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bobchadwickon Eight Newly Produced MQ-9 Reaper Drones Destroyed in Iranian Strike

So you're saying it's the same reason Sony can't make a new cassette Walkman? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49025766

bobchadwickon Motion Sensors and Home Security Gadgets Without Cameras

Another option, which is ESP32-based: https://github.com/francescopace/espectre

bobchadwickon Timeline Scan – AI fixes the dates on your scanned photos

My dad was a prolific family photographer when I was growing up (which I guess we all are now, with our phones). He also meticulously cataloged the photos and used a spreadsheet (first created on our Compaq Portable!) to store "metadata" about them, such as descriptions, dates, people in the photos, etc. A few years back, as family Christmas presents, my parents had the photos digitized, and had someone add the "metadata" as a caption on every photo.

This led to the first AI-related project I undertook that really blew my mind. I wrote a python script that read the captions, then sent them to ChatGPT with a prompt that asked it to get the exact coordinates of any locations mentioned, and to get dates for captions that mentioned a holiday or other even, but not a date, e.g.: "Christmas 1987," my birthday, which I included in the prompt, etc. I was then able to apply the results to the exif data the majority of the photos.

Now when I open Google Photos, my timeline stretches back to the day I was born, and the location heatmap shows the where photos were taken on extensive road tripping we did as a family.

bobchadwickon Slate EV truck starts at $24,950

I understand zero touchscreens, but what's the problem with power windows? What if you're driving and you want to lower the passenger window?

bobchadwickon Mouseless – keyboard-driven control of macOS/Linux/Windows

I used to use (and love) ShortCat, but it got too slow on my ancient MacBook Pro. I switched to Mouseless, and I actually prefer it now.

bobchadwickon Mouseless – keyboard-driven control of macOS/Linux/Windows

Committed Mouseless user, here. I use a split keyboard that has a mouse layer, but I almost never use it, let alone an actual mouse or trackpad. Mouseless is so much more efficient for me. It did take a day or two to get used to using it (and to get used to comments from people who see your screen when it's active).

bobchadwickon Launch HN: Superset (YC P26) – IDE for the agents era

I thought this was somehow related to Apache Superset.

https://superset.apache.org/

bobchadwickon Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars

Guitars are very much about aesthetics, which is why they're so often strategically placed in the background on Zoom calls.

bobchadwickon Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars

I just finished restoring the Univox Coily that was sitting in my parents' basement for the past 25 years. Every time I step into the room and see it I do a double take because it looks so cool. (It sounds pretty great, too, especially through my Kay 703, aka the widowmaker.)

bobchadwickon F-15E jet shot down over Iran

There's a significant difference between a hostage and a prisoner of war, and in this context that distinction seems highly relevant.

bobchadwickon Trump fires Pam Bondi as attorney general

We also re-elected Bush Jr. after he started the disastrous war in Iraq, along with doing a bunch of other terrible shit. Is it really that surprising that Trump was elected twice?

bobchadwickon I haven't used a mouse for 14 years

Ooh thanks for the hot tip on Scoot! I've been using Mouseless (https://mouseless.click/) for a while and it's been a game changer, allowing me to almost never touch the trackpad. That said, I like the fact that Scoot allows for selecting elements. Gonna give it a shot!

bobchadwickon Where things stand with the Department of War

This sounds like the plot to the story Johnny Cash tells in One Piece at a Time, minus the machine gun, of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZuJivIwV8o

bobchadwickon CIA Station Hit in Drone Attack

You mean lasers like this? https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/us-military-used-laser...

bobchadwickon I Used Claude to File My Taxes for Free

I use Free File Fillable Forms to prepare my taxes. It can be a bit tricky to make sure all the correct forms are completed and the calculations are correct, so that is the exact approach I take. It's a pain in the butt to essentially do my taxes twice, but I'm willing to go through that if it means I'm not giving money to the tax prep industry.

https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...

bobchadwickon A beginner's guide to split keyboards

Yep, I've adjusted the settings, and that has definitely helped. When it comes to real world typing, it feels like I'm using a ridiculous amount of brain power to get the word out of my head and onto the keys.

bobchadwickon A beginner's guide to split keyboards

Yeah, I can't imagine switching to a new layout without using these tools. I'm just struggling to level up in the real world.

bobchadwickon A beginner's guide to split keyboards

I've started using this: https://mouseless.click/. It looks insane, but it's amazing and I almost never find the need to use my trackpad.

bobchadwickon A beginner's guide to split keyboards

I'm in the same boat as OP. I've used keybr and https://monkeytype.com/, and while doing the exercises, I get pretty close to the speed and accuracy I had using a standard keyboard and qwerty, but I get much worse on both fronts when typing in the real world.

bobchadwickon I converted 2D conventional flight tracking into 3D

I just did this last week, mostly using Claude Code. I live close to a major airport and wanted to be alerted when interesting planes are flying overhead. The PWA Claude Code spit out is exactly what I was hoping for, and adding an AR overlay was really trivial.

It's amazing and in some ways frightening that I had an interesting problem, and within a couple hours I had a fully functional app that completely solved it.

bobchadwickon Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV

OK, I went looking for sources and found this[1]:

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency assumes the typical car is driven 15,000 miles (24,000 km) per year. According to the New York Times, in the 1960s and 1970s, the typical car reached its end of life around 100,000 miles (160,000 km). Due in part to manufacturing improvements, such as tighter tolerances and better anti-corrosion coatings, in 2012 the typical car was estimated to last for 200,000 miles (320,000 km) with the average car in 2024 lasting 160,545 miles according to the website Junk Car Reaper.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_longevity#Statistics

bobchadwickon Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV

Modern cars aren't built as well.

Can you cite a source for this? There's no question that they're vastly more complex, but I would think that modern car manufacturing is far more exacting (and efficient) than in the past.

If you're saying that older cars are more repairable, I'm happy to agree with you, even without a source to back up that claim.

bobchadwickon Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

I'm never going to ride in the Paris-Brest-Paris, but someday I'm gonna make a Paris-Brest pastry: https://www.seriouseats.com/paris-brest-pate-a-choux-with-pr...

bobchadwickon OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

I pay for YouTube Music and I see really inconsistent behavior when asking Siri to play music. My five-year-old kid is really into an AI slop song that claims to be from the KPop Daemon Hunters 2 soundtrack, called Bloodline (can we talk about how YT Music in full of trashy rip-off songs?). He's been asking to listen to it every day this week in the car and prior to this morning, saying "listen to kpop daemon hunters bloodline" would work fine, playing it via YT Music. This morning, I tried every iteration of that request I could think of and I was never able to get it to play. Sometimes I'd get the response that I had to open YT Music to continue, and other times it would say it was playing, but it would never actually queue it up. This is a pretty regular issue I see. I'm not sure if the problem is with Siri or YT Music.

bobchadwickon Making macOS Bearable

Good to know Shortcat is capable of working well on my laptop! I'll have to mess around with it. I think I have tinkered with the delay, so thanks for the tip on that. Wooshy is alright, but I think I prefer the hint-based approach to selecting a target.

bobchadwickon Making macOS Bearable

I love Shortcat but it's too slow to be usable on my i5-based MacBook Pro. I have been using Wooshy instead, but I'll be checking out mouseless after seeing it mentioned here.

bobchadwickon Survivors Clung to Wreckage for Some 45 Minutes Before U.S. Military Killed Them

But there's no war. These are just crimes.

bobchadwickon Building a high performance home

My family undertook a major renovation where we basically took down everything above the foundation and started from scratch. I went down many of the exact same rabbit holes as the OP and the results ended up being very similar. My takeaway was that the majority of the people working in the home building trades are very closed-minded and are terrified of doing anything that veers too far from the way homes have been build in the US since the middle of the 19th century.

bobchadwickon IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products

Huh, I have the entire second story of my house outfitted with FYRTUR shades and the only one that sometimes gives me problems is the one that crashed to the floor when the 3M tape holding it up failed. (Don't get me started on Andersen windows having no way to secure inside-mount shades without voiding your warranty.) That one seems to eat through its battery far more quickly that the others. All the rest of the ten or so shades work flawlessly with ZHA in Home Assistant.