Hacker News Reader

Crunchifiedon Historical Telecommunications

Connections Museum in Seattle is where they should look. As deep as it gets! They maintain working switches dating back to over 100ya, massive documentation libraries, and artifacts and parts out the wazoo from telephones to teletypes to outside facilities and equipment to momentos and books and on and on.

If Connections has a weak zone in its collections, it's in the post-ATT/1984 era of cell technology and computer networking. Open Sundays 10-3.

https://www.telcomhistory.org/connections-museum-seattle/

Crunchifiedon Google has officially turned these Nest thermostats back into dumb thermostats

If someone says Google can't be trusted for purchases of long-term, capital-style goods like a thermostat (or smoke detectors), I'd have to agree. The Nest I bought way back when may still be installed in the home I sold 10+ years ago.

But I didn't buy it from Google, I bought it from Nest (pre-Google) - a company that designed and sold high-tech gear that was designed to be permanently installed and (presumably) last a good long time. The acquisition was not a good match, but it is what it is - lesson learned and reputations lost.

(and the design, honestly, was more down Apple's lane than Google's - I thought the former would be more likely to buy them out, not that it guaranteed any different results).

Crunchifiedon The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck

Well, a president should certainly be held accountable for any executive order that is overturned on constitutional grounds. Not only should the president have (and use) plenty of legal counsel to avoid this, but a president stepping beyond constitutional bounds is acting illegally which (a) none of us should and (b) ought not go unpunished.

Crunchifiedon 'Der Viener Schlinger': The meat cannon that launched 20k hot dogs

It's not that strange to me. Wiener Schnitzel, a lovely breaded and fried veal dish of Viennese origin, is a commonly used "funny German word" in English. Der Viener Schlinger is apparently just about as funny, and easily enough "translated" into English.

Crunchifiedon Gold is now the top U.S. export

Do they count as export if the owner doesn't change?

I don't know. Does it count as export if it's not moved an inch?

Crunchifiedon IKEA made a mod for Skyrim [video]

There's lots and lots of them. Have you ridden an escalator® lately?

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

Crunchifiedon A new study of a bot running a store finds it is friendly but not very smart

"Misprint Moon Mug $35"

They'll sell plenty of those now.

Crunchifiedon Atomic Clocks

To fully understand time even as simply as a sequence of events is excruciatingly difficult, and we are still working out the details of our understanding. I think Einstein was on the right track with his quote, and trying to get beyond that would have simply been an obstacle in his path of knowledge.

Crunchifiedon Atomic Clocks

If I had an atomic clock, it'd probably be blinking 12:00.

Crunchifiedon Why some people mow a lawn better than others

You mean a flymo. It's more hovercraft than drone, and much older technology. Works reasonably well on non-lumpy lawns - my neighbor had one in the 1980s.

www.flymo.com

Crunchifiedon DDoS against Norwegian government IT infrastructure – status

It stored energy. It's not stored electricity.

Crunchifiedon 200 Milliseconds

I'm finding more and more web sites that won't load at all until I request them a second time.

Crunchifiedon DDoS against Norwegian government IT infrastructure – status

"vast stores of electricity"?

Crunchifiedon Holocloth

Clue: Corner of the cloth says "HONDA [something] DOMINATOR" and refers to the NX650 Dominator dual-sport motorcycle manufactured from 1988 to 2003. Single cylinder 640cc engine.

Crunchifiedon Should you wash your solar panels?

And hopefully these independent contractors are insured. It may well be insurance requirements that limit the use of ladders.

Crunchifiedon GNU Hurd gets 9pfs, OpenNTPD, dynamic /dev/ entries, and more

Any different from Linux?

Crunchifiedon Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

I figured with an app name like "bitch at", the government was simply getting tired of hearing peoples' gripes. I was saddened to see I was way off.

Crunchifiedon Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects

Blockchain is no good?

Crunchifiedon Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

Install it in your bathroom, use it like a restroom hand dryer.

Crunchifiedon Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s

In capitalism, any intentional non-maximization of profits is philanthropy. Nothing wrong with that.

Crunchifiedon Aluminum foil (2021)

I will not give up my Jiffy Pop when camping!

Crunchifiedon Aluminum foil (2021)

Is the very thin paper used in constructing corrugated cardboard that strong compared to aluminum foil? I don't have the answer to that, but it does tell us that very thin, relatively weak materials can be used to construct much stronger things, and we shouldn't casually compare the underlying materials with the finished product.

Crunchifiedon An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy

I always had a muLinux disk handy in my computer toolbox. Most of its shell commands came from a simple script ingeniously written by the distro's author. It's been around since the mid-90s, I'd guess.

https://micheleandreoli.org/public/Software/mulinux/mu/html/...

Crunchifiedon Kirkland Roundabouts

Tumwater. What you get when you put the wrong tablet in your denture bath.

Crunchifiedon Astronauts told to return to ISS after sheltering over air leak repairs

...or the scutters on Red Dwarf.

Crunchifiedon The IsUpMap lets you check the status of over 100 major sites at once

No Apple services listed? Where's iCloud?

Crunchifiedon MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

Just so you know, the original Ford Maverick started out at just under $2,000 in 1970.

Crunchifiedon I found a seashell in the middle of the desert

I would wager that the land was lower than the sea back then.

Crunchifiedon Kv4p HT – A homebrew 1W radio (VHF or UHF) that plugs into an Android phone

The article is chiefly about a radio circuit you can "build", plus some controller software that happens to run on an Android phone. Meanwhile the headline is 100% focused on describing something that your phone can be made to do (which you have admitted that it can't).

The two don't add up, and your apologetic analysis doesn't convince me otherwise. It's still clickbait. An Android cell phone has radio guts, and that headline is just gutless.

Crunchifiedon Kv4p HT – A homebrew 1W radio (VHF or UHF) that plugs into an Android phone

This doesn't turn your phone into a ham transceiver at all. It turns your phone into a transceiver controller. Given that a cell phone is a transceiver, this headline is rather disappointing clickbait.