Hacker News Reader

(2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16495553

ivocon Accessing the Pinecil UART with Picoprobe

FTDI chips cost at least $5 (https://www.findchips.com/search/ft232), but an RP2040 can be bought for less than $1, so it makes sense to use an RP2040.

ivocon Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

hah. Drilling holes to run Ethernet through centuries-old castle walls was my favorite.

ivocon Barco: Linux Containers from Scratch in C

Legally it's probably fine, but as the Belgian American Radio Company has been around since the 1930s, the title of the article did confuse me: my first guess was something about how Barco was using Linux containers in their products.

ivocon Kevin Mitnick has died

Could always ask Woz for a card ?

ivocon Emulating IoT Firmware Made Easy: Start Hacking Without the Physical Device

qemu is fine if the IoT device only runs Linux; may want to look into something like https://renode.io/ for a more comprehensive approach.

ivocon Many indoor air quality sensor products are a scam

Guilty as charged. Based on design validation testing, I ended up making the design choice to partially rely on a software offset, a strong fan blowing into the sensor not being a supported scenario. But the placement / air flow / multiple openings definitely took us more design iterations than we had planned for.

ivocon Barcode Detection API

Can someone productize this as a service please ?

ivocon Pandoc – A universal document converter

- Style using CSS: Use Pandoc to HTML, and use wkhtmltopdf or chrome headless to convert HTML+CSS to PDF.

- Style using XSL-FO: Use Pandoc to DocBook, XSLT docbook-xsl stylesheets to convert to XSL-FO, Apache FOP to convert XSL-FO to PDF.

ivocon One Tether Trader Didn't Cause the Bitcoin Bubble

Back when it was $20000.

ivocon Docbook

There's AntennaHouse and PrinceXML, but both are pretty pricey ($3-5K / server), and both of these do now support CSS as well.

Apache FOP / Batik is okay for generating nice looking PDFs, but its SVG rasterization is much worse than that of Chrome's PDF renderer (Skia).

As I didn't get the memo about XML being dead, I'm still using Docbook and XSLT/XInclude to structure and filter content written in markdown/rst.

But I will be switching over from XSL-FO to CSS paged media for layout as soon as Chrome supports bookmarks in PDF output, or either WeasyPrint or wkhtmltopdf improve their CSS3 column support.

ivocon Helium

"Consumers plug-and-play hotspots in their homes and businesses. Labor cost is $0".

But in doing so, these customers most likely would break the contract with their ISP, or they'd have to upgrade to a contract that does allow them to "redistribute" Internet access.