Hacker News Reader

brewtideon A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal

Reduced to a bar code; It makes sense now.

brewtideon Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat

I grew up "doing computers" and skateboarding. Looking back, the similarities are endless in all the ways you mention above.

Both formed ones ways of thinking when viewing the world.

brewtideon Whoisinspace.com/

I have these both installed as 'extensions' on my homeassistant.vm and it works wonderfully. Any device that is on my local network, ads blocked. If I want to access my home network and/or block ads when mobile, tailscale gets connected, ads blocked. highest of recommendation, I agree.

brewtideon The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week

I'm just working on my first app (thanks to AI...) and if you have a new dev account created sometime after 2023 they are making you do a 12 person, 14 day beta run before anything else occurs, apparently.

brewtideon I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

It's RTSP, just the audio. My 1/2 acre has wifi coverage everywhere (Uni-fi is really nice, honestly) so it just streams across the wi-fi.

brewtideon I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

https://github.com/Sukecz/esp32-birdnet-mic

I basically used this guide, but a different ESP32 device (so I had to change the pinout, but otherwise...). It's currently plugged into mains power, but in the future when I make additional, I'm aiming to make them solar + battery powered so I can stick them in more 'remote' areas.

Give it a go! The quality is astounding vs a security cam.

brewtideon I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

I built an esp32 with 48khz mic soldered on, feeding rtsp stream to server in living room. Works amazing. Need to build more mics.

brewtideon EasyEffects can improve laptop speaker sound quality

https://github.com/ceiphr/ee-framework-presets

These are the ones I have been using. I've generally stuck with the lappy_mctopface variant. I have no idea about the naming, but these presets have been good enough for me without much messing about at all!

brewtideon EasyEffects can improve laptop speaker sound quality

Just seconding this so other framework owners may give it a try. The speakers on my 13" are pretty bad, but using easy effects made them plenty "fine". Without, it sounded like absolute trash.

brewtideon Fixing a bricked Framework laptop

I don't know. I'm sitting here with a framework laptop consciously NOT updating it because I'm in no mood to have my computer SOL because a company can't seem to get their shit together?

Of note, I really like my framework, and I have installed BIOS updates on the past without issue. However, there have been a lot of firmware problems and fixes that are not fixes (battery related) and then bios updates that apparently cut the sound volume down to far lower levels than before the update, etc.

A user shouldn't have to worry about installing a BIOS update from the manufacturer causing the machine to die without circumstances like power loss, etc.

I feel personally that if such a BIOS update bricks someone's device, it should unquestionably be "we are sorry, let us send you out a new board asap". They can then reflash using pogo pins and send them out to other customers.

Accountability these days doesn't exist anywhere. It's making the world shit.

brewtideon Running Gemma 4 26B at 5 tokens/sec on a 13-year-old Xeon with no GPU

It's all relative. On the opposite coast, Maine it is ~ $0.28 cents kwh including getting it there. (~ 50% energy, 50% delivery). It's too darn expensive here.

brewtideon Learning to code is still worthwhile

Where do these new top notch programmers come from and what proof of top notchness will be required for job proof? (Honest questions)

brewtideon Learning to code is still worthwhile

Interesting you bring up (artistic) painting and bridge building.

I'm a house painter, and while the work is... It's just relentless work and staring all day.

It's the end results of making something just, better, with the simple acts of reputation and giving a shit about it.

Just wondering where house painter falls in your scale, I'd hunch.

brewtideon Immich 3.0

Does anyone have any pointers on the best way to import roughly 14 Google takeout chunks into immich?

I've downloaded all the chunks once, only to find them corrupted due to... Their 50gb size and using a browser in theory. One also cannot seem to use wget or alternatives because of the auth / session cookies required via Google takeout.

I've yet to even broach the aspect of importing each giant bundle into immich because I've not had success in even grabbing the takeout files correctly, but would LOVE pointers on the best way of importing the roughly 700gb into the database without it ALL going wrong.

I've had great success with immich running in docker for the past year or so, although I have yet to upgrade to the newest version. Google photos backups have been disabled on my phone for a year or so, but I yet to haul in all of the past years.

Also, anyone know if I can get immich to upload the photos without... Running immich once in a while? Would be great if it just automatically sent them to "my cloud".

Great software.

brewtideon Fox to buy Roku

My Roku TV (that hasn't been turned on in years, but was left plugged in for years...) literally tries to reach out every minute to home servers. Before u plugging it, I had blocked it's DNS, and was blown away at how frequently it tries to phone home. Easily the noisiest device on my home network.

brewtideon Developer gets Half-Life running at 30 FPS on a Nokia N95

I've been playing with asterisk and SIP and I'd like a simple device that would allow a to b contact on their end if only in select locations.

So, thanks for this edit, because I now have the plan -- Dad gets to geek out and they get simple texting / calling but none of the other related phone bullshit. I'm pumped!

brewtideon Claude Fable 5

I've had the same bad luck with tool-calling on Gemma4. Looking around the web, we are not alone. For other tasks, it's seemingly quite quick and decent.

But it gets stuck in tool call loops, it seems like.

brewtideon Life is too short for a slow terminal

I set the framework key in function row to pop a new terminal. It's amazing.

brewtideon Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

Sounds familiar.

brewtideon A programmable watch you can actually wear

Galaxy watch 7 (I think) weather here. Also about 30 hours. It's a charge every day thing, but allowing for some forgetfulness. It's not ideal, but it's manageable and certainly functional.

brewtideon MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code

I literally just put the meshtastic antenna on the roof today, in an old services box. Been in the window for months, had a few weird perfect weather moments show a few nodes and a ping. Put it on the roof, hours ago, nothing yet.

Someone has to start up the area! (I live in nowhere maine).

brewtideon Claude Code Removed from $20-a-Month "Pro" Subscription for New Users

Bingo. This same scenario with IOT hardware/software requirements and the ever changing software updates where features get added/removed (and firmware), etc would have so many here up in arms!

Oddly, less (vocal) arms on this specific case.

brewtideon The Beauty of Bonsai Styles

I've long wanted to 'get into bonsai' and had mentioned this 'bonsai retirement plan' to my middle-school aged kids (who are also very intrigued by bonsai...) -- Nice to see that my assumed 'silly' concept is likely not the worst 'investment' concept and shared by others! (With all of the real world benefits of learning and appreciation of time all wrapped up together!)

brewtideon How to Make a Sliding, Self-Locking, and Predator-Proof Chicken Coop Door (2020)

I have a radio controlled chicken door that I control through home assistant via a hack rf. It has a reed switch placed behind the door, and a magnet attached to the door to let you know door status, with failure stating "open".

And then a reminder sent to my phone 10 minutes past dusk to shut the door, if it is still open at that time.

It's rigged but the confirmation is nice.

Edit: most of sensors run by esp32 boards running esphome. Also include a temp sensor etc, fed into home assistant

brewtideon Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native

Once again, communication remains key.

brewtideon Welcome (back) to Macintosh

My framework 13 fingerprint scanner worked immediately out of the box.

brewtideon Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

Frigate NVR tied to a home assistant instance has my phone getting proactive notifications about people, birds, and buses (in their select areas...). It's not the easiest thing to setup, but if you're using ethernet cameras it seems to work very very well. The few POS wyze cameras's I have on the system tend to cause some problems, but I know for a fact it's 100% a combination of a) wifi (no matter how 'quality') b) wyze.

So, yeah. Look into frigate.

brewtideon A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks (2024)

I know 30+ years ago as I kid I learned this in my parents basement as I was rigging something up.

It is more the surprise, as if one is ignorant to this fact it is not expected at all.

brewtideon Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Or maybe they were going right away, taking the initiative and removing the ambiguity from the situation. =)

brewtideon Training my smartwatch to track intelligence

If it makes you feel any better, I've got a perhaps Galaxy Watch 7 from almost a year ago or so running wearOS, and it's battery life is at best at the 36 hour mark regardless. Came from an older tizen-based watch with similar battery life, and at least wearOS is far more funtional.