc.) seem to have already implemented this recently on the "new tab" button. I'm so used to highlighting a link or text I want to search for and middle-clicking the new tab button to open that link or search for the text and now as of some recent update, it no longer works. I keep trying by habit and muttering when I remember it's suddenly broken. I didn't see any option in settings nor much info when I searched.
blackfawn··on Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
I often see comments of "everything works perfect in wayland" which makes me wonder how many features some people use. I've tried wayland a few times now and have always noticed small quirks. A few current examples: shading a window actually leaves an invisible section that can't be clicked where the window was, shading and other window activities being inconsistent across various window types (terminal, file manager, etc.), picture-in-picture mode of browsers doesn't maintain aspect ratio, picture-in-picture doesn't maintain "always on top" or position when enabling it (I've managed to fix the "always on top" by writing a rule to apply to windows with "Picture in picture" as the title, at least)
blackfawn··on Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated
I'm not so sure one can say the ability increase your footprint due to wealth directly equates to a larger footprint... A bit of an anecdotal counterpoint: the few wealthy folks I know are almost hermits and typically relax at home while the rest of us have daily commutes and such. I've never known them to fly anywhere and basically "have everything they need" where they are. I'd be willing to bet their carbon footprint is much much lower than most.
blackfawn··on Rust for the small things? but what about Python?
Yeah, really... Python tries to hide some of the insanity behind venvs, conda, etc. but it often ends up some dependency nightmare that's barely holding together. Everyone that tells me "oh Python is so great, it just works" is either only using it for the absolute most basic tasks or kidding themselves. I'd often get a blank stare when I respond to that with "then why am I helping you fix this virtual environment with gigs of cruft for a 'simple task' that has suddenly and inexplicably stopped working for you?"

The equivalent things in Go, Rust, etc are a breath of fresh air for sure

blackfawn··on Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them
One thing people often miss when talking about US cars getting bigger, particularly "small" trucks, is government regulation: https://youtu.be/azI3nqrHEXM
blackfawn··on Nomad, communicate off-grid mesh, forward secrecy and extreme privacy
This looks interesting! Does anyone have any experience with this and meshtastic? I'm curious about pros/cons between the two
blackfawn··on Google Pixel 9 Pro
Cases have helped on past pixels but agreed, this one looks pretty terrible!
blackfawn··on Cybertruck Owner Breaks His Finger Trying to Show Vehicle Is Safe
FYI for anyone trying to go to the above link, it is actually https://openinverter.org
blackfawn··on Ask HN: Anyone else depressed by the relentless monetization and spying?
I've been looking into replacing a very old vehicle and it's super disheartening seeing all the telemetry and shady communication you have no control over on new vehicles. And it seems 100% across the board if you look at EVs. As appealing it might be to have an EV, the telemetry, snooping, forced updates, etc. are an immediate turnoff.

I know a few people with EVs and it seems like I'm always hearing "the latest update broke X" or "all my settings changed again"

blackfawn··on Dehydrated: Letsencrypt/acme client implemented as a shell-script
Does DNS mode work to issue for internal servers that don't expose 80/443 to the internet?
blackfawn··on Dehydrated: Letsencrypt/acme client implemented as a shell-script
I wish I could upvote this more... snaps are the worst!
blackfawn··on Browse Self-Hosted Software
Agreed! If I end up having to use Ubuntu, my first command is generally `sudo apt purge snapd unattended-upgrades`
blackfawn··on Cally: Accessibility Statement
The link goes direct to the accessibility statement but a demo is available if you jump back to the home page: https://wicky.nillia.ms/cally/

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have a way to jump to a specific year

blackfawn··on Pitcairn Island Immigration
It keeps the saying "the sun never sets on the British empire" true, iirc.
blackfawn··on An EMP or Solar Incident Could Result in Blackout Warfare
Disruption of just-in-time delivery of food, medicine, and other essentials would potentially be a very deadly thing all by by itself. Even if these items are available, the ability to purchase said goods would be difficult with the overwhelming dependency on electronic payment methods used today. Even pulling money from your bank account could be problematic.
blackfawn··on Running a Raspberry Pi with a read-only root filesystem
I like using Alpine for read-only operation on the Pi right out of the box: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
blackfawn··on Difftastic, a structural diff tool that understands syntax
Difftastic seems really nice! Unfortunately it shows some changed binary files which makes it sort of unusable. `file` reports these files as "ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, stripped" and the MIME type/encoding is "application/x-sharedlib; charset=binary" so not sure why difftastic is trying to show them as thousands of changed lines of text...
blackfawn··on Home Lab Beginners guide
I've been sticking w/ very compact units, mainly ThinkCentre M series "Tiny" and Dell OptiPlex "Micro" form factor, which are both practically identical in size. Both use a laptop power supply. You can get current versions for many hundreds of dollars or generation(s) old ones for as cheap as $30 USD. My most recent ones were older 3rd & 4th gen i5 & i7 CPUs but they still blow current Raspberry Pi, etc. out of the water, have M.2 for network, etc. & SATA for storage. A Dell I have that's a generation newer than these adds NVMe too. It's hard finding these small PCs that have multiple Ethernet but I just added a gigabit Ethernet M.2 card to the one.
blackfawn··on Can We Just Throw in the Towel on Airport Security Theater Already?
It'd be interesting to see a breakdown of percentage of veterans in different government positions. I'd imagine they are all fairly similar levels since it's most likely just a transition from military to government rather than specifically military to TSA. In any case, I certainly wouldn't call TSA "a welfare program for veterans" as the parent comment suggests.
blackfawn··on Home Lab Beginners guide
Agreed. Power draw and often noise on enterprise equipment is ridiculous in a home setting. I try to stick to the small form factor (SFF) or ultra-small form factor (USFF) computers whenever I can, which is what the author is using. I used to use Raspberry Pi boards for some things but always ran into problems w/ microSD cards dying, even with log2ram and buying industrial cards. I haven't had a single issue after switching to tiny x64 machines w/ real SSDs in them.

I picked up a HP managed switch that I thought I might use but it draws more power than the ThinkCentre M93p Tiny computers do and it's actively cooled w/ super noisy 1U fan(s) so I'm going to ditch it.

blackfawn··on 100kHz to 6GHz 2 port USB based VNA
Very late reply but that is most likely a tinySA, a compact and inexpensive spectrum analyzer that uses the same case as many nanoVNAs: https://www.tinysa.org/
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