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brightghost

60 karma · joined January 9, 2012

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brightghost··on Works With Nest
Any HVAC system installed or revamped in the past 15 years is likely to have a programmable thermostat. Whether people are using these _correctly_ or not (which as others have touched on here is not necessarily super intuitive, part of the problem Nest is meant to solve), I think attempts of some sort at saving energy with these is pretty common.
brightghost··on Show HN: 5iler – a repurposable minimalist notepad
Yes, I did try it out-- for me at least, on FF/Win7, it just inserts about 20 whitespace characters.
brightghost··on Show HN: 5iler – a repurposable minimalist notepad
isn't the same auto-correct system in TextEdit.app available by default in any cocoa text-fied on OS X? And if you think that system 'mostly sucks', perhaps it is because you are vastly underestimating what a difficult feature it is to implement?
brightghost··on Show HN: 5iler – a repurposable minimalist notepad
I don't get what the 'insert line divider' is meant to be. It seems to just insert a large, fixed amount of whitespace characters?
brightghost··on Add Gestures and Touch to your Arduino
looks like its basically just the reference implementation of the MGC3130 chip, with an arduino library for i2c communication.
brightghost··on Add Gestures and Touch to your Arduino
Anyone from the project here care to elaborate on the niceties of this dedicated chip? I'm currently putting finishing touches on a project with a swipe-based (touch, not hover) interface built around the (surely rough-and-dirty, but surprisingly capable) CapacitiveSensor Arduino library.

I'm sure the timing issues one sidesteps by using a dedicated controller ic are critical for projects more complicated than mine, but I'm curious if you know more about the limitations of trying to implement something similar onboard with the AVR. Is there something fundamentally different in the sensing method here compared to low-threshold capacitive sensing?

brightghost··on Autodesk announces new 3D printer and open platform
There's nothing new in Autodesk buying up everything they can get their hands on in the parametric modelling space, but I was surprised to see recently that they have made a rash of acquisitions and new product developments targeting the hobbyist/hacker community under their '123D' banner.
brightghost··on Target removes CEO in wake of cyber attack
Target has their own line of credit and debit cards which they push aggressively in-store, I assume these plans pertain to those.
brightghost··on Condoleezza Rice Joins Dropbox’s Board As It Names New CFO, COO
The difference is that harboring conflicting and controversial viewpoints is part and parcel of the mission of a University.
brightghost··on Intel unveils tiny $99 MinnowBoard Max open single-board computer
I can see this being big with the media-art crowd for installations if it has any sort of real graphics oomph. From what I've heard the pi is just barely capable of hd video, anyone able to divine these tech specs into a comparison with the pi's graphics capability?
brightghost··on Google sued for data-mining students' email
The public school you attend is not generally viewed as a free market decision as only certain members of society have the economic freedom to 'select' a different one, and public schools have legal obligations to protect the privacy of their students.

I imagine most people here are not working in K-12 education and so are not familiar with these issues, but it should be understood that many public school districts are making use of Google Apps for education in a capacity which is either explicitly or implicitly compulsory for students, including creation of private accounts on minor students' behalf.

If Google is not being entirely forthcoming on precisely what personally-identifiable information they are retaining about minor students they are potentially in a great legal mess here.

brightghost··on What to do if you're just semi-technical?
Did Starbucks get VC funding?
brightghost··on Show HN: I built this game alone – design, code, music, sound, marketing
So surprised (pleasantly) to see this! The original Eliss is still one of my favorite games. Last I heard though you were working on Faraway? What's the status of that project?
brightghost··on Introducing Paper
...an "aging" ~two-year-old laptop with a top of the line processor?
brightghost··on Show HN: We built Triage, an iOS app that unites all your dev tools
Ditto. I can't imagine they didn't discover this during the submission process -- seems like a strange decision to go ahead with it..
brightghost··on Pay No Attention to the Bloody Corpse in the Bathroom
I can't claim to be well-versed on this story, but I would like to point out that a couple weeks ago the author of this piece was accused of misrepresenting the issue in the local paper, The Star Tribune. In particular he was called out for glossing over the fact that there have already been several investigations of the matter, which I see he has again failed to mention in the piece linked here.

http://www.startribune.com/local/yourvoices/207993521.html

brightghost··on How Browsers Store Your Passwords (and Why You Shouldn't Let Them)
Isn't this just the standard 'Windows is woefully insecure' problem? I would be curious to see how this works in the browsers on OS X.
brightghost··on Stellar Wind (code name)
...isn't this at least the world's third or fourth private cloud appliance?
brightghost··on Firefox, Heal Thyself
Curious to see this today, as the FF enterprise mailing list has been filled with grumbling this week about FF's inability to auto-update itself or its plugins, and the headaches that causes us IT folk when paired with the auto-quarantining of outdated plugins recently implemented.
brightghost··on 19 Year Old Flees America and Skips College to Bootstrap a Startup in Bosnia
Funny; all this time I thought the goal of entrepreneurship was to build a sustainable business.
brightghost··on Alias.sh: for finding, sharing and storing bash aliases
I'm guessing you changed it since this feedback, but I really like the current color scheme. The lighter-grey bubbles around the actual code do a nice job directing focus to the important bits.
brightghost··on An Advanced Guide to HTML and CSS
I'm not really seeing why I would want the label of the section in question hidden when I'm dealing with it, and at least for me there's not really a parity between 'dealing with' and 'hovering over with my cursor' anyway, unless I'm copying the text. The bright orange color and the constant flashing on/off just adds visual noise and makes it difficult to really read the labels anyway, imo.
brightghost··on An Advanced Guide to HTML and CSS
I recently spent the better part of a day trying to figure out this seemingly-straightforward problem, so if you do go down this road I'd recommend a tool called wkhtmltopdf: http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
brightghost··on Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned how badly in need of proofing this content is. I just looked through a handful of sections but the ones I saw were littered with missing words, out-of-place headings, and poorly-cropped illustrations. It seems like great content, and the idea of charging for it has merit, but you're not going to be able to do so without proofing the content; it doesn't seem to me that even a cursory scan-through of all the pages has been done.
brightghost··on Bash Finder: Control the Finder from the Terminal
I also wasted a fair amount of time looking through these files, trying to figure out what all the miscellaneous bash configs had to do with the stated purpose. I did find that there is a nice undocumented feature of the cdff command, which allows you to specify the directory of a window lower in the stack by sending a numeral as the positional parameter.
brightghost··on Show HN: We made an addictive way to browse pictures on reddit
I think the progress bar is the most brilliant part of this whole thing. I don't read reddit, not because I don't think I would find it interesting but simply because I know it would suck so much time that I stay away. I did the same as the above poster and found the progress bar a really great and satisfying way to limit my time on the site (interesting that most sites have been pursuing the opposite goal in recent years).

I'm one of those that thinks 'gamification' is generally a bad philosophy, but to the extent that this partitioning into discrete consumption units could be called that I think it really works and adds a lot of value to the experience. My only problem with the site is that there's no clear indication anywhere that reddit is where the content is being pulled from, and it took me a bit to figure out how to get to the original page — maybe clicking the image could bring up the reddit panel from the bottom as well, but with some content-swapping to insert the full-size image into the reddit page above the comments?

brightghost··on Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else
Yeah, the quote seems pretty clearly to be in reference to Google Plus in general and the universal toolbar and redesigns they've been rolling out, not the social search results specifically. Pretty misleading article.
brightghost··on OSX Lion in CSS3
Am I missing something here? All I see are five boxes you can drag around with javascript which have some buttons and menus that don't do anything.
brightghost··on OSX Lion in CSS3
"Click Help then all the windowing system is gone south."

That's a fairly faithful emulation, actually...

brightghost··on Resources to Hack Design
...and it shows in the SkipScotch site.