HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

sborra

75 karma · joined September 13, 2016

submissionscomments
sborra··on Tokyo has only two barley tea makers, we visited one to see how mugicha is made
Caffè d'Orzo can't be made in an espresso machine like normal coffee. If you use ground kernels, depending on grind size, It will either clog the portafilter or be too weak.

Instead, most barley coffee is sold in instant coffee form. Most coffee bars will do it with instant barley coffee pods and a pod adapter portafilter.

You can find actual roasted barley coffee (kernels) in supermarkets though, and make it in a moka pot or a french press

sborra··on A man was gifted his dream car by Kevin Mitnick, who he helped put in prison
*whom
sborra··on I have left Branch and am no longer involved with Nova Launcher
except it's a matter of months, a couple years tops, until your old app stops working o doesn't work with your new phone
sborra··on Show HN: Daily puzzle game where you build a bridge of your own words (SolidJS)
Very nice and polished looking.

Logic wise, it took me a while to get it. I thought that a bridge could be valid as long as every tile in it could be construed to form a word with the adjacent tiles. i.e. a word could be valid across bends and words could overlap on more than one tile.

I got the idea because the example has the words "T U N E" and "E A T" as part of the bridge, but it could also be interpeted as "T U N E" and "N E A T" with "N E" being part of 2 words.

Maybe you could adjust the example to avoid any ambiguity for first-timers?

Great work. Looking forward to tomorrow's puzzle :)

sborra··on Ceefax Simulator
Italian national broadcaster RAI still has the equivalent of this, up and running on the DVB-T2 digital broadcasting standard and also online: https://www.televideo.rai.it/televideo/pub/index.jsp
sborra··on DIY Book Binding
The piece of software I miss the most since moving from MacOS to Windows is Cheap Impostor: http://cheapimpostor.com. It lets you turn any PDF into a correctly imposed 2-up/magazine/n-signature PDF ready for printing and assembling. It does it all with total control over margins, gutters, zoom lever, with an instant preview.

It was so nice to have it during university. I would use it for printing out papers as A5 "magazines" that I would bind myself. Very satisfying.

I never found anything quite like it for Windows

sborra··on Toshiba HD-DVD firmware archive
Tons and tons of Movies and TV shows are streaming-only releases nowadays.

Also, a bunch of old movies get restored in HD and released on streaming services only. First example that comes to mind is the classic 1993 comedy Look Who's Talking Now.

Adding insult to injury, a bunch of old movies get remastered physical releases... on DVD only. That's right. SD content encoded with a 30 year old codec.

So if I want to watch a movie from my childhood in HD, more often than not my only legal course of action is to subscribe to a streaming service.

Very sad, really.

sborra··on Show HN: API to query catalogs of 20 streaming services across 60 countries
JustWatch is great.

There's a trend in my country (Italy) where old movies are being remastered in HD but not published on Blu-ray. Instead, they're only made available on one out of a half dozen or so streaming services. JustWatch helps me immensely to spot new releases like that!

sborra··on The longest train journey in the world in 2021
There's much less competition (if any) in rail travel for any given route.
sborra··on U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says
after about 3 or 4 iterations of me reviewing my email setting, I got seriously fed up and I've gone for the nuclear option: all my facebook emails are marked as spam and binned.
sborra··on Small World: The Tiny House Trend
Surely more people are an asset for the local government, not a liability? You'd have 3x the tax revenue, 3x the purchasing power, plus the logistic efficiency that allows for local business to spring up and mass transportation to be viable.
sborra··on New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking
Google Maps works just fine with the GPS from my phone's sensors, but _every single time_ I bring up the app, it asks me to enable device location and Google Location Services.

I stubbornly (and maybe foolishly) keep opting out of every Google tracking option, it's crazy how annoying they are if you do this.

sborra··on Deliveroo users are getting defrauded
Not sure about multiple cards, but Revolut give you a virtual debit card you can turn off and on, put restriction on, etc.
sborra··on Storing data on videotape (1975)
That's super neat. What kind of VCRs support NICAM audio?
sborra··on Ask HN: Advice on finding an entry level job in NYC?
I think it's the standard in British English to treat organizations as a plural noun.
sborra··on Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?
That is fantastic. What technologies did you use?
sborra··on North American Regional Dialects and Accents (2016)
I once was working in a deli in Ireland and I got a customer who asked me for a rep (or was it a rap?). I was seriously puzzled until one of the people who was with her told me she wanted a Wrap and she was from New Zealand.

Kiwi english is one of the most interesting english accents to me. It seems like you guys have undergone a whole new vowel shift.

sborra··on Intel Launches 8th Generation CPUs, Starting with Kaby Lake Refresh
If I'm not mistaken there are a few Pentiums and i3 chips that support ECC. For example the G4560.
sborra··on Show HN: Add a play button next to IPA on Wikipedia
From what I can tell, it's bending an english TTS engine to make it pronounce IPA sounds
sborra··on Show HN: Add a play button next to IPA on Wikipedia
Ha! I Tried it with a couple names from my own language and it clearly is using an english TTS sound library. The pronounciation is better than you would get from a computer reading the name like an english word, but it's funny that even a language-neutral script such as IPA gets read with an english accent.
sborra··on A kids' cartoon led to invasive raccoons in Japan
Pom Poko is a Ghibli movie, yes, but it was directed by Isao Takahata, not Miyazaki.

I can aunderstand why it's not been marketed as much; it's pretty long-winded and it deals with Japanese stories and folklore that are foreign to the general western audience.

sborra··on How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD
What about the chemical option - attacking the board with a strong acid. Are there any readily available acids that would do the trick?
sborra··on Logo Pizza: Hot and ready logos for sale
Thought the same thing, Cheap first picks and expensive leftovers doesn't sound so smart.