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ja27

3,186 karma · joined April 14, 2009

I'm a refugee from a small company building enterprise software for multiple Fortune 500 companies and government agencies.

Now I run Thinkamingo where we build fun educational mobile apps.

I'm helping build BioscanR where we're applying modern sensor technology and analysis in the healthcare space.

I help run Tampa Hackerspace where I mostly get to watch other people build neat stuff while I focus on building the hackerspace. But I get to dabble in electronics, microcontrollers, art, 3D printing, etc. when I can.

I coach FIRST robotics, teaching high school kids to build and program competitive robots.

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ja27··on Ask HN: What's your daily driver keyboard?
Keychron K3 Pro, red switches, RGB, stock keycaps. I find low-profile more comfortable for my hands but has enough key travel it feels right. It's close enough to the MacBook layout that it isn't too hard to switch back and forth when I'm out with the laptop.
ja27··on Ask HN: Are Tech Meetups Dead?
I've seen maybe five big Meetup groups here that were pretty active pre-COVID get abandoned and looking for a new organizer. It's sad.

We had a big thriving Microsoft focused community here with multiple Meetup groups and multiple events every month but that died down as they laid off developer evangelists and then closed the local Microsoft office about 2 years ago.

There is a big, broad tech Meetup group here that's kind of thriving but their biggest draw events are "anything mentioning AI" meh. It's hard for them to find places to meet that can accommodate 50-100 visitors.

ja27··on Fixfest is a global gathering of repairers, tinkerers, and activists
We did a "restart party" at our hackerspace a few years ago. Definitely could have used a good stock of capacitors. Probably power cords. Not sure what to do with all the very specific USB-C etc. ports that break.
ja27··on GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" with x86_64, SMP and ~75% of Debian Packages Building
I remember talking about waiting for it to be ready in 1991.
ja27··on A New Era for FIRST LEGO League: Inspiring the Next Generation of Learners
Interesting. It's always been odd to me that FLL was all autonomous and no driver control then FTC and FRC focus heavily on driver controlled periods.
ja27··on Laptops are about to become a casualty of the AI grift
https://archive.is/SxxXj
ja27··on Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
I was just thinking today how I miss my DSL (Damn Small Linux) setup. A Pentium 2 Dell laptop, booted from mini-CD, usb drive for persistence. It ran a decent "dumb" terminal, X3270, and stripped down browser (dillo I believe). Was fine for a good chunk of my work day.
ja27··on Georgia Tech Is Teaching Other Universities a Fundraising Lesson
https://archive.is/YZIg0
ja27··on SpinLaunch, the Space Industry's Best Kept Secret
Article is from 2020.

They're all but out of the launch business now but claim to be continuing research on it. There are a lot of skeptics that it would ever work (at actual orbital velocity).

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/spinlaunch-yes-the-cen...

ja27··on Ask HN: Is HN Pro-Fascist?
Exactly. There are thousands of other venues to share political news. Go there.
ja27··on Inside the box: Everything I did with an Arduino starter kit
Addressable LEDs (strips, rings, panels) are really cool to play with too.
ja27··on Tiny Undervalued Hardware Companions (2024)
Yeah I fried a RAVPower USB-C PD supply with one of those.
ja27··on The Secret Lives of Adjunct Professors
My wife taught as a fine arts adjunct off and on at a large state university. Between gas, parking, and (relatively cheap) childcare we lost money every semester she taught.
ja27··on Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon from same cancer as Joe Biden
One of my favorites.

Also the one where Wally insists his towel gets cleaner every time he uses it: https://br.omega.com/dilbert/311.html

There's one somewhere where they're eating lunch and I think Wally asks Dilbert if he has any extra napkins and Dilbert says he won't know until he's done eating.

ja27··on The Subjective Charms of Objective-C
and the discussion from five days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43687966
ja27··on Tell HN: Changes to Bitbucket Cloud's Free Tier
Adios then
ja27··on What Happens When There Are Fewer Spaces to Park?
A Trader Joe's moves in
ja27··on Apple squandered the Holy Grail
WordPerfect for classic MacOS came out in 1988. It always felt like they bought someone else's product but apparently it was an in-house port.
ja27··on How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops (2020)
The nice thing about picking up older laptops is that the upgraded models don't really hold as much extra value compared to what they cost new so if you keep looking you can get a pretty maxed out machine for not a lot more than the more common low-end ones.
ja27··on Barnes and Noble is making a comeback
My local one closed two months ago to move to a smaller location. Won't open again until at least spring. They still had an iOS 5 book on the shelves from 2011.
ja27··on Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
This wasn't super creative, but way back in time, I was on a local tinymud and a number of us starting writing bot NPCs for it. I built a bartender bot that eventually would remember drinks, tell jokes, and more. One day another bot came into the bar and got into an extended exchange of insults with the bartender bot. We were kind of dumbfounded watching these blocks of switch statements have a very real-looking conversation in front of us.
ja27··on I Had $100k in Debt So I Moved into My Car
I was going to comment this but he actually mentions Michael Hickey in the article. He says he banked $60k towards building a tiny home in 146 days living in his car, doing Doordash etc., and posting/streaming a lot of social media. I believe there are many days where he says his income from views is higher than his delivery work but gotta have content to film.
ja27··on Enhance your writing skills with Ollama and Phi3
Am I missing something? How did he get Ollama / phi to access the internet to evaluate that site's text?
ja27··on The Lego Great Ball Contraption
I helped man one at a Brickworld. Lots of chasing down little plastic soccer balls all over the floor.

The whole thing just makes sense as a software dev. There's an input standard, output standard, and I guess a processing rate expectation (or not - that was probably the second biggest issue we faced was some slow contraptions that would back up). (The first biggest issue was a contraption that "pinged" the balls through the air to a landing container and would sometimes send them off randomly or kids would try to catch them.)

This is partly from LEGO fans previous work on railroad, town, space base, etc. modular builds where they have a spec for where each unit should connect and people bring in their own creations and link them all up.

I've always wanted to do something like the great ball contraption in general at makerfaires but open to all kinds of build materials, techniques, power, etc.

ja27··on Did you lose your AirPods?
I saw someone on Twitter that left hers in a seatback on a flight. They'd show up on Find My every day for almost two months before they died. She talked to the airline multiple times about someone checking her seatback and several times they insisted they weren't there. Doubtful they ever checked at all but impressive battery life.
ja27··on The rich history of ham radio culture
Heart attack from arguing with OM on 75m
ja27··on Pilots said nothing as Southwest plane flew dangerously low over Tampa Bay
The flight path looks like they were approaching for the east-west runway which is pretty rarely used at Tampa so that might have caused some confusion but that's what instruments and ATC are for.

If they had to divert, St. Pete Clearwater is right there and big. They probably flew right over it. Orlando and Sarasota are also much closer than Ft. Lauderdale. Maybe they didn't want St. Pete/Clearwater or Sarasota because of weather or Southwest doesn't use them, but Orlando gets plenty of Southwest traffic.

ja27··on Ask HN: Laptop or Desktop for Development?
I've been almost exclusively laptop for 15+ years.

Currently main a 16" M1 Pro MacBook Pro. About half the time it's connected to a Thunderbolt dock, 27" monitor (and sometimes a second monitor), keyboard + mouse/trackpad, ethernet, external SSD(s) at least for Time Machine, webcam, good mic on a shock mount arm, speakers, etc. I very rarely push the thermal limits or ram. It's incredibly useful to me, at least psychologically, to be able to pick up my main machine, with everything already on it, and move somewhere else in the house or get out of the house.

I do own some desktops but mostly use an older small gaming rig that can double as a dev machine but except for the GPU and SSD space it's weaker than my MacBook. It's actually small enough to throw in a large laptop bag with kb+mouse and a travel monitor but I rarely do that.

ja27··on OpenText to lay off nearly 1,200 employees
Hey, welcome to the laid off by OpenText club. fistbump
ja27··on Ask HN: Where to sell vintage computers?
Local makerspace
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