Hacker News Reader

chedabobon Multiple Displays on a Mac Sucks

We have one particular model (P2419HC) of Dell display at work that seem to do this.

As best as I can tell, there's some kind of active component in the USB-C cable that is only powered by the monitor, and it doesn't "reset" itself properly.

chedabobon A useful front-end confetti animation library

If someone told me it was pure CSS, I'd believe them. I'm not a frontend dev, so I'm always impressed by what you can now do without having to import a whole JS library.

chedabobon Fire alarm audio detection, using FFTs and Go

These are installed on doors that have an auto-closer anyway. They deter people from propping them open permanently with a wedge or a chair.

chedabobon The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

EMI maybe? Certain chairs cause monitors to go blank for a few seconds.

https://mastodon.social/@haeckerfelix/110272427676278609

chedabobon Facebook snooped on users' Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal

Cert Pinning and Certificate Transparency should block the decryption, even on a VPN where the user has installed a custom root certificate.

It wouldn't stop them seeing what domains the user is going to (as it's sent in plaintext because of SNI, and ECH was still a few years away).

chedabobon Don't upgrade to macOS Sonoma 14.4 yet: plug-in compatibility issues

I'd be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt in this instance, as 14.4 seems to be a duff release. Haven't seen this many major issues since High Sierra.

I'm currently tracking these 3 for our staff:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/03/14/the-macos-sonoma-...

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/03/16/oracle-advises-us...

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/03/12/latest-macos-sono...

chedabobon 15 Clicks to install an app from the web using the newly proposed Apple flow

It's been a thing since around iOS 8.

I think it only shows when an install/update is done without user interaction (e.g. auto-updates, or when you've got "Automatically download purchases" enabled).

chedabobon 15 Clicks to install an app from the web using the newly proposed Apple flow

I think they're trying to point it out as Apple being petty and providing a sub-standard experience, however this is exactly how it's worked for a decade for anyone beta testing outside of TestFlight, or using an MDM.

chedabobon On reddit: Someone in IT trolled me for over a decade

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36242914

The counting subreddit has already had a bit of influence on the tokens.

chedabobon Serverless Horrors

Ye, especially with something like Netlify or Vercel, I'd bet the vast majority of the costs are CDN bandwidth, and it never even touches the functions themselves. Could just as easily be in this situation with AWS CloudFront and an S3 bucket.

I have seen AWS Lambda generate large bills even with the 1000 concurrent executions limit, but with the help of upstream services. My memory of it is hazy, but I think over a weekend, a function with some dodgy retry logic managed to generate something like 21TB of CloudWatch logs.

chedabobon BT Tower is to be turned into a hotel

It opens once a year to the public. This is from last year https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/tickets-alert-tours-of-...

chedabobon EncroChat

Was covered a little on Darknet Diaries too: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/105/

chedabobon Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years

I've seen that too, and yeah, the only solution I had for the user was to reboot.

chedabobon Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years

I am currently experiencing an unbelievably annoying bug where once I finish on Google Meet in Firefox, all audio/video across the whole OS plays in slo-mo. I have to turn my headphones off and back on to fix it.

It's something specific to these headphones (Sony WH-C700N), as they do something different to get higher audio quality when using the microphone. Apple have helpefully removed Bluetooth Explorer from Xcode and the debug panel from the Bluetooth status bar icon, so I'm yet to figure out what mode it's using that my other headphones (Sony MDR-ZX770BN) don't.

chedabobon “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement

Ye Firefox had a reasonable viewer too.

https://evertpot.com/firefox-rss/

chedabobon Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

I've ended up pirating a lot more stuff recently because a lot of services won't set the aspect ratio on the stream properly, so on an ultrawide monitor it displays in 16:9 the size of a postage stamp with both pillarboxing and letterboxing.

Channel 4 (in the UK) is probably the worst offender, as they preserve the aspect ratio, but have it fill the full width of the screen. This results in the top and bottom of the video being cutting off for most TV shows, including the subtitles. They've gone to some effort to make their player run on different aspect ratios, but somehow implemented it entirely the wrong way.

Webrips do suffer from this same issue, but with either FFMpeg or VLC, it can be cropped to the correct ratio without reencoding.

chedabobon Apple tells EU it has five different App Stores, not just one

Ye they were two separate programs, but in June 2015 they unified them.

I presume this was preempting the addition of native 3rd-party app support in WatchOS 2 in September of the same year, so they wouldn't need another developer program and/or app store.

chedabobon A concrete example of what goes wrong with Apple's docs

No, it's the same documentation.

I think even for the new APIs added in non-public betas, it's all on the main website now.

Also there's docs that aren't on the dev.apple site for things like Apple Pay, but it's not a perk of paying $99 a year. I suspect the actual hardware docs for the Vision headset are private too (they were for the Apple Silicon DTK).

chedabobon Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone

I'd be surprised if Sony Ericsson didn't have a patent on it, because that was exactly how the numeric keypad worked on their early smartphones. They were resistive displays though, so they just required something hard on the back to register a touch.

chedabobon Fixing annoying blue standby lights

Yeah the energy consumption of even the small advertising displays is insane.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/09/electronic-a...

chedabobon My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

That looks like a proprietary version of Quick Charge, which has a negotiation step before the alternate voltage is enabled. From that murky period where everyone was tacking on all sorts of protocols to get more than 5V/0.5A from a USB-A port.

chedabobon Autonomous subs use AI to wayfind without GPS

The opening scene, although they don't go into much detail about how the submarine works.

chedabobon Autonomous subs use AI to wayfind without GPS

This went really well in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning.

chedabobon How the first gen iPod was reverse engineered to run Rockbox

A later model had the firmware dumped via the piezo speaker http://www.ipodlinux.org/stories/piezo/

chedabobon Now I can just print that video

I've started copying these recipes into Crouton https://crouton.app/

It does a remarkable job at extracting the recipes, and the end result is a consistent experience no matter the source.

chedabobon What has changed in CPU cores in M3 chips?

Ye, quite a few apps don't function correctly if you run the executable directly.

  sudo open /System/Applications/Utilities/Activity\ Monitor.app

chedabobon Microsoft is retiring Visual Studio for Mac in 2024

It shared nothing with Visual Studio apart from the name as it was just a rebrand of MonoDevelop.

I tried to use it on a Xamarin project a few years ago, and between the poor autocomplete and frequent crashes, I switched to JetBrains Rider for everything but XAML editing. There were also features that were locked behind a $250/month Enterprise subscription which other IDEs provide for free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MonoDevelop#Visual_Studio_for_...

chedabobon I trapped scammers in an impossible maze [video]

In one of the screenshots, Kitboga's fake page promises them the equivalent of $11k in BTC.

Considering a lot of these scams originate from countries with low wages and high unemployment, not really surprising people would be willing to waste a few days for the promise of a year's salary or more.

chedabobon Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way

A lot of 1D barcode scanners cannot read phone screens reliably.