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camhenlin

958 karma · joined September 23, 2014

my twitter: @camhenlin my stuff: http://github.com/CamHenlin my email: cam.henlin+hn@gmail.com
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camhenlin··on iPhone Duo
This has worked fine for Lotus products such as the Elise
camhenlin··on Emulating the Early Macintosh Floppy Drive
Early Macs are not really multitasking in the sense that newer machines are. Each running application has to hand back control to the operating system as a part of its main loop (think like video game main loop if you are familiar with that)

In the same way, disk operations themselves are generally blocking and will hand back control to the OS and apps during their read/write cycles so that other things can happen on the computer.

camhenlin··on Ask HN: Opinion on low/ no code platforms (Flutterflow, Bubble, others?)
Here is my experience, having worked on a competing low-code/no-code platform for several years:

- can be great for quickly getting a proof of concept up and running

- may suit your needs indefinitely if your scale remains small

- will likely scale very poorly as needs or applications grow due to the fact that they generally obfuscate computational complexity

- can be a lot more difficult to style or brand properly

camhenlin··on Notion for Macintosh System 7
Neat idea, I wonder how it’s handling communications under the hood. Tcp/ip stack? Serial? It will be interesting to toy with if the author decides to release it and the source code
camhenlin··on Hertz to sell 20k EVs in shift back to gas-powered cars
Lots and lots of Bolts on there if you take a look
camhenlin··on DeskHop – Fast Desktop Switching
Nice work! If DeskHop could be made to work with a Bluetooth mouse, it would be even better. FWIW I was looking for a similar solution recently. I've got a magic trackpad, keyboard, bluetooth mouse, and monitor. I'd like to swap between 2 computers somewhat easily.
camhenlin··on Turning an old car into a powerful generator
In Toyota's hybrid synergy drive, the electric motor system is inputting to the same transmission as the ICE engine, and is an integral part of the casing. You can see a cutaway of it here to get an idea of what it looks like in practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_vehicle_drivetrain#/med... What you're describing is indeed how the E-Four system works for the rear wheels on the AWD versions of the Prius
camhenlin··on Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile want to access your bank account
Yep, not worth the additional discount for me. I'm not giving AT&T my bank account information or any authorizations around it
camhenlin··on It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
I certainly didn't mean to suggest that having a GitHub profile could be a negative. My point isn't about identifying red flags, but about pointing out areas that could be improved to make one's profile stand out - especially in the case of the person I was responding to. As someone who reviews numerous resumes, I'm providing insight into what I typically look for when I peruse a candidate's GitHub account, based on my personal experience. I don't disqualify someone based on their GitHub activity, but I do use it as an additional datapoint to help identify those who might stand out from their peers.
camhenlin··on It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
I've held various roles over the years and personally believe that public contributions and innovative open source projects will often impress potential employers. Despite not coding much professionally anymore, I engage in fun personal open-source coding to maintain my skills. This strategy even played a part in securing my latest, predominantly non-coding role.

After reading your post, I reviewed your GitHub profile. You're certainly on the right track, but there's room for improvement. Here are my personal observations and opinions:

- You have numerous small projects, but they lack detailed descriptions and the README files don't tell me much about their purpose. Why are you building these? How can they be run? What functionality do they offer?

- Many projects have minimal activity, suggesting they might be incomplete or abandoned.

- There are several boilerplate projects like "calculator", "todo", and "tutorial".

- Your commit messages in most repos are quite short, often just one or two words. This practice might not be accepted in a professional team setting. I've been guilty of this with my personal projects at times too.

- Your project https://github.com/prakhar897/workaround-gpt shows promise in terms of community interest and the start of what could be a well-constructed README. Perhaps you should consider continuing with this project or developing a similar, well-structured project. Just a thought.

camhenlin··on A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves
My buddy has an 89 Prelude that got stolen a couple of times. It basically got driven around and left with an empty tank around town both times and no signs of break in. I think the keys are relatively common for those so maybe the thief has one.

Anyways, I installed a switch up under his dash the disconnects the fuel pump +12v wire. It takes just a moment to flick the switch if you know where it is, and afterwards, the engine will crank and crank and crank and sort of sound like it wants to start at first, but never do anything. It would probably take several minutes to find it if you had to look for the switch, especially if it were at night and you were trying to steal the car. Seems like a good lower tech deterrent to me! The car has not been stolen since.

camhenlin··on What do you think of Threads, Meta’s new Twitter Alternative?
I have never sent or received a DM on twitter
camhenlin··on Speeduino – Arduino based engine management
I'm currently working on replacing the factory KJet on a 83 308 QV engine that's been swapped into a 77 308 GTB to a MegaSquirt 3 unit, with coil on plugs from a newer Corvette. Full fuel and ignition mapping control! It's been relatively straightforward so far, someone even makes a crank trigger setup for these cars, I've mostly just worried about keeping the work tidy. I am planning on adding a Rotrex C38-71 supercharger once the modern fuel injection conversion is complete.
camhenlin··on HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals
Happens with their toner cartridges on laser printers too. I bought an HP laser, used some toner carts off Amazon, then got a software update and it wouldn’t recognize the toner carts. Had to replace them with HP cartridges from Staples at much higher cost to get back up and running, which I guess was their goal. Wouldn’t buy another one.
camhenlin··on Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023
My first job was writing VBA programs on top of extremely complicated Excel 97 spreadsheets to prevent input errors and provide a cleaner UI. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ve ever been as productive as I was at that job. It was just so straightforward to crank out decent looking forms and so intuitive for a fresh new dev
camhenlin··on Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks
What state do you live in that rural roads are 45? On the entire west coast they’re at least 55 and the average speed is more realistically in the mid 60s. I think in some of the south west states the speed limit on 2 lane rural roads is more like 70mph
camhenlin··on Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks
I’ve looked into one of these and they’re completely illegal in my state, no way to register them without gaming different dmv stations and getting a clueless dmv rep who doesn’t know what they’re looking at, to register it. This is Oregon. Really unfortunate situation as these fit a lot of use cases that would previously require something as big as a gas guzzling Ford F150 otherwise.
camhenlin··on Customizing the startup chime on a 1999 G3 iMac
I had an NT4 workstation, a hex editor, and no internet connection at my first job. I spent a lot of time modifying the text in explorer.exe, calc.exe, and other apps. It was a lot of fun and definitely helped me understand the tip of the iceberg regarding how hex editors work.
camhenlin··on America Is Trying to Electrify. There Aren’t Enough Electricians
The training going from apprentice to electrician is long, there’s lots of hard work, and the pay at the apprentice end isn’t good. It’s a good career to start in from a relatively young age, tougher to break into the older you get.
camhenlin··on Ask HN: How do you like to be shown appreciation at work?
Yes, I agree, if it's cash or some sort of monetary component, it should be relatively significant. I'm a big fan of thanking people for their efforts and then telling them to take a day or two off after they've put in an extra effort
camhenlin··on Nuklear – A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library
I went through great lengths to get it somewhat usable on slow CPUs. This is really where I spent the majority of my time. Check out my blog post introducing nuklear QuickDraw here https://henlin.net/2021/12/21/Introducing-Nuklear-for-Macint... where I have it running the nuklear calculator demo on an 8mhz Macintosh emulator in your web browser. The less you try to do on slow systems the better it is.
camhenlin··on Nuklear – A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library
Nuklear is great. I’ve spent countless hours hacking around with it. I’ve also built a customized version for classic Macintosh systems (down to System 2.0 or so) and built some simple Macintosh software for it. I put it on GitHub here: https://github.com/CamHenlin/nuklear-quickdraw
camhenlin··on Lexus in development of a manual transmission for electric cars
Porsche Taycan has a 2 speed transmission: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a28903274/porsche-taycan-t...
camhenlin··on Show HN: FocusedEdit – a classic Macintosh to web browser shared text editor
Potentially! The trouble with these machines is they don't have a factory serial port. There were a few companies that made serial port expansions for this generation of machines. Check out GeeThree Stealth Port, Griffin gPort, and Jamport for potential options
camhenlin··on Show HN: FocusedEdit – a classic Macintosh to web browser shared text editor
I got an RSS feed going! I was able to add it to NetNewsWire. I need to go through and add descriptions to my previous posts still, but at least I'm up and running now. Thanks again for the suggestion!
camhenlin··on Show HN: FocusedEdit – a classic Macintosh to web browser shared text editor
I’ll take a look and see if hexo (the software powering the blog) supports it! Appreciate the suggestion!
camhenlin··on Show HN: FocusedEdit – a classic Macintosh to web browser shared text editor
I developed CoprocessorJS to assist with building out these sorts apps. I used it to develop this application and one that I posted a few months ago for interacting with iMessages: https://github.com/CamHenlin/MessagesForMacintosh I have a few other ideas for classic Mac apps that I’ll use CoprocessorJS for as well

Here’s a blog post explaining my reasoning behind CoprocessorJS: https://henlin.net/2021/12/21/Introducing-CoprocessorJS/

camhenlin··on Show HN: FocusedEdit – a classic Macintosh to web browser shared text editor
I want to include my classic Macs as a part of my daily workflow. I’ve been using this recently to type up emails, long slack messages, and confluence docs for work. I even used it to type up the markdown that drives the introductory blog post I wrote at https://henlin.net/2022/10/02/Introducing-FocusedEdit-for-cl...
camhenlin··on Show HN: FocusedEdit – a classic Macintosh to web browser shared text editor
Sure but with emacs you’d have to do it in MacTerm or another chunk of telnet software, set up a LocalTalk network, etc. whereas this only requires a serial cable and also gives you a native Mac UI to do your editing in
camhenlin··on Show HN: FocusedEdit – a classic Macintosh to web browser shared text editor
Yep, it goes both ways! You can paste or edit text that you want to edit on the Classic Mac in to the web browser as well
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