Hacker News Reader

petecoxon Cats Cannot Taste Sweets (2007)

Eating plants and subsequent regurgitation is said to aid digestion "much as humans pop an antacid tablet".

https://www.hillspet.com.au/cat-care/behavior-appearance/why...

petecoxon The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S.

Seems like a case of s-dropping from a transliteration of a Greek name, Lucas.

c.f. Andreas -> Andrea.

petecoxon A Lecture on Johnson and Boswell by Jorge Luis Borges (1966)

He published a couple of short story anthologies in the 1940s: Fictions, Aleph - check your local library for a translation.

I smiled when in this lecture when he goes off on a tangent about Don Quixote and then imagines a fictional version of himself "I, for example, was born the same day as Jorge Luis Borges, exactly the same day".

That may well be Borges' inception concerning a fictional author with the nom de plume Pierre Menard. Ostensibly this is a lecture about Boswell but he has left a cue to an earlier short story.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the...

petecoxon Some tea bags may shed billions of microplastics per cup

Not all brands, obviously, but don't assume the 'bag' itself is biodegradable.

Anecdotally, certain fancy tea bags survived an 18 month composting cycle, which I had to then pluck out by hand before spreading said compost on my vegie patch.

Be kind to worms!

petecoxon Hackers Hit Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a ‘SIM Swap’

My bank uses an app, Symantec VIP, to generate a 6 digit code.

This works on vacation when I can't receive SMS. It was much cheaper to buy a 4G SIM in Barcelona (for Google Maps etc) than enable international roaming from Australia ($AU5/day).

petecoxon The Path to Dijkstra’s Handwriting (2013)

When I was in the seventh grade, a curmudgeonly teacher insisted all his students learn copperplate.

That made my handwriting worse - to the point that a couple of years later, at the same school, other teachers complained and I was sent to a remedial teacher to undo the damage inflicted by the earlier teacher who had wanted 'stylish'.

petecoxon Urinotron – Power from Waste

A science week exhibition to get schoolkids here interested in STEM, replete with a gross-out factor for queasy parents!

petecoxon CutiePi – All-in-one Raspberry Pi tablet

Great feature! End-user upgradeable simply by swapping a device's compute module with a newer iteration from RPi.

c.f. EOMA68

petecoxon Currency (Restrictions on the Use of Cash) Bill 2019

> Tradesmen are often paid in cash

Tradies here are stereotyped by (not all) unscrupulous operators that use cash to do jobs 'off the books' in under-quoting their true income or offering a discount to customers for unlawfully not charging the GST.

Bank transactions provide the tax office an audit trail. NB: The 'blackeconomy@...' feedback email hints at the purpose.

petecoxon Tree stumps that should be dead can be kept alive by nearby trees

Isn't this just coppicing, where a percentage of trees are harvested for timber and stumps are left to regrow?

https://renconforestry.com.au/managing-coppice-in-eucalypt-p...

petecoxon Why Has Language Changed So Much So Fast? ‘Because Internet’

More coverage of Gretchen's book is quoted on her daily linguistics blog:

https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/186456220892/reviews-of...

petecoxon On the Run: The Pursuit of Pablo Neruda

Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal starred in a 2016 movie from the viewpoint of a fictional detective.

petecoxon How to read the international phonetic alphabet

Wikipedia calls it 'ng coalescence'.

"This means that the words finger and singer do not rhyme in most modern varieties of English, although they did in Middle English."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Engl...

petecoxon How to read the international phonetic alphabet

A common alphabet for Africa has been proposed for sounds not represented by the basic Latin alphabet of colonial languages such as French and English.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_reference_alphabet

petecoxon Raspberry Pi admits to faulty USB-C design on the Pi 4

It seems a case of rushing a product 9-12 months ahead of schedule, scrapping two silicon revisions, as mentioned in the announcement[0] in their haste to be "production ready".

"Good, low-cost USB-C power supplies (and USB-C cables) are surprisingly hard to find, as we discovered when sending out prototype units to alpha testers"

In hindsight that reads that they tried a bunch of off-the-shelf cables and were perplexed about why some of them didn't work.

So they built their own official power supply that worked around the design flaw.

[0] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-...

petecoxon Top Australian banks join IBM, and Scentre in blockchain project

> Australia’s top three banks

Our banking sector is generally referred to as the "Big 4". Notably, National Australia Bank - the fourth column, haven't signed up.

The collaboration's website is below, with a link to a 2017 whitepaper that highlights Blockchain-as-a-service in facilitating a distributed ledger.

http://www.lygon.io/

petecoxon OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation

c.f. Debian, which has a policy to exclude non-free firmware from its installation media.

The onus is on the user to themselves supply the firmware.

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch06s04.html.en

petecoxon Ancient Romans Used Molten Iron to Repair Streets Before Vesuvius Erupted

In terms of 'ruts', the horse drawn proto-railway dates back to Corinth half a millennium earlier:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagonway#Ancient_systems

petecoxon Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

Fun fact: Pine64's dev-kit for their forthcoming PinePhone offering is codenamed "Don't be evil".

https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Project_Don%27t_be_evil

petecoxon iPadOS

Android has the same limitation.

i.e. I can connect multiple displays with Android via hdmi and a usb adapter but Displaylink technical support suggested for an extended desktop I'd need to pester Google.

petecoxon Madrid set to become first European city to scrap low-emissions zone

Article from last November with a map of the affected area (in Spanish). The areas in yellow were already covered by vehicle restrictions.

https://elpais.com/ccaa/2018/11/26/madrid/1543235492_515611....

The plan was to create a 4kmˆ2 ring bordering the important landmarks of the royal palace, museo del prado, buen retiro, Atocha station etc. The interior has quite a number of Metro stations and is thus quite navigable by foot.

Car-driving populism to revert a policy barely 6 months old seems to have prevailed. As can be seen from the guardian article's photo, Gran Via is a pretty major thoroughfare leading to the heart of the city, Puerta del Sol.

petecoxon I was wrong about the iPad Pro

The iPhone popularised capacitive touch.

His comments on styluses should be seen in light of the technology of the time (Newton/Maemo/Palm OS/WinCE etc) whose input was stabbing at a resistive screen.

(That's not to repudiate finger input being superior to pen for many interactions but styluses of 2019 use vastly different tech to those of 2007.)

petecoxon HongMeng OS Is Huawei’s Alternative to Android (Rumor)

> android developers could just submit their app in both places

Except for US entities barred by the same government decree. Users of many popular online services from ride sharing to social media would be forced to use the mobile web interface.

petecoxon Google confirms Play store will continue to function for existing Huawei phones

So a Huawei phone will be stuck on Android Pie, since any upgrade to the forthcoming Q release requires re-certification?

petecoxon The rise of the sober bar

lemon, lime and bitters is a staple here for the 'designated driver' that doesn't drink Coke.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon,_lime_and_bitters

petecoxon The word “lox” hasn't changed in sound or meaning in 8k years

> AFAIK, "lox" came to English through Yiddish

In Australia I have never heard the term - we goyim would just refer to a smoked-salmon bagel.

petecoxon Flutter and Chrome OS

Dart did transpile to JS, so a WebAssembly backend for a 'web native' Flutter experience on Chrome OS is imaginable.

But their app delivery platform is the Google Play infrastructure, which packages Android apps.

petecoxon Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop

The 11" is being superceded by a touchscreen tablet, with an optional keyboard.

(No "pro" bump though - the same original Allwinner internals)

petecoxon .NET 5

Office already runs on Chromebooks via Google Play within the Android container [0]. Is it then worth MS' time and energy to port the browser interface as a Chrome OS 'native' app?

[0] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/how-to-install-and-...