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imwallyon The secret afterlife of lost German luggage

The Instagram story-esque design is an interesting take. I'm viewing this on a desktop but I'm not sure how I feel about it. Usually I prefer scrolling but I suppose it works well with the high-res photos.

imwallyon Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

Seriously, I thought I received a knock-off when I first opened the package.

imwallyon Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform

I've been using pelican [1] with S3 for my blog [2]. It comes with a nice makefile that handles the generation (markdown -> HTML), dev server (localhost:8000 that regenerates files upon modification) and deployment to S3 (uses s3cmd along with API keys to upload to a designated bucket). It offers GitHub, ftp, ssh, and dropbox options for deployment as well, but I've never tried them.

[1] https://blog.getpelican.com

[2] http://nil.wallyjones.com

imwallyon Consume less, create more

I decided to go with Pelican for my blog, http://nil.wallyjones.com. If you are comfortable with a little HTML and CSS then you can whip up a simple minimal theme in a fairly short period of time. Honestly, I don’t even consider mine finished and tend to add to it as I write posts (which isn’t very often). If you have any questions about getting pelican up and running, let me know. You can also check out my theme, https://github.com/imwally/niltheme, as a reference for a staring point.

imwallyon Polybius (Urban Legend)

This was the theme of one of Nine Inch Nails recent music videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDV-dOvqKzQ

imwallyon Amazon stops selling Dash buttons

> Existing Dash buttons will continue to function “so long as the public keeps using them,” CNET says.

via https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/28/18245315/amazon-dash-butt...

imwallyon 3 years later, IntelliJ is still unusably slow on macOS with a 4K display

If you're on macOS, absolutely. Linux, maybe not. It's really hard for me to go back to a non-retina screen. I'm using a 2018 15" MBP which ships with a default scaled resolution of 1680x1050 which upscales the screen and in my opinion isn't as clear as the 1:1 pixels of 1440x900 (the native screen resolution being 2x that at 2880x1800). The crispness is worth the lack of real estate. Sharpness is definitely worth having.

imwallyon Eating more fruit and vegetables 'improves mental wellbeing'

This. Around 50% of my veg and fruit intake comes from frozen organic bags. They're cheaper, last longer, and quicker to make. My go-to lazy meals involve throwing frozen rice, broccoli or kale, and beans in a glass bowl and heating it up in the microwave.

imwallyon Why Apple's 3D Touch failed miserably

iOS 12 introduces this feature to devices without 3D Touch. Just press and hold the space bar until the characters on the keys disappear.

imwallyon The new MacBook Pros with T2 chips do indeed kernel panic randomly

Thanks! For anyone else interested, this specific crash report for Bridge OS is listed under System Reports > ProxiedDevice-Bridge.

imwallyon The new MacBook Pros with T2 chips do indeed kernel panic randomly

Does anyone know if you can view past crash reports? I sent the same crash report to Apple this morning but neglected to save it. Would be interesting to compare similar reports.

imwallyon The new MacBook Pros with T2 chips do indeed kernel panic randomly

Hmm, woke up to the same issue today. My 2018's lid was closed but the fans were spinning near full speed. I have a firmware password set so when it reboots it sits at the password prompt (why can't this timeout and shutdown after a certain period of inactivity?). The crash report indicated Bridge OS as well. This is also the second time it happened.

imwallyon The best laptop right now: Huawei Matebook X Pro

Note that there's supposedly some nasty coil whine on these machines: https://twitter.com/jcs/status/1000117326728060929

imwallyon The best laptop right now: Huawei Matebook X Pro

I too entertained the idea of the PixelBook but just this week I sold my 2017 15" MacBook Pro and bought a 2015. I couldn't care less about the TouchBar but there are some serious reliability problems with the butterfly keyboard.

What I liked about the 2017:

- Great screen (the P3 does make a difference).

- Loud speakers (though over a certain percent the chassis would vibrate).

- Slightly smaller footprint.

- Slightly thinner.

- Weighs slightly less.

What I like about the 2015:

- Reliable keyboard.

- Stiffer LCD hinge (less wobbling, don't care about how hard it is to open).

- No branding at the bottom of screen.

- MagSafe power adapter with charging/charged LED status indicator.

- Storage can be self-upgraded.

- No accidental TouchBar taps resulting in play/pause or locking screen.

imwallyon How to Clean Your Laptop

Many moons ago Apple included a nice little microfiber cloth[1] with an embossed Apple logo on it. Ever since then I have taken extra care to clean my devices every so often with the same cloth.

[1] https://nicolasbottari.com/uploads/_big/apple_cleaning_cloth...

imwallyon Lifestyle plugins for BitBar – Put anything in your Mac OS X menu bar

Agreed. It’s funny that not too long ago I wrote a cross platform battery status indicator[0] that I could place in my tmux status bar and not have to worry about changing my config based on what system I’m on. Coincidentally it can also be used with bitbar. However, shortly after using it I realized it was more distracting than helpful. Now I just call the script if I want to see the status. There’s also less battery anxiety this way.

[0] https://github.com/imwally/battstat

imwallyon Dumber phone

> letting myself get bored enough to stimulate serious creativity.

I think this is another key takeaway. We're so scared of being bored that we instantly reach for our phone as a means to fill this seemingly unwanted void. As if boredom has this negative connotation attached to it.

imwallyon The largest living thing on Earth is a fungus (2014)

I just recently read a great book called The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben [1] that touches on the subject of a social network among trees via a fungal network known as the "Wood Wide Web" [2].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate_Discove...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/30/world/europe/german-fores...

imwallyon Easy gopher-lua bridge

https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/moving-to-https

imwallyon Firefox Private Browsing vs. Chrome Incognito: Which Is Faster?

Would the built-in tracking protection make anti-tracking add-ons such as uBlock Origin redundant? Looks like it's using Disconnect's list but I'm not sure how much this differs from uBlock.

imwallyon Essential C

Great little resource on C programming and data structures. I had a lot of fun going through the problems presented in the Linked List and Binary Tree sections [1].

[1] https://github.com/imwally/cmuck

imwallyon A Brief History of Lisp Machines (2008)

Most of the links on this page are broken so here are the archived versions (thanks Internet Archive!):

The CONS protoype (AI Memo 444):

https://web.archive.org/web/20060211063312/http://home.comca...

The CADR (AI Memo 528):

https://web.archive.org/web/20050411174516/http://home.comca...

The Symbolics lisp machine museum:

https://web.archive.org/web/20000605210626/http://kogs-www.i...

After-the-demise symbolics info:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060101010104/http://www.abstra...

P. Tucker Withington's contemporary thoughts:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040810204319/http://www2.theci...

Lisp family tree:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060202000304/http://community....

imwallyon DuckDuckGo vs Google

But then you can’t use bangs anymore. I think the idea is that Google is there if you need it while still retaining the benefit of using bangs. So, it’s the best of both worlds.

imwallyon Countdown to timestamp 1,500M

    while true; do date +%s; sleep 1; done

imwallyon ‘Low End’ Means Good Enough

>> I can’t get too excited about the 2016 13″ MacBook Pro with 2 Thunderbolt ports. It has a Retina Display, but its 2560 x 1600 pixel display shows no more than my current MacBook’s 1280 x 800 display.

Huh? Out of the box resolution is 1440x900 and maxes out at 1680x1050 (without using a 3rd party application like SwitchResX). Apple used to set the default to 1280x800 but this is no longer the case.

imwallyon Ask HN: What podcasts are you listening to?

Garbage - https://garbage.fm/

imwallyon Ask HN: What's the most simple thing you struggle to understand in programming?

I can answer your question on nginx. There are multiple reasons why you would want to use it as the entry point to what you want to serve. As a standalone web sever if offers a plethora of configuration settings that allow you to specify how you want to handle the incoming requests.

TLS is one aspect that comes to mind. A certificate and key is not enough. You must specify the correct parameters such as the cipher suites, DH parameters, HSTS, and more if you want a secure connection.

You mentioned a reverse proxy. This is the other aspect that comes to mind. Servers are bound to ports, like 80 and 443. How do you serve multiple applications on the same port on the same server? A proxy. More specifically a reverse proxy. It sits between the client and the services as a middleman to handle and direct requests. Multiple services can run on different ports but the reverse proxy allows for a single point of entry, such as HTTP requests on port 80. The proxy will inspect the request and based on certain values, say a hostname, it will be directed to the correct service. Otherwise you would have to tell your clients to specify the port the service is running on, ex: http://mydomain.com:8080

imwallyon Ask HN: What's the most simple thing you struggle to understand in programming?

How to overcome imposter syndrome.

imwallyon Ask HN: What's the most simple thing you struggle to understand in programming?

A pointer is a value. That value is a memory location. That memory location should contain a value too. The value the pointer points to.

Pointers start to make more sense when you take the comment above about pass by value vs. pass by reference into consideration.

There's a great gif about this where a cup is used as the argument to a fillCup() function.

https://blog.penjee.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/pass-by-r...

In pass by value, a second cup is created just for that function and then filled with liquid. The original cup is left untouched. With pass by reference, the original cup is being filled, not a duplicate of it. How does the function know to fill the original instead of creating a duplicate for its own scope? A pointer.

When calling a function with arguments a few things are happening behind the scenes. Memory allocation for these arguments is one of those things. This is where the stack and heap come into play. Memory allocated for the function call is considered the stack while memory for the entire program (think global variables) is the heap. Things get even more interesting when you look into stack frames and step through the execution of a program with a debugger like gdb or lldb. You'll start to understand how recursion works.

Pointers are also used in certain data structures like a linked list. They allow you to easily keep a chain of values that contain data and a pointer which points to the next data, otherwise known as a linked list, or binary tree, or many other names depending on the structure.

I'm replying on my phone so I apologize in advanced for the formatting. Hope this helps.

imwallyon Ask HN: Install macOS in another partition and boot it before crossing borders?

It sounds like you want some type of plausible deniability[1] or a way to hide your secure data in pain sight but often security through obscurity is a terrible idea.

Beyond using FileVault and a firmware password I don't think there's much else you can do besides physically removing the disk. Unfortunately that is not a easy task on the latest MacBooks.

1: https://defuse.ca/truecrypt-plausible-deniability-useless-by...