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dantle

119 karma · joined July 11, 2010

https://dantler.us
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dantle··on Kitchen optimizations
A dishwasher micro optimization: put the small forks/spoons face down in the basket, and the large ones face up. Helpful when unloading because these items are time consuming to visually distinguish, but we sort them.

Works best if you can somehow convince your spouse to do it, too. :)

dantle··on What does "Copy clean link" mean?
I made a Shortcut to strip links. You can add it to the share sheet. It'll give you a new share sheet with the stripped link. Much faster than mashing backspace.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/528c9af856fc46c9a3d164a85e8...

dantle··on Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi
Did you have the full GUI running back then? I tried this in 2021 but couldn’t get the GUI to launch. It seemed like an expected graphics lib wasn’t available.
dantle··on Ask HN: Dealing with ADHD Without Medication?
Fasting always gets me into a high focus zone (but I don't have ADHD). Try doing a 48 hour zero-calorie/liquid-only fast. Black coffee and teas are fine. Get plenty of electrolytes, especially magnesium and potassium, or else you'll have a headache. Take an ibuprofen if you really need it. And reward yourself at the end. I always get an amazing amount of reading done in these periods.
dantle··on Lesser known tricks, quirks and features of C
Nice article. Saw a few things I wish I'd known about.

1. %n in printf would be handy when writing CLIs dealing w/ multiple lines or precise counts of backspaces.

2. Using enums as a form of static_assert() is a great idea (triggering a div by zero compiler error).

dantle··on How to Befriend Crows and Turn Them Against Your Enemies
I enjoyed the rhetorical style used in this article. A nicely presented mixture of humor and information.
dantle··on Tesla Project Dojo Overview
Locality has everything to do with performance. It's why your L1 cache is faster than your L2 cache.
dantle··on An update to storage policies across your Google Account
I've used this for about a year, and it has been stable. Hosted on my home computer.

https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver

My emails get rejected from @comcast.net but nobody else as far as I can tell. I haven't figured out a good way to debug the issue. As a result, I am not completely off of free Gmail. If you need your emails to be 100% received on the other end, I would recommend paying a hosting provider.

dantle··on John Cocke, the father of RISC architecture
It's harder to imagine coming from the IBM of today, but historically the company has earned many laurels from its numerous important contributions to computing. As my computer architecture professor used to say, "everything that's worth inventing already has been at IBM." In addition to RISC, they created out-of-order, superscalar processing, relational databases, TCM, magnetic hard discs, DRAM, etc.
dantle··on Chipmaker Analog Devices to acquire Maxim Integrated for $21B
Here's a trivial python script to download them, for the lazy among us.

https://gist.github.com/dantler/f26d75f1051db13649aaedf73f7d...

dantle··on Apple Silicon: The Passing of Wintel
Although I'm not familiar with the specifics of (1) and (2), the characterization that Intel "took a while" or "were really slow" to enable features might be a bit unfair. (I am also a former employee)

Keep in mind that Intel's ability to properly light up new silicon features on your PC often relies upon your willingness to update your software. For instance, even if the SMT scheduler fix has been written and upstreamed, the next Ubuntu LTS to integrate the change may be 18 months away. The end user will believe that Intel is taking a long time to develop the fix.

dantle··on Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests
It is helpful, but not necessary. I am listening in on Seattle's trunked radio system with just one, and I get most of the comms.

I documented my setup here: https://dantler.us/seattle-police-scanner/

dantle··on Ask HN: Looking to setup my own email server – should I do it or not bother?
I currently run my own mailserver. It's running on my home computer, which I leave on 24/7 anyway.

Administration is quite easy if you start with a well-maintained docker image ,and I found one I'm quite happy with.[0] It has been less than 30 minutes of work so far, but I already understand docker quite well. It was nice to learn some more docker stuff, too.

The major downside is that random email hosts seem to reject my mail (looking at you, comcast.net addresses) so I still use a gmail with some contacts.

[0] https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver

dantle··on Am I Unique?
I'm using Brave and my useragent is not unique.

Version 1.2.43 Chromium: 79.0.3945.130 (Official Build) (64-bit)

dantle··on Am I Unique?
Are you sure you're looking only the "User Agent"? The text at the top is describing your entire "browser fingerprint." It includes everything the server could gather from you. Including cookies, browser version, width/height of the window, etc.

In case it's not clear, uniqueness should be seen as bad in this case. It means you can be tracked.

dantle··on Laser-Based Audio Injection Attacks on Voice-Controllable Systems [pdf]
Perhaps the "all at once" attack could work against today's hardware. This is because the mics (in devices I know of) are co-planar and the user may be speaking to Alexa (or whoever) from directly above or below the device. In this configuration, it is valid for all mics to be receiving the same audio signal simultaneously.

But in some future rev, one could imagine that if the mics in the array are non-coplanar (e.g. at least 4 mics) and sufficiently far from each other, then there is no possible way for the audio signal to reach them at once (unless it is actually light being measured).

dantle··on Laser-Based Audio Injection Attacks on Voice-Controllable Systems [pdf]
I'm a bit surprised that this works. It appears that this attack targets a single microphone. However, internal to most of these home assistant devices (e.g. Echo or HomePod) there is an array of microphones. A real sound from a spoken word would probably show up on more than one microphone (with an appropriate time and phase offset), although it seems to not be currently required. It seems like it would be complex or impossible for an attacker to target more than one microphone with this attack.
dantle··on 80% of river plastic pollution entering the oceans stem from 1000 rivers
There have been stories in the news which have raised awareness about how Canada exports their recycling/trash to the Philippines.[0] The Philippines seems to pollute heavily, based on this map. Given this data, it seems counterproductive to send waste to the highest polluting countries, since they are obviously not able to process their existing burden.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93Philippines_was...

dantle··on Show HN: A simple way to write standalone C programs for i386
It's pretty easy. With CL.exe (Microsoft's Visual Studio compiler) just use the /SUBSYSTEM:EFI_APPLICATION flag. You may have to manually specify the entry point. Note that there's no default cstdlib, so if you want to use the EFI APIs (e.g. for a "printf" function or other things from the article), you'll need to tell the compiler about the header definitions (as you would any C API).
dantle··on Microsoft introduces Windows 10 X for dual-screen devices
The parent story isn't about some version of Android. Windows 10 X is a real version of Windows, based on the NT Kernel.
dantle··on Bike crash left Spokane man unconscious, so his Apple Watch called 911
Why would a different accelerometer surprise you? The entire SiP is different between the Series 3 and Series 4. One source say the accelerometer in S4 has higher dynamic range. [0]

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13364/apple-announces-the-app...

dantle··on Ask HN: Is there any guarantee that my phone's camera isn't spying on me?
There isn't a guarantee, but there are incentives for phone/platform providers to avoid spying on you in a battery-powered device. Battery life is still a primary selling point, and these companies are fighting hard to maximize battery life on your device. Turning on the camera is among the most power-hungry tasks, as it activates the image signal processor block of your SoC (which is millions of gates and a high speed transfer interface). It would be difficult to produce a competitive device which spies on its users.
dantle··on Jony Ive is departing Apple, but he started leaving years ago
The charging cable that ships with the MacBook is only capable of USB2.0 speed data transfers.[0] You'll want a different cable for high speed data.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208368

dantle··on TempleOS: Installation
TempleOS is written in x86-64 assembly and won't run on a Raspi. Try a VM!
dantle··on Analyzing Core I9-9900K performance with Spectre and Meltdown mitigations
Skylake was a reasonably big core architecture upgrade (a "tock" in Intel terminology). Several new instructions (XSAVE, AVX512, etc.) were introduced. Perhaps you meant Broadwell?
dantle··on Show HN: A parser for electronic component descriptions
You did a nice job with capacitors. It was cool to write X7R and have it show up as a characteristic.
dantle··on Concise Electronics for Geeks (2010)
Great review as an embedded SW guy to nourish my EE background. Nicely peppered with practical tricks and techniques that are useful in the field. I enjoyed seeing the low-pass and high-pass filtered wave signatures along with the explanation of what the problem might be (long/close connections and broken traces, respectively).
dantle··on Harmony Link will no longer work after March 2018
It's not too difficult to build your own IR blaster that is controlled by an app. I wrote an Arduino library that lets you send device-specific IR commands based on a generic LIRC configuration file. I run it on an Arduino101 and send commands to it via Bluetooth LE. Currently using it with a Windows service for climate control in my rental apartment.[1]

I could share more source code if anybody is interested in doing the same thing.

[1] https://github.com/dantler/infrared-remote-sketch

dantle··on ARKit + CoreLocation [video]
Hasn't Yelp's app implemented this feature (called Monocle) for half a decade now? Could anyone explain the difference?
dantle··on Show HN: Verb Master – A site for practising Spanish verbs
I followed the same flow for learning Spanish as you, and your site looks excellent. I too have a bunch of infinitives memorized via Anki, but would like to practice all forms of conjugation, and manually creating more flashcards is simply too labor-intensive.

One thing I'd like to see is the flashcard interface translated to Spanish. I learned Spanish in Spanish, for the most part, and I get confused when I see "imperfect" and I have to remember that it's really what I learned as "pasado/preterito imperfecto." Built-in pronunciation via TTS would also rock! One could probably write a userscript to do this, but it's always nicer to be built in.

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