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nightbrawler

735 karma · joined January 16, 2012

tyd [at] logic [dot] io

Offgrid in NM

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nightbrawler··on Fridge 0.2
The chest style is optimal because with a traditional freezer-on-top refrigerator, you lose a lot of cold air each time you open the door. Whereas with the chest style, hardly anything is lost because the cold air doesn't rise.
nightbrawler··on Ask HN: Mac users who have switched to Linux, how do you make presentations?
I think MS PowerPoint online is pretty hard to beat... it's fully featured and web based.
nightbrawler··on Ask HN: How did you decide where to live?
Fellow INTP here, similar requirements for me choosing where to live with friendly people accepting of outsiders. However, we ended up in the opposite environment than you, our nearest community is less than 200 people. If we don't wave to every passing vehicle, people might think something is wrong... and in Chicago, if you did the same, then people might think something is wrong! :)

After moving here, we quickly made friends and I've encountered quite a few other like minded tech workers in the area (one works for a direct competitor). My job and co-workers (many 10yr+ relationships at this point) fulfill my intellectual needs and the main engineering office happens to be located in Boston!

nightbrawler··on Ask HN: How did you decide where to live?
Some advice would be to start your day earlier so you can end it earlier. I'm usually done with work by 3pm and them I'm spending time with the kids, doing stuff outdoors and being disconnected. Our team is spread across the country so I typically work an east coast schedule.

Another big thing for me is having a separate place for an office, so I can leave the house and go somewhere that is dedicated to work. For that, I have a 400sq ft office about 20 yards from the main house.

We also have a separate space for homeschooling, that's a big help for my Wife and the kids.

If you want advice on remote living and property type stuff, shoot me an email (in my profile).

nightbrawler··on Ask HN: How did you decide where to live?
Works well with Webex for me. Entire team is remote and I share my desktop often for collaboration.
nightbrawler··on Ask HN: How did you decide where to live?
We live on the edge of the grid in a very remote New Mexico near the Gila National Forest. With 3 kids, 6yrs and younger that we home school. I've worked remote since 2010 and absolutely love it. Working remote plus home schooling the kids means we can travel and pretty much go anywhere we want any time. We do a lot of RV travel plus spend lots of time outdoors in the Gila, hiking, hunting and exploring...

As for the deciding where to live, it was pretty easy for us. We were already coming to New Mexico for the outdoors multiple times per year, and land in our favorite area is cheap. We were able to locate 43 acres with a log home and relocated here 5 years ago... was the best decision for our family.

Our first couple of years here the internet was a bit spotty as I had to use a Verizon hotspot and typically had 2 bars of LTE on the best days. Surprisingly, there is fiber run all over the place here even tho its super rural. Eventually the local phone company installed a DSL box on one of the fiber runs near our property and that allowed us to get DSL. It's only 5/1 but fits our needs and my VPN connection works fine with it along with my VOIP desk phone.

nightbrawler··on Hashicorp Vault v1.0
We use Vault in our environment and deployments... Vault has a concept of using tokens for authentication to pull secrets. You can assign max number of uses, max TTL and other parameters when you generate them.

For our deployments, we generate a single token with a max # of uses that matches the target server count for our deploy and also a very short TTL of 5 seconds. Our code gets pushed and the token is passed to each server (in an env var) during that time and a command is passed to refresh environment vars with secrets from Vault. So if a token gets compromised it's very likely to be used up and/or expired.

nightbrawler··on After 60 Years, I-95 Is Complete
Some interesting statistics of tax rates: https://bradfordtaxinstitute.com/Free_Resources/Federal-Inco...

- During WWI it peaked at 77% - During WWII it peaked at 94%!!

nightbrawler··on BreezyPDF Lite: HTML to PDF generation as a Service
Despite being a bit pricey, PrinceXML is the best tool I've seen and used for HTML to PDF conversion. Massive set of features and very reliable output. We've used it as part of our reporting engine to output PDF's since 2011. Supports spanning tables across multiple pages, JavaScript, image loading and lots of other cool stuff
nightbrawler··on Show HN: Kubernetes operator to automatically deploy and run Tor hidden services
Very useful, thanks!
nightbrawler··on Ditch the Batteries: Off-Grid Compressed Air Energy Storage
While I was researching offgrid options a few years back I came across this site and their windmill for compressed air: https://www.cottagecraftworks.com/wind-compressor-wind-drive...

They also have quite a few interesting compressed air kitchen appliances...such as mixers, grain mills.

nightbrawler··on A home-made lithographically-fabricated integrated circuit
For those curious about the HF danger mentioned above, Wikipedia has an interesting (and scary) summary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrofluoric_acid#Health_and_s...

nightbrawler··on Show HN: Monthly subscription airline with SFO-LAX flights starting at $78
Looks like some older iteration located here which does a better job presenting what they are trying to sell and how it's better

https://www.jumpdrive.io/index.html

nightbrawler··on Gabriel García Márquez’s Archive Freely Available Online
Interesting! He was last night's final Jeopardy:

In a 1967 novel this Nobel Prize winner wrote, “The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude”

nightbrawler··on Idaho Wants to Establish America's First 'Dark Sky Preserve'
Self-plug: I live under Bortle Class 1 sky in New Mexico. It's absolutely amazing! We are in the process of building a small cabin on our land that we plan to rent out starting in 2018 so we can share this experience with others. Keep an eye on http://darkskycabin.com ...
nightbrawler··on Solar Roof
Add in the various types of metal roofs and the price can double for a similar sized house.
nightbrawler··on Why public lands must remain in public hands
Not sure if you're being serious with your last sentence. But I live on the edge of the grid near the Gila National Forest... and it's exactly like that. 3.3 million acres of public land to hunt and fish on. The trout fishing is amazing, and elk meat is hard to beat! For NM residents, hunting tags are very cheap and 1 large elk is enough to feed my family for a year.
nightbrawler··on Browserprint: Browser fingerprint tool now can guess client OS even when spoofed
Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12198358
nightbrawler··on Brains Sweep Themselves Clean of Toxins During Sleep (2013)
When I was younger I preferred staying up late and working and it allowed me to get a lot done. As I've gotten older and now have a family, things have flipped and now I much prefer to start my work day early, usually around 6am. This gives me more family time in the afternoon/evenings.
nightbrawler··on Behind the Scenes of Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel
In Mexico it's plato o plomo... silver or lead.
nightbrawler··on Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views
Here's an awesome technical writeup about MethBot: http://go.whiteops.com/rs/179-SQE-823/images/WO_Methbot_Oper...
nightbrawler··on A Dose of a Hallucinogen from a ‘Magic Mushroom,’ and Then Lasting Peace
For some awesome insight into Magic Mushrooms, Hamilton's Pharmacopeia on Viceland had a great episode:

https://www.viceland.com/en_us/video/magic-mushrooms-in-mexi...

nightbrawler··on Micro-engraver who works between heartbeats to keep his hand steady
"He has dropped completed works and been unable to find them again on the greasy carpet of his studio."

That could be rather disappointing!

nightbrawler··on Show HN: Athena, drop-in replacement for wkhtmltopdf using Docker, Electron and Go
We started off using wkhtmltopdf for the reporting module in our application to generate PDF's. After using that for a while and searching far and wide for an alternative, we settled on PrinceXML and haven't looked back. It's not OSS, but it's really awesome... once integrated, just set it and forget it.

http://www.princexml.com/

nightbrawler··on [dead]
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10864801
nightbrawler··on DHL Global Forwarding Failed on Software, and That’s Why It’s Being Sold Cheaply
Thanks for sharing that!
nightbrawler··on Show HN: Find the best recipe for any two foods, based on over 600k recipes
Very cool idea!

As I was going through the top pairings I noticed a strange pair of "milk and poi" ...it looks like it's picking up the word "points" as an ingredient

example: http://www.foodpairing.ninja/milk/poi/

nightbrawler··on Show HN: Jeopractice – A Jeopardy flashcard game using 200k past clues
Was just poking around and came across this one: http://www.jeopractice.com/?id=6177&x=3&y=2

No picture is displayed.

nightbrawler··on Merch by Amazon
Their example shows that a shirt selling for $19.99, the designer/promoter would get $8.89 royalty. More than a few cents and not a bad deal for not having to deal with the actual production.
nightbrawler··on Real-Time Lightning Map
This is awesome! I live down the road from "The Lightning Field" art installation ... Will be cool to see how accurate this is for our remote area

http://www.diaart.org/sites/main/lightningfield

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lightning_Field

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