Hacker News Reader

nullify88on Reviews of Android TV launcher after Google added ads to the homescreen

I own a Shield and I've yet to see an ad on the home screen. I'm up to date and logged in with Google but not Nvidia.

Anyone else in Europe getting adverts?

nullify88on Show HN: I’m an introvert – made an app to help maintain connections with people

Getting a 403 error i'm afraid. I'd love to check it out.

Strangely, refreshing the page after recieving the 403 gets me to the app store. But clicking the HN link always results in an inital 403:/

nullify88on Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

I've recently switched to the browser based client https://teams.microsoft.com and ditched their desktop application as I grew frustrated with its extremely slow UI. The browser client is more responsive, consumes less CPU and RAM, and uBlock some of the tracking javascript.

I can live with some of the missing features:

No noise cancellation

Audio devices are configured via windows sound settings

Can only share full screens and not individual windows

Standard Windows notification sounds and not the Teams sounds.

Maybe missing more otherwise its more or less the same app.

I've installed it as a Chrome App and it has its own window, task bar icon / shortcut and generates notifications.

I'd suggest others to try it out.

nullify88on Cloudproxy – hide your scrapers IP behind the cloud

I agree, it would be impossible for sites to block individual customers behind carrier grade NAT without blocking other customers sharing that NAT endpoint.

Of course, the websites can raise an abuse complaint with the ISP, and they may take further action.

nullify88on Your CPU may have slowed down on Wednesday

On Windows you'll have to delete C:\Windows\System32\mcupdate_GenuineIntel.dll to prevent Windows applying Intel microcode updates. Whatever microcode is in the bios, it will use that. There are also ways to modify the BIOS to update or downgrade its microcode.

My gaming PC, a Sandy Bridge i7-2600k, has had 20 microcode updates between 2010 to 2019. The majority were in 2013 until the spectre mitigations came in 2018. The last bios update for my mobo contains microcode 2 versions behind the spectre updates.

Feed a BIOS image in to this tool to view microcode information. https://github.com/platomav/MCExtractor

nullify88on Server.casino – Random Servers Across the Internet

If its on the public internet with no security, how can someone tell if their access is unauthorised? Its not really that different from connecting to facebook.com or the various publically accessible ssh servers.

nullify88on Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?

Windows usually does it automatically as part of a maintenance routine. Unless you were writing and deleting lots of files causing fragmentation, there isnt usually much to gain with manual runs.

nullify88on Complexities of e-mail validation logic

Another Migadu user here slowly degoogling myself. $19 a year is a bargain for my usage and the features I get.

nullify88on Samsung to jump into laptop processor market with Exynos chip in H2

They also had Linux on Dex which was a full Linux desktop environment. Unfortunately it never left beta and was killed off.

nullify88on eBPF on Windows

Its about 5 lines of powershell to install and start OpenSSH. Maybe a few more if you want to automatically inject public keys. Well within possibilities of a user_data script that runs on the first boot of an AWS instance.

My main pain with OpenSSH on Windows was that its an older 7.7 Windows port that gets installed. However 8.1 is finally bundled as part of the recent KB5001391 and fixes some annoying bugs.

nullify88on Windows Terminal Quake Mode

In Windows Terminal, I'm sure you can create a new profile with your chosen shell prepended with "start-process -Verb RunAs" that will offer similar fuctionality.

nullify88on Ask HN: Please Dark Mode for HN

At night on mobile, I switch to Samsungs browser which has built in Dark mode. I dont use it for anything else.

nullify88on The Endless Acid Banger: algorithmic self-composing acid techno music

Yeah, I wrote that as a 11 year old me when I heard that track on WipeOut3 for the first time. I was still discovering electronic music via a bunch of unwanted Euphoria compliation albums. Wipeout3 was often played in both my PlayStation and CD player.

nullify88on The Endless Acid Banger: algorithmic self-composing acid techno music

Nothing gives me the tingles like listening to Sasha - Xpander from the WipeOut 3 soundtrack.

nullify88on Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup

Wow, those by cecile richard are really something. Thanks for sharing.

nullify88on New GitHub themes for VS Code

https://github.com/Armin2208/Windows-Auto-Night-Mode

I've recently started making use of this app. Since websites and applications are starting to read the Windows dark / light mode setting (VSCode included), my desktop switches dark mode on automatically for many apps and websites in addition to the blue light filter.

Some apps aren't perfect and may need a restart like MS Outlook, but many others work well.

nullify88on Surprisingly Slow

Thanks for the heads up, i'll give that a go :)

nullify88on Surprisingly Slow

I see this alot with Ansible. Its not particularly slow but running it places a bigger burden on laptop cpu and fans than I'd imagined.

nullify88on LG is getting out of the mobile phone business

Lawnchair does a great job but at the time of use development slowed and when I switched phones I stuck to using the stock launcher.

But its great to see an alpha for Android 11 was out a week ago. So I'll be jumping back on that bandwagon.

nullify88on LG is getting out of the mobile phone business

Years ago I used to use the MS Launcher, however I noticed strange behaviour when in low 2g signal areas...Apps would take longer starting up. I'd tap on an icon, nothing would happen and the launcher would appear frozen, few seconds later the app would open.

I noticed the launcher was sending traffic whenever I started an app and it was affecting app start times when in low and slow signal areas.

I didn't dig in to it, but I suspected it was sending app usage analytics and the launcher was blocking until its usage data was transferred.

Another MS app "Your phone companion" is also sus. Preinstalled on my S10, it uses 20mb of data a month and I don't use it at all. Receives very frequent updates, its changelog is "Not provided by developer", and it has many permissions.

nullify88on My NAS exposes itself over the internet without permission

Yes, you're talking about a device behind NAT which initiates a connection to an external service.

However, we're talking about a service listening behind NAT (in this case Call of Duty on an Xbox at home) that needs to be listening for connections initiated by other Xboxes to establish a P2P connection. This is what port forwarding enables and this is what uPnP automates.

nullify88on My NAS exposes itself over the internet without permission

It does depend on the game. A P2P game like Call of Duty will have problems when played simultaneously on more than one console because the external port can not be shared.

What happens though is that another external port gets forwarded to 3074 instead.

3074 -> 3074

3075 -> 3074

3076 -> 3074 etc.

Its likely uPnP does this automatically as even uPnP won't be able to map multiple devices to the same external port but it does make the process convenient.

nullify88on My NAS exposes itself over the internet without permission

Do you mean TURN? STUN does not work over Symmetric NAT as the source port is unpredictable.

nullify88on My NAS exposes itself over the internet without permission

Lets not forget about consoles too. Xbox Live and PSN complain about obstructive NAT configurations and rely upon uPnP to open ports.

Of course they can be opened manually but that assumes some technical experience, and that the ISP provided hardware gives you access to its configuration.

nullify88on Windows 95 – How Does It Look Today?

I don't think you understand the comment parent made. Windows 10 comes with a feature called Fast Boot and it is usually enabled by default depending on RAM, driver support etc. What used to be a "proper shutdown" is now a hybrid hybernate. Parts of the OS in particular related to bootup are stored in a hybernation file which is loaded at boot time resulting in faster boots. This is because Windows can now skip driver init and load state from previous boots.

nullify88on I made an eInk newspaper

After seeing the one with the new york times, I thought about having a colour eink display that would display related album or artist art as I played music from my chromecast audio plugged in my hifi. Just finding a high quality source of images is hard but Apple iTunes has a decent selection.

Other opportunities could be displaying the days RSS feeds or HN posts.

nullify88on Drinking strong coffee before exercising increases fat-burning, new study finds

Blood thinners reduce blood viscosity increasing flow. Aspirin is commonly used together with ephedrine and caffeine to form an ECA stack. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECA_stack

nullify88on FileZilla now contains adware if you download from the official homepage

I do like CyberDucks features when it comes to cloud storage like S3, but I do miss the WinScp file commander like interface.

nullify88on Socat – A utility for data transfer between two addresses (2018)

Likely something like this https://github.com/rupor-github/wsl-ssh-agent#wsl-2-compatib...

Similarly, you can also do this with KeepassXC

nullify88on Why we decided for and against Ubuntu Core

I understand your confusion.

CoreOS has indeed since been deprecated, however when Redhat acquired CoreOS in Jan 2018 they merged CoreOS and Project Atomic to create Redhat CoreOS. They also released Fedora CoreOS which shares some technologies with vanilla Fedora and Silverblue.

Shortly after the acquisition, Flatcar Container Linux was released which is an updated derivative of the original CoreOS.