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Cockbrand

1,480 karma · joined August 24, 2010

I'm not very good at replying to unsolicited emails. Still, you can write me at cockbrand@gmail.com
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Cockbrand··on StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month
Adding to the nostalgia: who will teach people that (X)HTML cannot be parsed with a Regex once SO is gone?
Cockbrand··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
I guess the touch screen on the Mac will go the way of the Touch Bar (and earlier: the dodo) before it, but I’m much looking forward to buying an OLED MacBook Air in maybe 5 years.
Cockbrand··on Laptop Based on 6502 CPU
Of course, is's great for executive poolside work, see also https://sm.pcmag.com/t/pcmag_uk/photo/c/commodore-/commodore...
Cockbrand··on Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains
+1, unfortunately.

A few years ago, I experienced absolutely stellar service from Gandi when (due to negligence of the previous registrar) I had trouble moving a domain in.

A couple of months ago, my main domain was offline for over a day due to a configuration snag that I could not resolve on my own, and Gandi's customer service now has ridiculously short hours (pretty much only in the morning), took quite a while to respond, and didn't provide much background info on the underlying issue.

I was amazed by the drastic change in quality, and I'll move my domains out soon. Where to is a still open question, though.

EDIT: I just read in a sibling thread that Gandi has been bought by private equity a while ago, that explains a lot.

Cockbrand··on The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME
I learned this stuff from friends, O'Reilly books and endless nights of failure and trial and error. I'm certainly not a super wizard, but I feel like I'm not missing any shell skills to be able to do what I need to do.

[Insert mild rant on kids these days having no attention span any more]

Cockbrand··on The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME
I feel like this is common knowledge and should not be worth mentioning. But then it apparently is not common knowledge, as the article proves.

Have I run into this at some point?

I certainly have.

Have I learned to quote better and only where appropriate from it?

I certainly have.

Bourne compatible shells take a while to learn and require some experience. This won't change, but alternatives exist, with their own caveats.

Cockbrand··on Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage
+1 to both.

Elaborating a bit:

1 acre-foot is 325,851 gallons or 1,233,482 liters.

For easier mental handling: 4 acre-feet are roughly 5 million liters or 5,000 cubic meters.

Cockbrand··on In an $80 motel room, a discovery to shed light on the origins of life
+1 on this question, without any snark intended. What's a good, not too expensive beginner's microscope that's capable of this kind of citizen research (and other fun stuff)?
Cockbrand··on Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi
I was having a very similar thought - finally a nice use case for HTML wallpapers like Windows used to have them. I bet that there's a trick to have this as a desktop background in Wayland, but I'm too lazy to find out right now.

Either way, really nicely made, I love it! Small change request: adjust the CSS to make the controls look less vibecode-y.

Cockbrand··on Launch HN: Coverage Cat (YC S22) – Umbrella insurance via your personal agent
I live in a rainy and windy place, so I often need to replace a flipped umbrella. How did I not know that there's umbrella insurance!?
Cockbrand··on Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
Now that you're mentioning it, I seem to remember seeing or even owning Extended Keyboard IIs with the same print. I may be wrong, though.
Cockbrand··on Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
The weird Canadian helm icon on the Control key caught my eye in particular.
Cockbrand··on Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
The Extended Keyboard II came with a plastic overlay for the function keys. It showed Cut/Copy/Paste for F2/F3/F4 respectively. See https://chrispeak.com/2022/04/08/apple-extended-ii for a photo.

Not sure if this was ever supported system-wide in any way, though.

Cockbrand··on Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
Maybe the author uses a CMS that's supposed to replace tags like [happy-face] with an emoji, but something broke?
Cockbrand··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
What!? It's the entire, singular purpose and meaning of life for millions of people to make themselves look glamorous on Instagram, and you say it's optional?! /s
Cockbrand··on When code is a maze, smart developers make maps
And so the war began.

This is a bit like vim vs Emacs - everyone should be able to use their favorite setup, and the formatting should not get in the way of the engineer's preferences.

Cockbrand··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
Oof! Mine is still the original one, and it’s incidentally also at 89% after maybe 3.5 years of being my daily driver.
Cockbrand··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
I agree, despite being quite the Liquid Glass hater at first. It has grown on me, and they have ironed out the worst kinks. I still don't love it, but it's great that we're getting a bit of three-dimensionality back, after all the ambiguity that comes with the flat design trend of the decade or so before Liquid Glass.
Cockbrand··on Steam Frame starts at $1059
Now I see that the page reveals this:

> Four high-resolution, monochrome cameras provide controller and headset tracking

(Emphasis mine)

So it's not really suitable for real AR out of the box. Thanks for the heads up!

Cockbrand··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
So what's your experience in terms of speed and battery life with iOS 27 on the iPhone 13 so far? I have a 13 mini, and I still haven't gotten over the (perceived) shorter battery life with iOS 26.
Cockbrand··on Steam Frame starts at $1059
Not being very savvy about VR glasses, am I assuming correctly that this device can't do AR, as the cameras are only used for tracking?
Cockbrand··on iPhone Duo
> you could never do fancier than a 1500 buck iphone

There's always high-end commercial modders like Caviar [0], who help customers flex both their wealth and their extremely bad taste...

[0] https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/

Cockbrand··on Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
Or hit ⇧⌘N
Cockbrand··on Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
Wow, that frog game - I haven't thought about this in a loooong time! Didn't it also come with the demo disk for the 1541?
Cockbrand··on Lion-man
I'm currently reading that book, and I find this sentiment interesting (not knowing any better myself) - is there a critique/fact-check somewhere?
Cockbrand··on RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source
This is great stuff, thank you for sharing!
Cockbrand··on OpenLogi
I haven't tried the LLM approach recommended in the sibling comment, and I agree that the UI is quite cumbersome. Yet, once it clicks, it's still not super straightforward, but it allows for quickly implementing whatever one needs. I guess the UI complexity comes with its extremely powerful capabilities.
Cockbrand··on OpenLogi
I'm still quite often amazed by BTT's capabilities, for example right now by the fact that they bothered to implement Logitech's HID++ protocol.
Cockbrand··on Hello, me. It's been a while
Very fair, and I'd differentiate between being bored as a kid (unbearable) and being bored as an adult (enjoyable to some extent). Maybe "mild meditative zen state" would be a more precise definition than "boredom" in the first place.
Cockbrand··on Hello, me. It's been a while
> It’s sort of the opposite of an activity, and the brain hates it.

While this is true, I'd word it differently:

It's sort of the opposite of an activity, and we've conditioned our brains to hate it.

Boredom used to be absolutely normal in our society for pretty much ever, and the urge to do something about it when it occurred was a lot weaker than it is now.

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