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philbarr

2,158 karma · joined August 18, 2010

Email me at: philbarrmail at gmail

Twitter on: @simplyapped

Website: simplyapped.com

Android Apps: https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Simply+Apped

IPhone Apps: ...coming soon surely....

hnchat:oiyxtJ0yZZlhDzZLoUTn

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philbarr··on Did you know Git was originally created in 10 days?
"Subversion was slow and clunky"

Lucky you, you never used clearcase or Visual SourceSafe!

philbarr··on Touch Pianist
Let's hope it doesn't have the third movement in it or else we'll be needing new keyboards.
philbarr··on Touch Pianist
This is a great kind of thing for getting people into music. There's a piano in my local pub and when people say they "can't play piano" I'll play a 2-5-1 in C and tell them to hit any of the white notes. People love that they can make up their own tunes having never played before.
philbarr··on macOS command-line tools you might not know about
caffeinate is on Mac.

  caffeinate -d -i -u -s
philbarr··on So you've installed `fzf` – now what?
I had to add the fzf plugin in my .zshrc to get this to work
philbarr··on Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
Aaah - back in the day when we used to link 26 Access databases together, one for the first letter of a customer's surname... :)
philbarr··on The Door Close Button
you're right. Open dev tools and add it yourself. :)
philbarr··on Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)
No Saruman vs Gandalf rematch in the original films. It was included in the director's cut but then you could see why they left it out.
philbarr··on An intro to finding things in Linux
I can't believe I didn't know this for all these years. I was just guessing/remembering bits of info.
philbarr··on Italian ‘king of absentees’ allegedly skipped work for 15 years
That sounds the same setup as Nice Guy Eddie has in Reservoir Dogs. Probably you don't want to meet the people who had those cards as they might have a penchant for chopping people's ears off and setting them on fire.
philbarr··on Google pushed a bad Android WebView update that crashes apps including Gmail
Yeah same here. Noticed it late last night UK time, multiple attempts at reinstalling webview made no difference. New update now fixed everything.

So the faulty version was up for a good few hours?

philbarr··on [dead]
this is just an advert for a product? do we allow that?
philbarr··on Visual and interactive way to learn Git
The best way I found to learn git is to read the first 3 chapters of Pro Git. Yes it's a pain, yes you're going to have to sit through the "distributed source control" speech again, but the enlightenment of realising why it works like it does is great.

When you realise it's nothing more than commits and a bunch of special labels it starts to make sense.

EDIT: Meant to add that sites like ohshitgit might help in a crisis but you're only a few hours reading off working out WHY those things work.

philbarr··on R U OK?
I went on holiday to Spain once, bought an inflatable dinghy and paddled with a friend for a long time around the coast until we got to a beach. On the beach was a naked man. After we had convinced him to get some pants on (mickey mouse boxer shorts) he told us his story.

Basically he'd gone on holiday exactly like us once, found this beach, and just thought, "fuck it" and stayed. Fuck the job, fuck the family, fuck the friends, everything. He lived in a cave near the beach, the locals gave him food and he did the odd job when he could be arsed.

Ever since I've thought, "if it ever gets so bad I want to kill myself, I'm just going to get up and go back to that beach."

That simple thought alone has got me through some rough times.

As we paddled away from the beach other people started coming out of other caves to come and watch us leave.

philbarr··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2020)
so you wrote some code that generates a link to a github gist with your bio on. if HN said your post was too long, you could have just posted the link....? :)
philbarr··on The pope just proposed a universal basic income
Fine, I'll employ myself.
philbarr··on Show HN: Gifcap, a browser based client-side GIF screen recording tool
Looks like it depends on WebRTC javascript apis which Brave browser might not support?

EDIT: More specifically, it needs to support getDisplayMedia()

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaDevice...

philbarr··on Coronavirus: Prime Minister Boris Johnson tests positive
Possibly completely unrelated: PM chief advisor Dominic Cummings seen running out of Downing Street in the last hour

https://twitter.com/AllieHBNews/status/1243520576007872513

philbarr··on Ask HN: Are there good self-hosted video conference tools?
You can try setting up https://www.kurento.org/

Note that all modern browsers support WebRTC. I wrote a simple server to setup WebRTC sessions between browsers that worked, but it's probably easier to use kurento.

philbarr··on Greenland and Antarctica ice loss accelerating
Right - the chart shows that there was significantly more ice on average for 1981-2000 than there has been in the last 5 years. Hence the ice is decreasing. Go look at the chart again.
philbarr··on Greenland and Antarctica ice loss accelerating
Pretty sure that graph shows that the sea ice over the last 5 years has been significantly less than the mean value from 1981-2000, even if you allow for 2 standard deviations from the mean.
philbarr··on Gitlab's Guide to All-Remote
But they might sell it at different prices in different markets
philbarr··on “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
Upvote for a random Simpson's reference.
philbarr··on The Simpsons in CSS
I worked at a place once where we were told to pick a naming system for the releases. We chose "Genesis" as the first one.

Our boss, whom we didn't know was religious, says, "that's fantastic! Books of the bible, yes?! Next release is 'Exodus'?"

"Er, no it's Start Trek, next release is gonna be called 'Picard'."

philbarr··on We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech
The OP implied there was a third way. I didn't mean only one way or another.
philbarr··on We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech
How would this "circular sustainable economy" work?

People tend to think of there being only two versions of the economy available - the government tells us what stuff to make, or free markets determine what we make.

We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. Currently the only way to make more money is to make and sell more stuff.

philbarr··on Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
Must have been fun sitting at work watching all your wallpaper getting ripped off.
philbarr··on I've screwed up plenty of things too
> Don't get me started on "DevOps" engineers. It's either rebranded sysadmins doing the same thing but maybe with some CI/CD. Or Developers who have been thrown to the wolves.

This made me laugh! This is so true.

philbarr··on Show HN: Everlook – Find and list remote job opportunities
"competitive salary". Oh really? In who's opinion?
philbarr··on Coronavirus Forces World’s Largest Work-from-Home Experiment
WebRTC is peer to peer and is supported in most major browsers.
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