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spydezon MyHurricane, Stormpulse now has an HTML5 competitor.

Anyone know of a service where you can just stick in your city or zip, and get an email if anything's headed your way?

Don't know if you have that info in MyHurricane, voxxit, but if you do it'd be an awesome feature.

spydezon Student makes history with human-powered ‘flapping-wing’ plane

I'm not an aeronautic engineer, but I used to be a pilot. I would say yes, he's getting increased lift by being that close to the ground.

My sources include dusty memories and Wikipedia, so... grains of salt all around.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_effect_in_aircraft

spydezon Ask HN: How do I find a mentor?

True, but you can still fuck up stuff without being DOA-178B (or whatever). My flight planning assistance SaaS example wouldn't be safety critical, I assume.

Just a warning of what to avoid...

spydezon Ask HN: How do I find a mentor?

Google "iPhone pilot logbook". There's at least one app already out there. Find out what they do and do it better.

spydezon Ask HN: How do I find a mentor?

Safety critical software is absolutely not the thing to get involved with (especially off the bat)... That and security critical software have mountains of approval to get through before they can be used. The FAA is notoriously old fashioned.

Also, I'd personally hate to be responsible for some crash because my flight planning assistance SaaS had a minor, off-by-one bug in it somewhere, or misinterpreted "thar be tornadoes" for "light and variable winds".

(I am an embedded software engineer. I was also a private/instrument pilot.)

spydezon The Psychology of Loners and Introverts

The original URL + Readability work fine for me.

spydezon Call phones from Gmail

Too bad some of us have a Google account for Google Voice, and a different account for Google Apps for Your Domain (email).

Guess my GV number will always be disjointed, unless they add GV to the Apps and have some way of transferring an old account in...

spydezon Google Kills Wave

They did not.

Well, they did originally have "who's online" functionality, but they had to yank it when someone found an exploit, and it took them forever to get it working again.

The "email me" option was much later - around the time they went from "Preview" to "Beta", I think. And as thorax said in his reply to me, Google flubbed the UI/usability of the preferences.

As far as "who has a Wave account", it's the same scheme as email. You get a Wave address; you're responsible for letting all your friends know what your address is (e.g., mine's in my HN profile). Probably could've been improved by hooking into Facebook/Twitter/etc. and spamming out your Wave address to all your friends...

spydezon Google Kills Wave

There's an option on every blip in every wave that says "Delete This".

You can even delete other people's blips!

People can only see your mistakes if they're in the wave and looking while you type (ie, "Chat Mode"). If it's used like email (that is, checking it a few times per day), they see only the snapshots of what happened when the "Done" button was pressed.

You can add pictures. You can embed YouTube videos. You can have links.

Honestly, yeah, it takes some getting used to, but once you're used to it, it's no more complicated than Outlook. Personally, I think using Outlook to set up a meeting notice is harder than using Wave.

spydezon Google Kills Wave

...there is an "email me when a wave gets updated" option, you know.

They even let you decide how often you want to get emailed. I chose once/day, but you could go all the way up to one email for every blip updated/added.

And this way works with all email, not just gmail!

There's a link in that email to send you straight to what's updated. How much integration do you want, exactly?

spydezon Google Kills Wave

My little group of friends is using it for a DnD RPG. It's orders of magnitude better than the IRC chatroom we were using before.

It's going to be annoying having to go back to IRC.

spydezon Peter Norvig on Being Wrong

Don't know about Google. I'm working for a defense contractor, so we may have more hoops and red tape to blunder through... but my PMs are always busy talking to the customer, writing documentation, figuring out what the specs actually mean, managing, or something. There's no time left in the day to hunker down with the code (or digital logic or whatever engineering discipline the PM came from).

See also "Maker's Schedule Manager's Schedule": http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

spydezon Ask HN: Four months since launch: how are you finding the iPad?

How do you know this light doesn't suck? So far you're 3 for 3 on sucky lights, and you haven't tried this new one.

If there's a review for the new one that says, "This doesn't suck," then there's probably a review for your previous 3 that says the same thing...

spydezon Hacker Monthly #2 is out

Sounds like you bought issue #1, so I'll ask:

How's the print quality?

spydezon The Drag Coefficient Scoring System: what size startup is right for you

He forgot at least one... In my case:

Medical Issues: +1 to +inf points, depending.

i.e., I have migraines, 5+ docs to see about them, lots of pills and meds to buy, etc. Definitely getting good use out of my megacorp insurance plan & psuedo-unlimited sick leave.

Ignoring the migraines, I only have 1 point in his system, but there's no way I could do a startup right now... I had more sick hours than work hours last week.

spydezon Ask HN: Number of iPhone apps you published & income you get from them

  a) 0 
  b) 0 and 0, respectively.
  c) none
  d) $0 per payout.

spydezon Rands in Repose: Chill

Thanks.

spydezon Rands in Repose: Chill

I've tried all the triptans. None of them work. Neither do muscle relaxants, blood pressure medicine or anti-convulsants (at least not Topamax; it made things worse).

Only things that help are narcotic pain-killers and Migranal (aka DHE). And they only reduce the pain, not break the migraine. Alcohol helps a bit when I'm drinking it, but then there's the hangover to pay (on top of the migraine which has come back by then... >:( )

Seriously. My neurologist has given up on me. I've got an appointment at the Mayo Clinic, but until then, I'm on my fucking own.

spydezon Rands in Repose: Chill

Yeah; screw the T-shirt... I've had migraines for years, and my current one has been messing me up for a month or three (yes, a month-long migraine -_-). I wanna hear more about how Rands mitigated (mitigates?) his headaches.

He's one of the lucky ones with migraine auras, so he's got a free 15-30 minutes between when his vision goes wack and when the pain pounces... I don't have that luxury, and once the headache hits, it's pretty freaking hard to relax... if I even knew what relaxed me.

spydezon An open letter to thesixtyone.com

Gone now.

spydezon An open letter to thesixtyone.com

If the author reads HN.... You've been hacked. Try visiting your site with JavaScript disabled:

http://imgur.com/GkFJ7

...unless you're trying to up your SEO with the Viagra crowd.

Tried to comment this on the blog, but registration is turned off. Sending an email at the "contact me" page a note...

spydezon GDrive is coming, 1GB free storage

It is a joke. Dropbox and Zumo Drive both give you twice that for free; it's amazing that Google with its millions of servers and 7 something GB Gmail accounts can't do better than a lousy 1GB free.

spydezon [dead]

Perhaps make a "Lite" (aka free) version, and ask us to review that?

Or go the Canabalt route, and have the whole game playable (with slightly reduced functionality due to not having accelerometers, multitouch, etc) on a website and then a pay-for download on the App Store.

spydezon Announcing Duck It, a new way to search

Someone did...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google#Name

spydezon Apple Announces Major Consumer PC Upgrades

I use it for closing tabs in Firefox when I don't have two hands on the keyboard (W is on the right hand's side of the keyboard for us Dvorak folks).

A middle click anywhere on the entire tab is easier that hitting the lil' x button. Plus, you can turn off the 'close tab' button it the options and make your Firefox look a little bit cleaner.

spydezon Apple Unleashes New Macs, Multitouch Mouse

Some thermite?

A high powered air cannon?

A bath in liquid nitrogen followed by a toss in the air and an impact with a baseball bat on the way back down?

spydezon 10/Gui: A 1-D multitouch window system, very simple looking

The website, which currently has basically nothing other than the vimeo video, is here:

http://10gui.com/

I'm impressed, but I don't know how well it'll work, switching from the gesture surface to the keyboard and back and forth.

spydezon Google Wave: too complicated for its own good

That feature's already planned; that's what the "Draft" checkbox is for. I'm sure eventually you'll have a setting to default all blips to draft mode.

You can't expect every feature to be in and working flawlessly in the preview.

spydezon Ask HN: Check out my side project

That still redirected me to Amazon Payments and asked for 5 bucks...