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psim1

3,400 karma · joined December 1, 2018

Portland State Intramural hockey: Go Groundhogs!
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psim1··on The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
Jesus was a carpenter! More appropriate for New Yankee Workshop or This Old House.
psim1··on The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
Perhaps they consider it some kind of perk that is not "paid for" by the donation. The receipt states "No goods or services were provided."

Or maybe they're lying, but I'm going with what the receipt says.

psim1··on The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
One of the highest-value streaming subscriptions you can get is PBS Passport. You get it with a $60 donation to either a PBS TV or NPR radio station. The donation is tax-deductible and the PBS subscription is rich with high-quality content for both adults and children.
psim1··on Being ambitious and being a dad
I felt successful before I had kids. Satisfying, upward-moving career; happy marriage; lots of travel; volunteering in multiple organizations. I liked all these things, succeeded in them, people liked me, etc.

As a dad, I feel like a total loser. All of the aforementioned are diminished or put entirely on hold (travel, most volunteering). I'm medicore at everything, except parenting, in which I am successful at keeping my kids alive and safe and healthy, but not in satisfying their desires. In that I am totally inadequate.

I expected that I would have to put "my" life largely on hold when we had kids and instead of the satisfaction I got from the pre-kid things, would enjoy the satisfaction of raising happy children. To have neither is demoralizing and I'm constantly looking for the critical thing that will improve the child-raising experience. And no, waiting it out for the kids to grow up is not the answer!

psim1··on Bttf is a command line datetime Swiss army knife
I think I would have instead changed the name to `marty`, who, in time, learned to think fourth-dimensionally.
psim1··on Everything in C is undefined behavior
I like the ideas of this article but would not use SPARC as a main badguy in my examples. A naive and probably popular takeaway would be, "Thank goodness I am not writing for SPARC and don't need to worry about these SPARC architectural concerns!"
psim1··on An Apple (II) for Teacher
I went through elementary and middle school using MECC software on Apple II, and of course had no idea at the time what a treasure it was. My generation was at the beginning of the computer-education revolution; we had "gamified" learning before that was ever a thing.

An Apple II on a wheeled desk-cart was always popular in elementary school.

psim1··on Killed by Apple
Truly, the SE was a great phone. It was not really "rolled in" to future phone models; it just ended.
psim1··on Setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10
Tangentially related, if anyone has Sun nostalgia but only a bit, find a Sun Type 6 USB keyboard on eBay and plug it in. Great keyboard for a Mac. Unfortunately, the left-hand function keys (Stop, Again, Props, etc.) do not emit any usable keycodes. But everything else works.
psim1··on IBM Bob
I agree, it looks like an IBM-mediocre version of every other LLM coding tool that currently exists.
psim1··on IBM Bob
Definitely not the grandson of Microsoft Bob.
psim1··on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all
(Please don't downvote - serious question) Are Chinese models generally accepted for use within US companies? The company I work for won't allow Qwen.
psim1··on LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
LibreOffice almost seemed irrelevant; with cheap to free (*included) tools in abundance, such as MS Office, Google Workspace, Apple Pages/Numbers/Keynote, the need for LibreOffice is not what it once was, back when StarOffice and OpenOffice were liberating people from the tyranny of Microsoft.

Now it's worse than irrelevant, it's a liability.

psim1··on Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
Janky is directly proportional to cost. Grandstream are the jankiest and least expensive. I like the Cisco 191; it is a fine unit but costs about $100-120.
psim1··on Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
For three or four endpoints all within the home, you could do this with just ATAs and not even need a SIP server. Many ATAs have a configurable "dial plan" that will let you map a number to an IP address, thus giving you the ability to call the other terminals directly within the LAN.
psim1··on It feels like Claude goes down almost daily now
Yeah, this was the confirmation I needed that it's "not just me."
psim1··on The 49MB web page
And this! https://www.mcmaster.com/help/api/ Linked from the footer of every page!

I'm so happy to have seen their web site that I want to do business with them, even though I have no business to be done.

psim1··on Gemini Said They Could Only Be Together If He Killed Himself. Soon, He Was Dead
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/gemini-ai-wrongful-death-lawsuit... is the Gift Article link. This was what I submitted, but the query params got stripped.
psim1··on Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid
Carriers both land/VoIP and wireless must attest to having fraud mitigation measures; this is the "Robocall Mitigation Database" and in Cape's record they exempt themselves from STIR/SHAKEN attestation but state they have measures to prevent fraudulent calling. (which is required for them to be permitted to operate)

What kind of measures are possible to prevent fraudulent calls when the caller is your anonymous customer? The answer is obviously "none," unless you respond to every complaint by terminating service of the offending customer and hoping they don't come back.

psim1··on Claude Opus 4.6
I need an agent to summarize the buzzwordjargonsynergistic word salad into something understandable.
psim1··on IP Addresses Through 2025
In 2021 I speculated on IP and acquired a /23 block by ARIN wait list. I figured on running some services from the IP space for a while and after the 5 years mandated wait time would cash in when surely it would fetch $100k from some party desperate for IPv4.

At this point the services I am running are far more lucrative than the IP space itself is turning out to be.

psim1··on What Killed Perl?
Around 2010 I ditched Perl for PHP because I had been using PHP for web and could write the same systems scripts in PHP as I used to write in Perl. Sticking with one go-to language is easier on the brain.
psim1··on Questions for Cloudflare
> It is unfair to blame Cloudflare (or AWS, or Azure, or GitHub) for what’s happening

> Ultimately end-users don’t have a relationship with any of those companies. They have relationships with businesses that chose to rely on them

Could you not say this about any supplier relationship? No, in this case, we all know the root of the outage is CloudFlare, so it absolutely makes sense to blame CloudFlare, and not their customers.

psim1··on Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues
Later today or tomorrow there's going to be a post on HN pointing to Cloudflare's RCA and multitudes here are going to praise CF for their transparency. Let's not forget that CF sucks and took half the internet down for four hours. Transparency or no, this should not be happening.
psim1··on That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
Your description can only refer to Kevin Mitnick. They threw the book at him to set an example. I remember being amazed at what a hacker he must have been. Later I read about his crimes and thought "that's all?" RIP Mr. Mitnick.
psim1··on Why is your open source project still hosted on GitHub?
Because that's how and where people find them.

Related questions with same answer: Why do you still use Facebook? Why do you still use LinkedIn? Why do you still use YouTube?

psim1··on Making the most of a dumb fax switcher box in the old days
T.38 is actually a fine way of transporting fax bits but unfortunately it is quite uncommon to see T.38 end-to-end. While a VoIP provider may negotiate T.38 with a customer's fax ATA, it is likely being transcoded to G.711 by a gateway at some point as it traverses the telephone network, ultimately making T.38 a less-reliable choice. (Better to have the same codec end-to-end.) A comparison might be cellular or VoIP providers offering wideband codecs, which sound great when you stay on-network, but when the call crosses the PSTN and is transcoded, the sound is worse than if you used the standard narrowband end-to-end.
psim1··on Monodraw
Reminiscent of TheDraw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw), a tool I used "back in the day" to create BBS artwork.
psim1··on Teletext in North America
Can anyone recommend a good CSS replacement for viewing this site? The author posts interesting content but the site itself is unbearable.
psim1··on Exploiting the IKKO Activebuds “AI powered” earbuds (2024)
Indeed, brace yourselves as the floodgates holding back the poorly-developed AI crap open wide. If anyone is thinking of a career pivot, now is the time to dive into all things cybersecurity. It's going to get ugly!
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