pixelface

purchased an ipad mini for the singular purpose of running foreflight on it - an electronic flight bag application which replaces a whole bunch of frequently updated aviation charts and printed material, gives convenient access to aviation weather data, simplifies managing a digital logbook, plus lots of hand-calculations like weight and balance that are not difficult but are more annoying to do by hand. in flight the ipad sits in a claw mount sunction cupped to the canopy where it's easy to keep an eye on adsb traffic, pull up airport information, and so on. there are other EFB apps that will run on android tablets but foreflight is more or less the standard and default used by most people so far as I'm aware.

since owning it i've found it's also very handy in the kitchen for viewing recipes as it can be set in place and read without being picked up in the hand as a phone might require.

I think if you time your destructive interference to the source of the audio perfectly and cancel out the sound, you haven't gotten the whole picture. As sound travels away from the source it reflects off surfaces and some of those reflections also reach the microphone. Those sounds have traveled a different distance than the original source and are no longer timed with your interfering element. Imagine holding your hand to block your direct view of a person in a house of mirrors but you can still see them in the mirrors. On top of that these reflections won't contain identical audio as the surfaces will absorb different spectral content, so now even if you had infinite perfectly timed anti-signals for each reflection, your anti-signal has spectral content that is missing from the incoming reflected audio and now your anti-signal is a signal unto itself. In order to create a signal that perfectly cancels out all of the copyrighted audio you would have to have knowledge about the form and materials of the physical environment as well as the position of the microphone within that environment.

very cool, just grabbed a copy.

you can still get around this with some effort [1] and a pfsense box, the pfsense box gets wan from the ont and the original att router is hung off a third nic where it's allowed to do 802.1x and nothing else. the setup was a little challenging at first but has been maintenance free since. maybe there is a technical reason they have their network set up this way but i was offended at the idea of being prevented from using my own router.

[1] https://github.com/MonkWho/pfatt

I'm a non-academic taxpayer trying to read articles and don't have access through my employer or public library. I know other people in the same situation. Emailing the authors directly to request a copy is a known legitimate workaround, but in cases where I'm trying to read a paper on fungal propagation from 1971 (most recent example, from last week) the options are limited.

I would also imagine that if these things were more readily available people would be more likely to use them.

Absolutely and I am aware of its origins, but I've seen the analogy brought out at least a few times here on HN when discussing the merits and potential of an idea that seems obvious but has gone unexplored or uncommercialized. I get the sense that there may be some beliefs around the evaluating of ideas, at least in this crowd, that lead some to see it as being comparable to noticing a sum of money on the ground. I'd love to understand that.

Something that bugs me about this metaphor is the foregone conclusion that the thing on the ground is identifiably a $100 bill. Clearly anyone seeing a great idea for the taking will do so, but the discussion is really more comparable to seeing a bit of trash on the ground and pondering whether it might be money or not.

The issue is having ideas but not the ability to determine whether they are good ideas nobody has capitalized on yet or bad ideas that others have abandoned. I find myself asking this question often about a lot of things -- am I somehow so fortunate or clever that I've conjured a great idea, or do I lack the clarity of thought or prior knowledge to understand why my idea is bad, useless, or somehow infeasible?

not parent commenter but as someone who also has casual user family members on Linux - Ubuntu on a ThinkPad x220 is what I've set them up with.

i think it was a really good choice, i'm certain i'm not the only person who saw that movie as a small child and decided thats what they want to be. it was exciting and cool back then and it still holds up now. i want to imagine that someone truly and deeply understood having a love and understanding of computer systems when they made the choice to express it with such artistic license.

i've always seen the flashy computer bits as something that isn't intended to be viewed literally, but rather a way to understand the mental models they had for things. in the same sense that i would explain something as "hopping into a box and poking around systemd to see what's on fire", the movie used big flashy graphics as a metaphor for the minds of expert users. i think that was the best possible choice to bring you into their world without requiring the viewer to have an expert understanding of the inner workings of a computer.

this sounds like a really cool way to operate and it would be really interesting if you could expand on your experiences.

hardly limited to the 1960s, you can still do this in 2020 even in an expensive place like los angeles. pandemic aside, people living cheaply with many roommates and getting by on the wages of a bartender or minimum wage film set production assistant aren't even rare - the old pabst brewery on the eastern fringe of downtown LA is an entire campus of it. it just requires compromises on things that one is less likely to make if $2000/mo/bed is an option.

formlabs released a repo to use their old model printer (form 1 / 1+) to do stuff along these lines. i've tested it as far as exposing a photoresist (after forking and fixing some issues) and it is definitely a cool thing to not have intermediate steps like transparencies or toner transfer.

CA DMV will issue you an 'identification card' in addition to a drivers' license which very handy to have as a backup.

as someone who is waiting on their pinephone order right now, a major factor for me is supporting the existence of not-google not-apple. i want other options and even though they are not great yet, if enough of us support that niche it will become better. i hope enough people buying into it now will hasten viable daily driver phones running linux proper.

it's hard not to see this as the wasted potential of 10,000 human minds that could otherwise be solving real problems and needs. i'm curious to hear how alexa (and google assistant, et al) can be justified beyond small novelties that would be completely adequately serviced by non-cloud and/or non-voice means. i'm aware of the trickiness one can accomplish with a rube-goldberg-esque system of custom triggers, custom hardware, and carefully spoken phrases. i remain unimpressed by the segment and coupled with the significant privacy issues it feels like such a net-negative.

the more amazing thing to me is the idea that you can fit github on less than $500 in external drives. curious now about creating an all-of-github local mirror, could be a fun project.

yes and funny enough, downdetector is down. started doubting my network until all the same outages confirmed on my mobile link, and mxtoolbox couldn't get a response either.

by this logic would you say that normal people using tor are providing cover for bad actors?

It's not one step away from doxxing at all -- in this case Lucky225 is not an unnamed source, that is actually his real legal name per his twitter [1] and the FCC database entry for his ham radio license (not linking that)

[1] https://twitter.com/lucky225/status/1258503072323526657

having internet closer to normal standards would allow more people to enjoy such a thing. I could afford to buy a sailboat now, but if I were to take it out to sea I would be unable to work the job that funds my existence. starlink (or others) bringing cheap and reasonably fast internet to the ocean would open up a world of exploration to people who can work remotely. supposing you are okay with the inherent compromises of being aboard a sailboat, something like starlink is really the only missing piece for being able to do it without being a successful lifestyle vlogger or very very wealthy.

Grant was part of a group of people who showed us how engineering could be more than cubicles and paperwork, and inspired my childhood dreams which turned into fulfilling careers in both tech and entertainment. To this day Grant and his coworkers are my 'what do i want to be when i grow up' answer.

there are a number of pieces of electronics that appear to already meet this - high quality (and older) vacuum cleaners, analog audio gear, laboratory equipment, certain kinds of vintage computers.

the main issue i run into with repairs tends to be mask roms / asics / gate arrays that are undocumented and long gone from the market. there are ways around that, but they require great effort. it's only in special niches like arcade machines or iconic 80s synths where people will go so far as to decap and image dies in order to get the needed information.

there is a particular value an object must have in order to tip the scales in favor of repair over replacement. it simply isn't practical to spend a major portion of a device's cost to repair it unless it is special in some way. i place value on repairing things and buying used but a lot of that is out of a personal feeling of pride in repairing and reusing. board level rework is a far cry from changing ones own oil.

on the topic of designing laptops and cell phones to last 50-100 years, you can absolutely make use of communications equipment from 1920-1970. radio teletypes didn't stop working, people still buy and sell them.

you may find Bandcamp addresses some of the of issues you outline above. I do what I refer to as bandcamping: sort by new releases, filter for physical media and major genre. start flipping through everything and be pleasantly surprised. my reasoning on the physical media part is that it raises the barrier to entry enough that you're browsing things someone believed in enough to put on tape or vinyl.

the fact that Bandcamp seems to be the best payout to artists as well as free unlimited ad-free streaming and drm-free downloads of your library makes it really attractive compared to other options.

the officer grabbing the pink umbrella struggles to grasp it because his right hand grips a club. a truly poetic metaphor.

you've touched on the problem and the solution - number of people using it. for people who were children in the early 2000s it's a distant memory now but adults used to be generally bad with computers and windows was just as much wizardry as anything. be the linux userbase you want to see in the world and help others when they want to join just like the 10 year olds of 2003 handheld parents through computer use. there's never going to be a magic solution, there just needs to be a sufficient number of people using it so that your outlined issue of proximal support gets better.

ubuntu (and i'm sure others) are in a great state for casual users already -- i've handed multiple family members an ubuntu machine with no more instruction than "use it like any other computer, don't be scared by the icons looking a little different" with great success. for the increasing number of people who do almost all of their work in a word processor and a browser exclusively, it's a complete solution with almost zero hassle.

this already exists in some forms [1] on top of the fact that amateur radio in general is quite capable of moving data whether by packet radio [2] (including packet radio BBS [3], things like hinternet [4], bbs over amateur radio, or plain old teletype (RTTY) as a means to operate access a console on a remote machine. there's a ton of interesting creative work being done in the space even though it isn't particularly mainstream-popular.

[1] http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/ [2] http://www.choisser.com/packet/ [3] https://www.scc-ares-races.org/data/packet/index.html [4] https://www.kqed.org/quest/8440/ham-radio-helping-to-build-a...

feeling pretty good about the fact that some friends and i decided to get our licenses early into quarantine via remote online testing. highly recommend it if you're interested, some people are not aware of the fact that morse code requirements were dropped long ago and the question pool is available from a number of excellent study help sites (hamstudy.org is what I used).

this sounds really interesting and i'd imagine a bunch of us are very curious for a quick rundown on it despite not having an immediate need for it ourselves. care to elaborate?

you'll be pleased to find out that we are already able to do your first item - https://fo.am/activities/midimutant/