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tpoindex

250 karma · joined February 4, 2011

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tpoindex··on How to Befriend Crows
I too have enticed/befriended a group of Steller's Jays at my weekend cabin. I've always put out seeds for casual bird watching and about two years ago started giving them peanuts as well. I make sure to give a distinctive whistle for that extra Pavlovian effect. Many are quite accustomed to me, will come within 5-8 feet to snatch a tossed peanut. Over the last year, they often greet me when I drive up with some calls, or usually come when I whistle if they're not around. The two resident black Abert's squirrels also come up for the peanuts, often by my feet.

They are also several ravens in the area, often staying at tree top level, 60-70 ft. I've never been able to get their attention. even with peanuts. I'm guessing they just don't see the action at ground level, too many trees, or feel safer higher up.

tpoindex··on The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter
Seems that the underlying study that included the Bolt was from Feb. 2019 (the AAA study cited), so their battery recall/fix and newer software may have helped.

Another couple of red flag in the AXIOS article was: "AAA found the loss in driving range could be as high as 41% with the heater on full blast." Hmmm, even with the recent Siberean cold air mass blast here in Colorado, I don't need the heater on full in my ICE cars with outside temps of -5F. Also, the recurrent.com study show some of the vehicles ratings based on verified range versus estimated range - why? Perhaps it's accurate, but mixed methodologies in the same study.

tpoindex··on TruffleC: A C implementation on top of JVM (2014)
NestedVM was another early attempt (2004) to run C, C++, Fortran, etc. on the JVM, but at substantial performance degradation. This was a clever hack that ran a Java coded MIPS emulator and loaded a compiled binary into a large array. Performance was 20-40% of native speed, but still fast enough for some applications, such as SQLite as a JDBC driver.

Website, source repo, and paper seem to still be available, try archive.org for dead links:

http://nestedvm.ibex.org/

tpoindex··on Hacks for Engineering Estimates
This is exactly my hack too! Especially when there are outside dependencies that can easily stall your progress.
tpoindex··on The Birth of Tcl
I collected many of the T-shirts and other items. I published a list w/ photos, including a few photos others sent me. All done in glorious bare-bones 1990's HTML, photos taken on 35mm and scanned with a cheap scanner.

https://www.nyx.net/~tpoindex/tcl-wear/

tpoindex··on The Birth of Tcl
Upvar has it's place, especially when writing your own control structures. Outside of that, tread lightly.
tpoindex··on A 'Null' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell (2019)
For those who like podcasts, Radiolab also had this story recently, along with a few other cases of bad programming (“Are you suggesting I change my name to “quote N-U-L-L quote”, to match the databases you’re working with?”)

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/null

tpoindex··on 500-year-old manuscript contains earliest known use of the “F-word” (2020)
John McWhorter's podcast "Lexicon Valley" has a 45 minute episode on the word if you would like to dig a little deeper.

https://slate.com/culture/2019/01/john-mcwhorter-f-word-hist...

If you'd like to get newer episodes of Lexicon Valley, it's been moved to: https://www.booksmartstudios.org/s/lexicon-valley

tpoindex··on Android 13 virtualization lets Pixel 6 run Windows 11, Linux distributions
AccuBattery gives an audible alert when a configurable charge level is reached (default is 80%). Not as nice as having the phone stop charging by itself, but at least I'm not frying my battery.
tpoindex··on Postman Now Supports gRPC
There certainly are plenty of Postman alternatives out there, one that I've used before is Milkman: https://github.com/warmuuh/milkman

It's built on a plugin architecture, does gRPC, GraphQL, JDBC, Ws, et.al. Other plugins allow sharing of workspaces to various services. Written in Java/JavaFX, brew or chocolatey install.

tpoindex··on Docker for Mac Without Docker Desktop
Lima absolutely rocks. For me, there are a few small nits, but overall probably the best to replace Docker. Out of the box ("brew install lima; limactl start") lima gives you an Ubuntu VM with containerd and nerdctl. Nerdctl is mostly compatible with the docker cli as others on this thread have mentioned. The examples/ directory also has configs for starting up k3s or k8s. Rancher Desktop is also using Lima.

Minikube also works, but I can't get host directories mounted in the VM; running nfsd on the Mac is a reasonable work-around. It does start up k8s containers, so if you just want a docker-like environment, it might be overkill.

tpoindex··on Other sites like HN?
If you want multiple in the same page:

https://devurls.com/

https://sciurls.com/

https://techurls.com/

I mainly stick to HN, Lobste.rs, and a few tech related Reddits.

tpoindex··on Systemd 250 Released
You want MXLinux - Debian with just enough systemd to work in a modern environment but with SysV init. https://mxlinux.org

> not to mention 5-minute shutdown times

5 minutes? Try total hang on shutdown, and often not starting up. That was my systemd experience. I traced it down to a NFS mount that no amount of tinkering would mount reliably pn boot. Granted that was several years ago, but soured me on systemd.

tpoindex··on Weird English
Also highly recommended, John McWhorter's podcast, Lexicon Valley. Not only English, but also dives into other languages and why they are so. Edit: add older episode archives at Slate,

https://www.booksmartstudios.org/s/lexicon-valley (current)

https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley (archive)

tpoindex··on How to fold an origami cat: Lexus takumi challenge (2020)
This explains a lot. I have a 2021 Lexus, and there are a few questionable design choices. Forefront is the infotainment system interface - way too complicated, prone to error, way too distracting. (You navigate the system with a touchpad on the console, while glancing over at the screen.)

A better test would be to unfold a cat origami, and figure out a less complicated, durable design from it.

tpoindex··on James Gosling Interview
Tcl hasn't been string based for 20 years, misinformation is hard to eliminate. Since the release of version 8.0 in 2001, Tcl internally has value types for integer, bigints, double, boolean, lists, etc.. As long as you're careful not to cause the internal value to 'shimmer' into a string representation, Tcl maintains the value type as last used. Tcl happily converts values to strings as needed, giving the impression of 'everything is a string'.
tpoindex··on Google broke a conditional statement that verifies passwords on Chrome OS
There is a policy that would probably catch these types of errors - Chromeos developers should eat their own dog food, i.e., developers should be required to use a Chromebook on the "dev" or "beta" channels as their daily machines. Sure, use a cloud VM to get work done, but login, email, browsing, etc. done on the Chromebook. Google itself has fine machines for this purpose.
tpoindex··on Elm Compiler Written in Elm
eie.io would be an awesome domain name for this project. Too bad it's already parked by a squatter as a "premium name". (For non-native or non-Western English speakers, it's a line from the children's song "Old McDonald Had a Farm".)
tpoindex··on Wapp – A Web-Application Framework for Tcl
I did write a Tcl web system back in the 2000's that was close to the Tk programming model, although not quite a one-to-one. Here is an example of side by side programs for Tk and Aejaks: https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/%C3%86jaks+compares+to+Tcl%2F...

Some other screen shots: http://aejaks.sourceforge.net/Screen_Shots/index.html

This was made with the Java based Echo toolkit, and the Jtcl interpreter (Tcl implemented in Java.)

tpoindex··on Cesium for Unreal Now Available
Nice models of Denver on the video, especially Union Station, City & County Building, airliner flyover. But the car is driving the wrong way on Broadway, even though the parked cars on the right side are pointed in the correct direction. Maybe a new GTA Denver edition is in the works? heh.
tpoindex··on New.css – A classless CSS framework to write modern websites using only HTML
I'm also interested in your tables solution. Also, is there an organized MVP.css community somewhere?
tpoindex··on Circle – A C++ compiler with compile-time imperative metaprogramming
Thanks for pointing out Manifold, looks delicious.

As a historical note, PL/I had a preprocessor that itself was a subset of PL/I. I don't recall any type safety features, but was quite useful for creating DSLs within a program.

tpoindex··on Systemd, ten years later: a historical and technical retrospective
This, exactly.

My first experience with SystemD (Ubuntu 16.04 IIRC) turned into a frustrating experience, mostly around trying to mount a NFS volume in /etc/fstab, defined with 'soft' and 'bg' mount options. SystemD would often fail to mount the volume, and as a result would never fully boot to login prompt. Additionally, on shutdown SystemD would hang again forever trying to unmount that volume. No amount of mount option flag tweaking seemed to make much of a difference, so I simply removed the NFS volume from fstab and manually mounted when I needed it.

Happily running MX Linux today and back to mounting NFS in /etc/fstab.

tpoindex··on All about Birds
I'll also recommend another Android app, BirdNET [1]. This app does audio identification. and is jointly developed by a small team of EU researchers and Cornell. Covers 1,000+ species in North America and Europe. I've found that it does a remarkable job of identification even with crappy mobile phone microphones, and even in noisy environments. It ships off a recording to a server for analysis using neural nets trained on 2.5 million samples. I'm assuming that it's using Cornell's audio recordings, perhaps others. Times when I don't get a good match, it's best guess is often correct for birds that I know.

I've seen similar apps for iOS, but haven't tried any of them.

1. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.tu_chemnitz...

tpoindex··on Running Linux on your smartphone in 2020
Termux is cool tech (including running full Linux in a chroot). I would also mention UserLAnd [0] to run full Linux distributions sand specific application with a simple install.

The thing I am missing the most is HDMI video out, as my retired Nexus 5 could do with MHL and a simple dongle on the USB micro port. That dongle could also provide power and another USB port for a mouse or keyboard. Very few modern phones seem to have any video out other than casting. I do see that DisplayLink does support Android, but I've yet to find a dongle that also provides USB C power delivery in a nice portable package.

0. https://userland.tech/

tpoindex··on Simpler UI Logic With Finite State Machines
> "If you haven't built a finite state machine, you've built a bad finite state machine."

SMC (State Machine Compiler) is worth bringing up here, which uses a formal language to define a state machine and produces code in one of a dozen+ languages to run it. Makes it impossible to build a bad state machine. I remember using this on some small projects last decade, I'm happily surprised to see it's still maintained.

http://smc.sourceforge.net/ and code at: https://sourceforge.net/p/smc/git-code/ci/master/tree/

tpoindex··on Show HN: Monolinux – A tiny embedded Linux distro
MuLinux could boot a Linux to a prompt, with minimal command line utilities. Extra floppies provided X11, GCC, Tcl, Perl, et. al. MuLinux formatted 3.5" floppies to 1.7mb and replaced many utilities with "rustic" versions written in /bin/sh. Fun stuff! Disclosure: I contributed the Tcl floppy and lpr/lpq/lprm utilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux

tpoindex··on Lethal memory fail: Why drivers see, and then forget motorcyclists
Good list. I haven't been riding for a few years, but I had boiled all of this down into one golden rule: Assume every car IS out to kill you. This is basically your rule #8, but a little more succinct.

Adding to your list, I'd also suggest rule #11: When riding on a multi-lane street or highway, never ride adjacent to another vehicle. Speed up to get ahead or slow down to fall behind. This helps to avoid the other vehicle making a lane change into your path. Keep out of the other vehicle's blind spot.

tpoindex··on Documentation to set up a simple macOS VM in QEMU, accelerated by KVM
> I ended up just building a bare-metal Intel Hackintosh which was less of a hassle.

I think we need a new word to describe VM-hosted MacOS to distinguish from hardware hosted: QEMU + hack + Macintosh = Quackintosh ?

tpoindex··on Linux on Samsung Galaxy smartphones
GNURoot Debian might be a solution for you: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gnuroot.de...

It runs X, using the XServer XDSL app previously mentioned in this thread. I found some things rather quirky, but certainly fun to play with. My older Nexus 5 could do HDMI out with a dongle, add in BT keyboard and mouse, and it's mostly usable.

Doesn't run on Android 8.0 yet, and no HDMI out on my newer Pixel, so it's Termux + keyboard for on-the-go hacking.

Linux Deploy (also on Google Play) for those who have rooted their devices looks to be another choice.

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