jonah-archive

Huh, that's weird. I submitted at 2025-09-24T23:45:55 and that one was submitted at 2025-09-26T00:14:11, but the link text on mine says "3 hours ago" (currently) if I look at it from the front page but "2 days ago" (currently) if I look at it from my posted page.

I'm assuming it got the HN second-chance treatment but I feel like that doesn't make a ton of sense if it had a major discussion in the intervening timeframe? @dang might be something to look at

I liked the post. I had a Waterfield shoulder bag for my 12” MacBook that I loved because it just didn’t seem like a laptop bag (maybe because of the size), but in the same vein I also took a seamripper to it to remove the brand label (did you ever follow the old SDR Traveler, uh, luggage? A little overwrought but I liked the no-branding aesthetic).

There's another photo of it in the thread here that didn't make it into the archived version: https://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?t=5632

I have an O2 in storage and have been meaning to try a rebuild of this for... well, at least a decade at this point. Since I finally have a decent 3D printing setup now maybe I can actually make some progress this winter!

I advise people to use porkbun generally. Personally I use and like EasyDNS, though their UI is a little quirky.

This is a really great read. I was briefly obsessed with laserdiscs in the mid-aughts and went as far as swapping the EFM decoder chip on a Pioneer player with something that could pull the digital audio signal out (details are a little fuzzy at this point). I wanted to figure out a way to extract the video data and it seemed so potentially possible but, as is clear, far from simple and far beyond my abilities at the time. Incredible to see that things have finally progressed to the point where one can fully capture the disc data and emulate these things.

Heh, I was just looking up stuff from the era and found the original discussion of same: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/new-itunes-how-to-add-r...

I cook in a Gozney as well and the things that have made the biggest difference for me are a slow-rise dough (I've found that the really high-hydration recipes didn't make a huge difference for me and made the dough way more difficult to handle, so I haven't been doing that) and putting the sauce on hot (I keep it at a low simmer on the stove and dress directly from there). Shaving some parm over the whole thing with a microplane and adding a quick drizzle of olive oil right before popping it in also makes a big difference (I crank the oven to around 900F and my pizzas usually cook in ~75 seconds).

Ken Forkish's _The Elements of Pizza_ is a great resource though it's more focused on standard home oven cooking. His slow-rise recipe is roughly: 350g water (at ~95F), 13g salt, 1.5g instant dry yeast, 500g white flour (I use Caputo 00), mix the first three and let the yeast hydrate, then mix in the flour, rest 20 minutes, knead briefly until smooth, two hour room-temp rise in an oiled tub, shape into balls, then fridge rise (until either the next day or the day after, but best the next day). I do it with 310g of water to get a 60% hydration dough which is my preference.

https://www.jasnh.com , introduced in 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20020601214717/https://www.apa.o...

Our first home computer was a 386SX with a 300MB hard drive and 4MB of RAM, which seemed amazingly capacious at the time.

Right?? This was the closest modern thing I was able to find but the price point isn't there for a kid radio: https://rapidradios.com

alas, his friends are a couple hundred miles away so GMRS won't cut it. The GMRS-enabled radios are much, much better though

Huh, I was just thinking about something sort of like this after camping with some friends and our kids this weekend -- we brought FRS walkie-talkies for all of them (cannot recommend this enough!) and on the drive home my four-year-old was asking if he could call his friends on the radio -- rather than getting him a Technician's I was thinking about finding or making some push-to-talk cell/wifi devices for them. It seems like a few of these things exist but they're marketed toward the enterprise (in at least some cases, with a family-style product unfortunately but unsurprisingly being discontinued: https://relaypro.com/families/ ), but it doesn't seem like it would be a hard build aside from making a durable/kid-friendly enclosure for it.

Melville (roughly) agrees -- from the first chapter of Moby-Dick:

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Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

---

> I once told my math prof (logician) who made a comment about transfinite cardinals: careful it's powerful but it's power from the devil. I half regret that comment in retrospect.

You're in good company -- from Penelope Maddy's "Believing the Axioms"[0]:

---

Measurable cardinals were introduced by Ulam in [1930], where he proved that they are inaccessible. They are now known to be much larger than that, larger than all the hyperinaccessibles, Mahlos and weakly compacts. Indeed, because of their power, they are probably the best known large cardinals of all. The voice of caution reminds us that they were invented by the same fellow who invented the hydrogen bomb.

---

0: https://jwood.faculty.unlv.edu/unlv/Articles/Maddy1.pdf

A few years ago I was at a cafe in a venue that had a large conference/gathering, and their router was handing out 24 hour DHCP leases and ran out of IP addresses. It was a fairly technical group so me and a couple other people set up a table with RFC 2322-style pieces of paper with IP/gateway info ("please return when finished") and it worked surprisingly well!

I've ridden it before, it's really fun! The two locomotives are Baldwin 2-8-2 Mikados built in 1938/9, more details here: https://www.steamlocomotive.com/locobase.php?country=Canada&...

I think my favorite part is when the announcer explains the emergency stop system, and clarifies that getting a cinder in your face doesn't count as an emergency (IIRC they have safety goggles you can wear if you're concerned about it).

EDIT: found a video I took of it going by where you can hear the whistle blow (I was there over the holidays which is why it's decked out for Christmas): https://www.instagram.com/p/B64mteDJUBl/

Some good discussion in this previous post from 2023 as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177110

The Geekport is reasonably well-documented -- this is a direct logic analyzer port on the bus on the mainboard (in the form factor of a CPU socket -- upper right of the photo on this page): http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/pr...

This is an utterly random question, and I'm sure there's a better place to ask it, but does anyone reading this happen to have/know the logic analyzer pinout [0] on the BeBox mainboard? I got a weird rackmount BeBox (an LCS LD-CS1, the controller for their LD-88 audio mixer [1]) and have been rebuilding the blinkenlight board, but I'd love to drop an Agilent on there at some point.

0: https://bebits.irixnet.org/beos/docs/DR8/UserDoc/DR8UsersGui... "The pin-out for the logic probe interface is available upon request from Be, Inc. Be can supply a card and analyzer set-up libraries that connect the CPU bus to an HP 1660A."

1: http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/de...

I still have mine (in a firewire enclosure)! Last tested the DiscT@2 feature about four years ago, at the time qpxtool had a utility for burning the imagery under Linux.

I intermittently use a Twiddler (older version). The learning curve is initially steep but fine with practice. It's not cheap but it's not that expensive, and it works for mousing as well: https://www.tekgear.com/twiddler-4-wrap.html

We have a big and ongoing focus on amateur radio right now thanks to a grant from ARDC and really hard work by our awesome Program Manager Kay Savetz. Worth checking out: https://blog.archive.org/2022/11/16/digital-library-of-amate... https://archive.org/details/dlarc

Fritz Leiber, "A Pail of Air": https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51461/pg51461-images.ht...

The control knob looks like the one off a Dualit toaster (their Classic model is also extremely repairable), as do the heating elements: https://www.dualit.com/collections/toasters

(I bought a Dualit after using one at a B&B many years ago -- I absolutely love it, though it really is a little overkill for making a few slices of toast each day. But it's a pleasure to use.)

> Then I remember using our dialup to download every possible 3rd party VB form control and throwing them in a Form to see what they did. I don't know why I found this entertaining enough to keep doing it.

Wow, that takes me back. My local library also had a copy of "Visual Basic How-To: The Definitive Vb3 Problem Solver" and at some point I'd renewed my loan of it so many times they told me I couldn't anymore. I remember building a working interface based on the "Peanut Computer" interface from the beginning of _Out of this World_.

When this was posted it was rolled out for a subset of users. At this time it should be fully rolled out for all users.

Hahah, fair, but there are a _lot_ of Asterion/Asterius/Asterios-s, even just in mythology.

> Borges was a meta-author (which also means that it's impossible to spoil a Borges story).

"The House of Asterion" would beg to differ.

I used the GMT extensively in 2002/2003 or so while doing summer research. Not a low barrier to entry but incredibly useful and versatile, and was my first non-amateur introduction to CLI/pipeline style coding. Great to see it's still around and learn some more about its history.

For the interested, the book Two And Two has a lot more about the Old House. I used to visit regularly when I lived northeast and there's no place quite like it.

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/rafe-bartholomew/tw...