Hacker News Reader

eggfriedriceon Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?

This is great! I hope it was vibe coded

eggfriedriceon RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3

Lovely job, I like the "here's where I've got to so far" style. This gives people enough to work from and make a hand-wired version while he's waiting for boards to come back. Even if he runs out of time to do anything it's leaving a working design and firmware for folk to start from.

It's definitely too easy to put off publishing until it's "properly" done and then it never happens.

eggfriedriceon Using e-ink tablet as monitor for Linux

This was a really interesting read! Back in the day a friend and I started a company and Kickstartered a RPi add-on. The kickstarter campaign failed, but we ended up building anyway after one of the silicon manufacturers spotted the project and provided some FoC devices which changed the economics.

We spent oodles of time on it, learned lots, build a fairly simple product but ended up selling it through some of the bigger RPi retailers. It was all an excellent learning experience, and ignoring our time we made about 50p out of the entire batch of a thousand. Factor in our time and it was a complete financial disaster, but we were young and carefree and had fun doing it!

eggfriedriceon Pimped Amiga 500

Classy job!

eggfriedriceon The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain

I recall at the Torness tour that the guide, who's a local, remembered at public the planning meetings that they were told the building wouldn't really be visible from the A1!

At least they painted it grey to match the sky...

eggfriedriceon Show HN: A text-only blog engine using Cloudflare workers and KV store

This is nice, apart from a quick play when they were new I've never really looked at CF Workers and KV again. This made me go and have a look at the docs and find that it's actually looks quite useful. I didn't know they'd added Python and other languages, so that's cool in itself.

I like Jon's example here, a single and fairly short file that does just enough to demo this all, nice.

eggfriedriceon HTML Tags Memory Test

Today I learned about <hgroup>!

eggfriedriceon How to untangle phone numbers

I particularly like how the UK phone number examples are not written how we would write them in the UK, which I guess underlines the point.

eggfriedriceon Favorites from our prompt engineering tournament

I'm not sure I understood much except the photo of the cake

eggfriedriceon Computer Engineering for Babies (2021)

It's a great book, my daughter loves it. I was pretty chuffed when she figured out the AND gate needs both buttons pressed at once. I'm not entirely sure she's sussed XOR yet though.

eggfriedriceon Happy 20th Birthday to Inkscape

I've also lasered lots of things from Inkscape drawings. I've always found it easier to use than proper CAD but still get good results.

I don't remember this much, but a previous me wrote a guide for lasering using Inkscape for Edinburgh Hacklab. I don't think the process has changed much... https://wiki.ehlab.uk/inkscape_for_lasering

eggfriedriceon New LoRa RF distance record

There is essentially no use of LoRaWAN at 433MHz in Europe, this would have been at 868

eggfriedriceon Understanding battery performance of IoT devices

I do a lot with LoRaWAN, and I like the simplicity of its approach for class A devices, which is to wake up and transmit and then listen for a reply in two defined time windows. These are shortly after the transmission, so clock drift is less of an issue with cheap oscillators.

eggfriedriceon The art of auto engineering

OMG, I had no idea Tim Hunkin was churning out YouTube videos these days! I was exactly the right age to appreciate the Secret Life of Machines, and it looks like I have several hours of quality stuff to watch there.

eggfriedriceon Rclone is 10 years old today

Yup, it's great. I used it to shuffle stuff from s3 into Dropbox and it was just the right tool for the job.

eggfriedriceon Zrepl on Rsync.net

Back in the day I managed a small office server, backing up via a particularly slow ADSL line. It took about a week to do the initial sync, so I just let it run and in the meantime backed up to an external disk every couple of days.

Once it was up and running most snapshots took a few minutes to sync, always finished before the morning anyway.

Definite +1 to rsync.net, this was >15 years ago but it was always 100% solid, I don't think I ever had any issues. It's nice to see they're still doing the same thing and haven't bloated it with crap!

eggfriedriceon Oil Wells Hidden in Plain Sight in L.A

There's some nice fake buildings in Edinburgh, Scotland

There's a fake "house" at the end of my street. It's actually a telephone exchange: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@55.9050155,-3.2075701,3a,75y,...

There's normally an Openreach van or two parked outside, which gives the game away, but driving past you wouldn't notice.

My favourite is Dewer Place sub-station, despite the fancy frontage it was purpose built in 1894 as a sub-station: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@55.9465325,-3.2112386,3a,75y,...

I went on a tour round a few years ago and it was notable for using Gas Insulated Transformers, which are unusual outside of Japan if I remember rightly. There were amazingly strict planning regs that required the installation to be super quiet, so the building had a surprising amount of sound insulation.

eggfriedriceon Nothing like this will be built again (2002)

I went on a tour round Torness a couple of years ago and it's a fantastic engineering marvel to mosey around.

A few things stand out, like the old-tech ring binders and Windows 95 screensavers on CRTs. The safety focus was clear. Nothing was done without a risk assessment, and the young apprentice who was helping with our tour was given a telling off by the tour staff as he wasn't holding the handrails - as had clearly been drummed into them.

What really struck me was how many people were involved in running the plant. I don't know how it compares to similarly sized gas plants, but there were hundreds and hundreds of people employed - mostly in project management/safety roles. I wonder how it compares to how many folk are employed in renewables, we have a lot of wind power here now.

It's a shame that cracks have started to form in the reactors so the plants will be shutdown earlier than planned. It looks like tours are suspended for Covid, but go round if they open up again before shutdown!

eggfriedriceon The world’s biggest offshore wind farm, Hornsea 2, generates first power

I like the photo showing the blades labelled A, B and C. Makes it look like IKEA-style assembly, but with a massive Allen key.

eggfriedriceon The Arduino IDE 2.0 beta

I stand corrected!

eggfriedriceon The Arduino IDE 2.0 beta

Nice to see that it's not just another VS Code spin off. They seem to be finding a nice middle ground between the very basic Arduino 1 IDE, and an over-complicated all-in IDE.

Plus, debugging, woo!

eggfriedriceon Tamale King: ecommerce website from 1990s

What I like most about this is that the site didn't fall over from the HN hug of death.

I assume it must be their massively scalable Kubernetes + NoSQL DB + CDN infrastructure.

eggfriedriceon Show HN: WebGL simulation of rainy autumn day/evening

Nice Scotland simulator!

eggfriedriceon WireViz: Tool for documenting cables, wiring harnesses and connector pinouts

This is really cool. It's something I find hard to document at the moment so I'll try this out with my next project.

eggfriedriceon Bloodhound's 461-mph speed is big but team eyes bigger record ahead

Awesome! It's great to see that the project was saved from bankruptcy. I was really gutted at the thought it would get shelved, especially as it was so far along.

They've done a whole lot of educational work with the project to get kids (and adults) excited about engineering, which can only be a good thing.

eggfriedriceon Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes (2013)

When this last came up on HN, the Scottish Government was in the process of rolling this out. It seems to have happened and baby boxes are now given to all newborns: https://www.parentclub.scot/baby-box

eggfriedriceon The Death of the Mom and Pop E-Store

It can take a huge amount of time, but actually, that bit I won't outsource yet. We do it all in house.

A friend of mine with a similar business in a different field tried outsourcing that a few years ago and it didn't work well, I didn't really understand why until I started.

We sometimes pre-configure gateways and devices for customers, so we need to pull them off the shelf and work on them first, then pack all the other stuff they ordered into the box and ship it. It's invaluable having the stock close to hand.

My solution - hire someone to help with the logistics.

eggfriedriceon The Death of the Mom and Pop E-Store

https://connectedthings.store/gb/

We don't have the Things Node yet, but we do have the Things Uno (EU) which is a really handy dev board for experiments.

eggfriedriceon The Death of the Mom and Pop E-Store

I run a small online store, we focus on a particular niche tech, LoRaWAN. It's specific enough (at the moment) that there aren't many other folk in this area.

We started out with Shopify, but that's actually really limited in functionality unless you spend many $100s per month on apps to add basic stuff (like VAT handling). We switched to a self-hosted shop, which feels totally old skool but is working out pretty well. We're happily charging cards and shipping stuff all over the world.

Our thing is knowing the products and providing support, so I think that has some value. If you want a boxes shifted cheap then Amazon's your answer. Anything cleverer, then specialist retailers still have some real value.

eggfriedriceon Why Should Americans Be Grateful for $137 Insulin? Germans Get It for $55

>In the UK. It costs £0 to see the doctor and for the inhaler now is £8.80.

In Scotland prescriptions are "free", i.e., I don't pay anything for my inhalers, or anything else prescribed by my doctor.

This costs the Scottish health service £1.3bn (https://www.scotsman.com/news/bill-for-prescriptions-in-scot...). I don't know how sustainable that cost will be, but I don't hear anyone complaining about the policy, except for opposition parties.