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mmcgaha

1,016 karma · joined April 17, 2017

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mmcgaha··on Men in their 50s may be aging faster due to toxic 'forever chemicals'
I have no concern for young generations wanting to blame our age group. The day will come soon that their generation is pointed at for not solving the complex problems of their day. Now if they will show me the same grace when I start a story with "back in my day" we will all get along.
mmcgaha··on Suicide Linux (2009)
And here is thought sl was a pain in the ass. I hate that train.
mmcgaha··on A practical guide to observing the night sky for real skies and real equipment
I live in rural Maine so it may not be the same everywhere but a few months ago I was just enjoying the outdoors and noticed all these fast moving objects. Turns out they were satellites. You could see one or two fly over every couple of minutes.
mmcgaha··on Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?
Christmas dinner for my immediate family almost $500. That was pretty much dinner and our favorite appetizers but does not count the liquor and wine. This was just me, my ex, five kids, a daughter in law and grandchild. I can see getting to 3k pretty fast.
mmcgaha··on X.org Security Advisory: multiple security issues X.Org X server and Xwayland
I bet you are the life of the party. Seriously though, what makes you write that so matter of factly?
mmcgaha··on The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog
I just wish someone would make a first person version of AMFV. It would need to be a really different game to stay true to AMFV but I think it could revolve around not getting shut down by the bureaucrats.
mmcgaha··on RPi 500 arrives with mechanical switches, RGB LED backlit keys
I like that it is a well maintained unix like environment with full on vendor support. Since the pi 5 performance has been good enough for everything I do and the 400 is still my go-to when I need an extra machine for something. Given that, there is almost no way I will buy one but if I didn't already have a pi 5 workstation I probably would.
mmcgaha··on "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"
I use it to maintain our product catalog at work. The server does the final rendering of the complete document but as a page is getting edited the preview is getting rendered in the browser. Back to what everyone is saying, this isn't important enough to move the needle for people making these decisions.
mmcgaha··on Croatian freediver held breath for 29 minutes
When I was in high school I could hold my breath all the way through comfortably numb. None of my friends could even come close. My technique was to breath in and out real fast until I felt tingly.
mmcgaha··on We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness
Yep, this is it exactly. When I was young TV, including HBO, would go off the air at night. You could not have hours of fun playing an Atari. Having fun at home was cards and board games. Late night fun . . . well that will probably never change.
mmcgaha··on Rolex Caliber 7135: new indirect impulse escapement and high frequency movement
I would say shut up and take my money but they don't want my money.
mmcgaha··on Rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia
When my son was six he found a girly magazine at a friends house and was sneaking away to look at it. When my wife caught him she told him the magazine was bad and he should not be looking at it. His simple reply was "But I like it Mom."

Even if Unix is bad, I like it.

mmcgaha··on The History of Toontown’s SpeedChat (2007)
I met a lot of folks playing TT and the method that I used most was to jump for numbers and the first letter of speed chat was the letter. Adults and older teens picked up on it and kids did not so it worked out well.

I played some TT rewritten a couple of years back and everyone can just chat away. My opinion is that restricted chat was better.

mmcgaha··on Invisible Electrostatic Wall at 3M plant (1996)
I used to work for a company that bought off cuts from this plant and the static that comes off of these rolls is scary. I heard this story years ago and no one in our plant had a doubt about it being true because 3M ran enormous rolls.
mmcgaha··on Consumer-grade routers on puny power supplies (2024)
I used to run my mother's vacuum cleaner plugged into the same outlet as my C64 to keep it from crashing.
mmcgaha··on Uncut Currency
I have too many family stories of the things police used to do to believe that it was better back then. My gut tells me things are better now but maybe I am just not in the know.
mmcgaha··on The Power Mac 4400
I could not agree with you more.

I am replying to you from my third mac. I got it less than a year ago and it is the first Mac I have used since 2010 or so. Sure I am getting used to it but it does surprise me how different some things are from my typical XFCE/Win10 environments. I know unintuitive is the wrong word but at least for my own intuition, it is unintuitive.

mmcgaha··on Half My Life with Perl
In my mind Perl was the Rust of the 90s. Perl evangelists were everywhere and wanted to rewrite everything in one line of Perl.
mmcgaha··on What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)
When I was a kid I used to think that having variables A... without any gaps in the letters meant that I did a good job of thinking out the program in advance.
mmcgaha··on Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen
I was looking for a reference but I am afraid it is lost in some news group in the distant past but my understanding is that all of Meta Kernel was written directly on an HP calculator.
mmcgaha··on Exploring and having fun with rotary telephones
In the 90s there was a charge on my mom's phone bill for touch tone dialing. I called up to dispute the charges but the phone company wouldn't have any of it so I had them remove the "service" and they warned me that she wouldn't be able to dial out any more. I flipped a switch on her phone to simulate pulse dialing and a few months later switched it back. She was never charged again.
mmcgaha··on The US copyright office has struck down a major effort for game preservation
So musicians should not be compensated when their old songs play on the radio? You made your money in 1974 now move along while my company exploits your work for free.
mmcgaha··on Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
I am not sure that it is an issue with the origination point. In fact I just thought it was my ISP because my daughter's boyfriend was watching and doing facetime with her and my video was dropping but his was not. I have 2gb fiber and we regularly stream five TVs without any issue, so it should not have been a bandwidth issue.
mmcgaha··on Hackers use ZIP file concatenation to evade detection
I doubt it still works but things I needed to get through email I would embed in word documents.
mmcgaha··on Bill Atkinson doxxed Douglas Adams in 1987
Magazines used to have pen pal sections where kids would post their name, age, and address so anyone could write them. It was a different time.
mmcgaha··on A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones
This isn't new and the pediatric dentists are the worst. Get a second opinion before you let someone destroy your teeth.
mmcgaha··on Wait Until 8th
Among my children, my oldest got an iphone for Christmas in 2007 when he was 17. The other four got them spread out over the following ten years but progressively younger in age. I cannot say that I see a big difference in their phone usage, grades, or social development. It seems to me that they all just got more attached to the phone the longer they had it. I am starting to see some push back from my 16-year-old after reading "Stolen Focus" a few months back and I hear that other kids her age are doing the same.
mmcgaha··on LG TVs Start Showing Ads on Screensavers
I have exactly that in two rooms and it has some issues. I cannot turn off either display with the remote and I cannot change the volume with the remote in one room.
mmcgaha··on Ask HN: What is your opinion on Open BSD?
> My sister made me install it on her Intel i3 PC one time.

Your sister sounds hot!

mmcgaha··on The Heart of Unix (2018)
I always tell people the best way to learn how to use linux is to read The Unix Programming Environment.
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