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ianpenney

242 karma · joined December 15, 2013

You can find me on the 20 meter band.
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ianpenney··on CN Tower, Behind the Scenes (2014)
A community member recently got meshtastic nodes CNT1 and CNT2 installed! Here’s a bit of old lore about the environment they’re located in.
ianpenney··on Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet
The end of the article?

Thanks for making exactly my point.

ianpenney··on Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet
The detection of dimethyl sulfide on an exoplanet is an exciting development, ok. And DMS on Earth is almost entirely biologically sourced, but that doesn’t make it an exclusive biosignature. There are plausible abiotic pathways for DMS formation, such as in geochemistry we can’t know entirely about because we live on earth.

I’m not sure a journalist for this exalted American newspaper here knows anything about this and frankly the excited language of this article is dumb af. Probably because excited people keep paying for subscriptions to this trash.

It took my amateur self nearly 10 mins to ask around to qualified friends and research some counter ideas.

ianpenney··on How Long It Takes to Get over an Ex Emotionally
“It took me a year to believe it was over And it took me two more to get over the loss, woah-woah“

https://genius.com/Barenaked-ladies-enid-lyrics

Not a bad estimation from a song long ago, as it turns out.

ianpenney··on U2's Larry Mullen Jr: my dyscalculia makes 'counting like climbing Everest'
https://www.clac.ca/Your-voice/Article/wired-to-work-differe...
ianpenney··on U2's Larry Mullen Jr: my dyscalculia makes 'counting like climbing Everest'
This is a very personal story and I’ll keep it personal because I don’t know what anyone else’s lived experience is. If you’re young and this resonates for you, you’ll figure it out.

My undiagnosed dyscalculia combined with an unnecessarily difficult calculus course at mun.ca cost me my degree. All other requirements met.

Yeah I am throwing shade because I was made to feel stupid by callous faculty when I fully understood why you’d want tests for sequences and series but just couldn’t hack those exams and assignments where they threw three curveballs per problem.

I grew to understand trig in high school by programming a rotating cube on a Sharp calculator. It ran at .5 fps. My teacher passed me because it was clear I had a grasp.

I would have done better at UofT - I compared their curriculum after the fact. One maybe two curve balls per question. Just couldn’t afford it.

I still have to use my fingers to count basic addition and subtraction. I can’t read an analog clock unless I really think about it. I have immense problems remembering the names of people I just met.

Luckily, at the time, I had a history of good IT admin work to make up for it.

And 25 years later, I am very happy with how my career has gone, no letters to my name.

It’s good to see someone else’s famous and major success despite such a burden.

For anyone else, get whatever exemption you can. Lord knows the golf caddy of their rich parents’ friends do the same.

I’d be as bitter as the prof who smoked cigars in his office, but my Cayley medal still hangs on the wall as a reminder of something that would take way too long to put to words.

ianpenney··on Digital Signage for Apple TV: The Complete Guide
Jamf is way overblown for this use case. Check out SimpleMDM instead.
ianpenney··on Why does FM sound better than AM?
FM is not very practical on frequencies that bounce off the atmosphere with any regularity as they have a lot less bandwidth to offer.

The reason this conversation is so foreign to most of us is because back in the day of shortwave radio our suburban and urban environments weren’t soaked in RF interference.

Go out to the middle of nowhere and try a shortwave radio or an SDR with an extremely long wire antenna strung up in trees. You’ll receive the world.

ianpenney··on In SSRI Withdrawal, Brain Zaps Go from Overlooked Symptom to Center Stage
Had a friend with this problem. Wanted to say this story hits home for me after many many years. I tried my best to help, don’t want to say exactly how because I’m not qualified.

But frankly the doctor who prescribed larger and larger doses of Venlafaxine shouldn’t have been qualified either.

It’s a much more potent norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor than it is for serotonin. My understanding is by the time you get an effective dose you’ve got some collateral negative effects.

ianpenney··on Ask HN: What books taught you the most about human nature?
Gödel Escher Bach.
ianpenney··on Amusing Ourselves to Death (2014)
This is a very deep thought that has crossed my mind quite a lot as I’ve used LLMs and other AI.

Ironically, we are discovering the human condition by evaluating what we are “not”.

… but, we are.

ianpenney··on The 4-chan Go programmer
This is either parody or the making of someone who’s never done real work.

Source: if you do this stuff or even dare to name another microservice after a Harry Potter character when 11.5 million people rely on it, I’m going to dedicate the rest of my life to having you fired from everywhere.

ianpenney··on Blitzortung – real time lightning strikes around the world
Pseudorandom but you’d have an issue with the fact that certain tall objects get struck all the time and there are better radio noise sources that are probably better at generating entropy.

Maybe the timing rather than the locality might be a better input.

ianpenney··on Hackberry-Pi_Zero – A handheld Linux terminal using Raspberry Pi Zero 2W
See also: Lilygo Tdeck

https://www.lilygo.cc/products/t-deck

Runs meshtastic:

https://meshtastic.org/

The new UI is being developed right now…

https://youtu.be/mtFwETD7nY4?feature=shared

ianpenney··on "Out of Band" network management is not trivial
Ham radio. Meshtastic. Knowing your neighborhood.
ianpenney··on Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
Reasonable comeback.

Assange news is pretty big. I guess I was surprised that wasn’t top of the page.

And I always defer to the Jargon file for my own axioms. It’s been a long time with that as a North Star.

ianpenney··on The Internet in Greece
When I finally got to Lyon at a random Airbnb my iCloud backups started catching up with gusto.

It reminded me of all the restaurant toilets in Athens that instructed you to throw your used toilet paper in the trash and not down the antiquated drainpipes. No blame no shame. It is what it is in one of the oldest cities.

Tokyo used to be like this too in 2014.

Starlink must be making a killing in places like this.

ianpenney··on Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
Does anyone else think this is the least important distraction to real hackers today?
ianpenney··on [dead]
If you’re a flight attendant and you lift someone’s heavy bag into an overhead and injure yourself in the process, do you think AA will compensate you for your injury on the job? Or will they say “you shouldn’t have done that” and leave you unable to work?

If a passenger can’t lift the bag into the overhead themselves, perhaps they should check it either before security or at the gate.

Bad reactions all around, certainly. I can think of no quicker way to piss off a crew member with extensive safety and security training than to call them a “Waiter” when they’re the ones tasked with handling life threatening emergencies should they arise.

On the gripping hand, FAs are also trained in deescalation.

ianpenney··on FireChat was a tool for revolution, then disappeared
Meshtastic is alive https://meshtastic.org/
ianpenney··on Timekeepers may subtract a second in 2029 as planet spins slightly faster
Story time.

Was working at $company when our mission critical software went absolutely haywire one day.

The way I proved it was the leap second was because the QA and Prod environments crashed hard at the exact same time.

If you’re running old as the hills enterprise software, maybe plan to have some extra help on call that day.

ianpenney··on UTC+08:45
When Facebook first adopted mun.ca I was ignored enough to feel it necessary to create a group called:

“Hey Facebook did you know -3:30 GMT is a time zone?”

Ah, memories. Time zones are hard. Don’t roll your own timekeeping libraries for business prod. Just like crypto.

ianpenney··on Ask HN: How did you get yourself out of a rut?
Forgive yourself.
ianpenney··on The Apple Vision Pro is spectacular and sad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain

Worth a re-watch in this day and age given your comments on the zeitgeist.

ianpenney··on You Shouldn't Make Friends at Work
One of my very very best friends was my coworker. We went to Devops Days Berlin together which was a dream come true for two house music fans from Toronto. We went to Berghain! We’ve been hanging out for about a decade. He dropped everything with his wife and kid to bring me supplies when the building I lived in got a worst-case infestation of bedbugs during the pandemic. He always invites me to his DJ shows and we message almost every day.

Now that’s something to be grateful for.

As cgeier put it: hard disagree.

Love you buddy.

ianpenney··on The era of American computer magazines has drawn to a close
Ctrl-F, “coconut”… was not disappointed. PC Gamer was an astounding resource in my childhood.
ianpenney··on Higgsfield AI: Anyone Can Train Llama 70B or Mistral for Free
For the community; the space of AI is expanding so fast. You’ll have to work faster.
ianpenney··on Higgsfield AI: Anyone Can Train Llama 70B or Mistral for Free
boson? That you Alex?
ianpenney··on Still no love for WPA3 on the Raspberry Pi 5
This sounds about right to me, but I’d like to point out the cost barrier differs into unrelated paradigms above/below OSI Layer 2.
ianpenney··on The Guerrilla's Guide to the Baofeng Radio
Here’s why the Baofeng is often referred to by hams as a spurious emissions potato:

https://youtu.be/8WJQb_zMpxU?feature=shared

It’s cheap. It desenses easily. It picks up more noise than signal and makes an unacceptable amount of harmonic interference on transmit.

If you’re really interested in having a handheld radio, get your Amateur licence and buy a Yaesu FT5D. Worth it for so many more reasons.

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