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rikkus

837 karma · joined March 8, 2013

I make software

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/rikkus; my proof: https://keybase.io/rikkus/sigs/kIq3Jz0HV04Pve0amDFYLoV8gGN0cg1Z7m1ib1dShYE ]

hnchat:BjMJVPzqC8ox02CDYmDs

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rikkus··on AirPods Max: An Audiophile Review
Not often, no, and for that reason. If you do a web search for the terms 'audiophile' and 'ABX' you'll find quite a few reports which are quite fun to read.
rikkus··on WebAssembly Studio
Yes I can't look at it. It should be interesting though so I've bookmarked it to come back to. I'll use a browser plugin to 'fix' it if necessary.
rikkus··on Why some people suffer from a stutter
Oh the agony of not being able to say the next thing when everyone’s waiting for you to speak. Right in the middle of what was supposed to be a great point - in my mind, at least.

And yes it feels like the perception is going to be you’re thinking slowly or forgot what you were saying, but no, miles ahead in my brain here with a huge amount to say, busy processing it as I speak so I can get it across succinctly and appropriately for the audience - then ... blockage.

rikkus··on Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
Try finding stuff. In a large org, even with as much careful organisation and attempting to make things searchable, it just gets impossible. That doesn't mean Confluence is bad of course - it may just be a hard problem.
rikkus··on Who’s Watching Your Porch?
The Office for National Statistics shows a continual fall in the long term rate of theft for the UK since 1995. From around 11k incidents per year to around 4K. A steady decrease.
rikkus··on What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?
Apple Maps has replaced Google Maps for me. I’ve been trying to move away from Google and this has been an easy one. I don’t notice the difference most of the time. When I do, it’s because I’ve pulled up Google Maps by accident and it’s cluttered and spammy.
rikkus··on What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?
First result for me on DDG is that very thing on Amazon.co.uk
rikkus··on How to Make a Raspberry Pi VPN Server
If you use your own VPN to home then you can access everything on your home network without setting up port forwarding, if you have stuff like that. I used to but not these days.

You could also have the PI run a VPN client and connect to a privacy-promising VPN service, effectively ‘bouncing’ off home.

Not sure if that is even technically possible without pain, or why you wouldn’t connect directly to the privacy-promising VPN.

rikkus··on Launch HN: Got-it (YC W19) – Bluetooth labels for tracking things at work
Newer Tiles have replaceable batteries. Also the app shows how close you are to the Tile and it seems to work. Also I seem to be able to find these, where with the older ones I had the same issue as you where I couldn’t find them when I wanted to.

I still press the button from my pocket and call my phone though. Grr.

rikkus··on Carbonite To Be Acquired by OpenText for $1.4B
Google Drive isn't a backup system.
rikkus··on Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
I'm currently teaching my child binary search. She thinks we're just having fun playing "Guess Who?"
rikkus··on 16-inch MacBook Pro
Except that doesn’t work in every other app that doesn’t understand vi keys.
rikkus··on The Misunderstood Roots of FRP
When working on GUIs that used callbacks like this, I’d have a method for setting the value of the second component which didn’t raise a ’changed’ event, or I’d turn off raising events for the second component before telling it to change then tell it to continue.

They weren’t beautiful, but both methods worked fine for the rare cases they proved necessary.

rikkus··on Tcl: Everything Is a String
And modern software that does the same. Cisco AnyConnect VPN thing, for example. You can feed it a command file, but that doesn’t give you any error handling or logic to handle dynamic responses. Expect to the rescue!
rikkus··on Bike crash left Spokane man unconscious, so his Apple Watch called 911
When do you charge it?
rikkus··on iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max
Sync to local storage, drag and drop, sync happens to other cloud.
rikkus··on Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
There is always going to be major flux as new architectures are evolved until they are stable. If this was hidden, there would have been little input from outside Microsoft.

While there have been legitimate problems with this process - for example, the explicit ‘go live’ given by Microsoft before things were truly stable, there was a choice made to develop in public and the net result (sorry) seems positive to me.

rikkus··on Ask HN: Has anyone got a job by contributing to open source projects?
I worked on KDE apps and some of the core bits for a while and hung around on IRC, where I found some Qt work. I did some short term gigs and some permanent (making Zaurus apps, among other things), all entirely remote. This was in the early 2000s.
rikkus··on Ten Years of Erlang
LiveView was always going to have this limitation. Its design makes it suitable for low latency links - such as local network.

It’s not going to fail to ‘work’ because of this. It just has a niche and isn’t a general purpose web framework.

I’m looking forward to building some admin tools with it, reducing the complexity required when having to deal with server and client separately.

rikkus··on Kuo: Apple to include new scissor switch keyboard in MacBook
I had a loaner Touchbar-equipped MBP as my daily driver for a couple of months.

I already had Caps Lock mapped to Ctrl. I used Karabiner Elements to map a Caps Lock press to Escape. It took about a day to get used to.

I’ve managed to get a 2015 model back now, but I’m sticking with Caps Lock press = Escape.

I miss the fingerprint reader!

rikkus··on Apple Hires Key Chip Designer From ARM as Own Efforts Ramp Up
The RISC PC [1] was based on ARM but had a ‘guest processor’ slot which could be filled with an x86 chip amongst others. You could run Windows in a window on its own CPU.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RiscPC

rikkus··on SIM swap horror story: I've lost decades of data and Google won't help
Thanks. Currently I do this:

Phone -> Dropbox + Google Photos (automatically)

Card-based cameras -> Plug in card, Dropbox + Google Photos pick up new photos

Backup 'server': Local synced Dropbox folder -> Local + Cloud backups

I couldn't see how to add iCloud to my existing syncs / backups. When I looked at it, I couldn't be sure it would keep photos on my phone long enough to allow Dropbox and Google Photos to pick them up. It's good that it's possible to get the originals over at a MacOS machine. Might be worth exploring then.

rikkus··on SIM swap horror story: I've lost decades of data and Google won't help
Would you mind elaborating on your iCloud setup to handle this please?
rikkus··on Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company
Using a password manager and a catch-all domain works fine for me. I don't use the federated systems (any more - I used to use Google) - I just make up an email address for anything I want to sign up for and save the credentials.
rikkus··on Calorie per Dollar List – Eat for 21 Dollars a Week
Begging is very dangerous (where this took place) and involves being healthy enough to get yourself to somewhere it's even possible. Eating thrown away food seems like a good way to end up with something nasty.

Eventually, both of these would become options, but when you believe your situation has to be temporary, it feels safer to starve a little.

rikkus··on Calorie per Dollar List – Eat for 21 Dollars a Week
Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work like that. What’s left after rent and bills can be close to zero.
rikkus··on The low-down on home routers – how to buy, what to avoid
I’m on Zen Internet in the UK and was supplied a Fritz router with the connection. WiFi was great but didn’t reach throughout the house (old, lots of brick internal walls).

I noticed they claimed they could do mesh WiFi so I tried to buy their extenders. They are built to plug directly into European power sockets, though, and when I asked AVM they advised against using an adapter for the UK and instead buying some second hand routers.

I bought two the same as my original (2nd hand on eBay, cheaper than the extenders would have been) and set them up.

It was trickier to set them up than the extenders would have been but it’s all working and pretty solid so far. I was very happy with their support.

rikkus··on Calorie per Dollar List – Eat for 21 Dollars a Week
I spent a few months eating for £5 per week - not through choice. Most of what I ate was marked down (nearly out of date) loaves of white sliced bread and damaged cans of beans or spaghetti in tomato sauce. I’m quite tall so this wasn’t enough and after a few weeks I was in constant pain from hunger. There are many people in the UK for whom this is their life.
rikkus··on Police fine pedestrian for disorderly behaviour after he tried to cover his face
This is entirely untrue.
rikkus··on Tibetan musical notation
I'm happy with standard notation when playing the piano or something that can only play one note at a time (e.g. trumpet), but I still can't get my brain to read it fast enough when playing the guitar.

I know tab notation exists to help with this, but it loses much of the detail encoded in standard notation - note lengths being the most obvious example. There have been attempts to create a hybrid notation and there are books with tab printed below the stave(s), but neither work well.

If anyone's found any alternative notations that work well for guitar, I'd love to see them.

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