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barryp

146 karma · joined August 28, 2015

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barryp··on FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels
For sure it's going to depend on the person, but I bet a lot of the hacker news crowd here appreciates observability and metrics.

In software we're wiring up stuff with prometheus and making grafana dashboards and changing code and configuration based on what we see happening. CGMs in a way give you insight into one aspect of your body and diet.

I've been trying Lingo, and it's been super-interesting to see in almost realtime how your body reacts to different foods. Sure you read all the time about "watch your carbs..." or "don't eat so much sugar", but it's hard to know how seriously to take that advice.

It's a whole different thing though when you eat one thing for a snack and see a big spike in a graph on your phone, and eat a different thing the next day and see hardly any change at all. It makes it much easier to rationalize your food choices.

barryp··on Kirkland Roundabouts
Background music is awesome
barryp··on Giant Floating Victorian Drydock
The US Navy's WW II floating drydocks in the Pacific were wild - whole battleships and aircraft carriers lifted up, fixed, and sent back out.

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/the-massive-fl...

barryp··on Stewart Cheifet, creator of The Computer Chronicles, has died
Loved loved loved that show, a definite must-watch for a young nerd back in the late 80s. Thanks Stewart.
barryp··on macOS Packaging for Ungoogled-Chromium
I've been grabbing macOS builds of Chromium from the Playwright project (https://playwright.dev)

The download URL follows this template

    https://playwright.azureedge.net/builds/chromium/{revision}/chromium-mac.zip
To find the current revision, look in

    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/playwright/main/packages/playwright-core/browsers.json
Today I'm seeing

    {
      "name": "chromium",
      "revision": "1151",
      "installByDefault": true,
      "browserVersion": "132.0.6834.32"
    },
So I'd grab

    https://playwright.azureedge.net/builds/chromium/1151/chromium-mac.zip
After unzipping, mark the file as runnable with

    xattr -d com.apple.quarantine Chromium.app
barryp··on How to build a 50k ton forging press
I got curious as what happened to the other 4. Wikipedia lists them as extrusion presses being scrapped in the 90's and 2021 in Maryland and Torrence CA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program

I wonder if they wore out?, something better came along?, or just no demand?

barryp··on NanoKVM: Affordable, Multifunctional, Nano RISC-V IP-KVM
Yeah, I was just doing this last week with an old HP Elitedesk 800 G2.

This Youtube really helped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhq0bsWJEOw

And there's more here: https://www.meshcommander.com/meshcommander/tutorials

barryp··on Passkeys: A shattered dream
I think you're right about the first part...a passkey being tied to a single account on a single site.

But not the second: on Github for example you can have multiple passkeys for the same account.

barryp··on FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds
Try "The Computer Designed To Die In Microseconds"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYdAT0v4DHs (Scott Manley)

https://www.lanl.gov/orgs/padwp/pdfs/2nwj2-03.pdf

barryp··on Lemmy Instances are already blocking each other
Yes, absolutely this for the content-side.

Especially in the tech world, it would make sense for r/php to be hosted and run by the offical php.net guys, r/laravel by the laravel.com crew, r/vuejs by ... (you get it).

However it'd be hard for the subreddit hosters to manage which user-facing instances are allowed to post. If shitposters could just fire up new personal instances every time they were banned, then subreddit hosters would just be playing whack-a-mole and get fed up with it.

They'd almost have to require that users post from instances with good reputations - and now we've just reinvented e-mail's problem of forcing users into using one of the big providers in order to be able to send/post anything.

Too bad we can't have nice things

barryp··on How to become a debt buyer
I thing orgs like that already exist, see: https://ripmedicaldebt.org/ and https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rip-medical-debt-forgiving-medi...
barryp··on Hetzner Introduces ARM64 Cloud Servers
Yes, the have datacenters in Virginia and Oregon - seems to just be AMD servers though (no Intel or ARM).

Been using a couple VPSes in Oregon, pretty happy with them.

barryp··on QCVM: Bite-sized QuakeC VM written in C
I had a huge amount of fun back in those days messing with QuakeWorld and Quake2, learned a ton of stuff.

One project was embedding a Python2 interpeter in QuakeWorld, along with a QuakeC->Python translator. The translator and the resulting Deathmatch and CTF games are here: https://github.com/barryp/qwpython

The other was embedding a JavaVM in Quake2, and instead of trying to translate the C game logic, we recreated the whole thing from scratch in an object-oriented Java fashion: https://github.com/barryp/q2java

Thanks to Carmack for opening up those old engines, that was a real education.

barryp··on Features I'd Like in PostgreSQL
That'd be tedious and error-prone if had schemas with maybe dozens of tables. Now you've also got dozens of views to manage and keep in sync with the underlying tables.

I work with both MySQL and PgSQL, and not being able to reorder columns easily is one feature I really miss in PG.

barryp··on Sonic: A super-light alternative to Elasticsearch
I was looking at the Github repos for Sonic, and a PHP library for working with it: https://github.com/ppshobi/psonic/blob/master/api-docs.md and I'm scratching my head over: what's the difference between the popping and flushing operations?

Specifically, there's a "pop" method which: "pops an item out of index" and a "flusho" method which "Flushes the indexed text from an objects". They kind of sound awfully similar and take similar args.

Otherwise it all looks pretty straightforward - just that one small conceptual thing might be explained a bit more in the docs.

barryp··on ACME Laboratories
I always liked the way he formatted his C code - opening and closing braces on indented on line by themselves, the code inside the braces indented the same amount. Appealed to my Python side, long before I ever saw Python.

Wrote a lot of code that way, wish that style had caught on.

barryp··on FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
Hah, the location of my house is interesting - that'll be fun asking for a pizza or a fire truck sent to "corrosive filth ....."
barryp··on Ranked-Choice Voting Is More Democratic, Not Less
> (1) Why would the state residents vote for a state legislature that takes away human rights from them?

A lot of voters wouldn't have a problem if they're going to take rights away from those "other people" they don't like.

barryp··on Overview of new features in Apache HTTP Server 2.6
Running CGI scripts.
barryp··on High Fidelity Image Generation Using Diffusion Models
Yes, I'd like to see 3 images: A) the original image before it was downscaled to 64x64, B) the 64x64 input to the upscaler, and C) the final upscaled image. So we can compare A and C
barryp··on The Sears Tele-Games Pinball Breakaway
Ah! I had that game as a kid, loved it! The actual paddle buttons on the side made it much better than a 2600 for that type of game. Don't remember what happened to it - maybe it died and that's why we got a 2600.
barryp··on North Dakota needed to hire Latvians to manage an ancient state computer system
Burgum's not a typical pol when it comes to IT stuff, he was the CEO of Great Plains Software which Microsoft bought for $1.1 Billion, was then Senior Vice President of Microsoft Business Solutions Group. Apparently he was also chairman of the board for Atlassian in 2012.

Being Governor is his first political office. I'm not saying he knows Cobol, but I'd bet he knows probably as much about it as most of us here do.

barryp··on Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go
I’ve been able to send to gmail and iCloud ok, but outlook/office365/hotmail has been a no-go, even after going though their self-service system to open up your IP address.
barryp··on Pressing YubiKeys
I’m pretty sure every site I’ve setup to do TOTP only allowed one authenticator. I got burned using Google Authenticator when I had to replace my phone, because there was no way to transfer the auth data to a new phone.

Maybe The Google app has changed now, I have no idea. I’ve had much better luck storing TOTP in 1Password and Bitwarden - which allow you to sync across multiple platforms. So now device upgrades are a non-issue.

Most sites give you some static backup codes for TOTP - definitely store those somewhere safe, they can be a lifesaver.

barryp··on Pressing YubiKeys
PayPal? All I've ever seen in there is TOTP and SMS
barryp··on Starlink internet satellites keep emergency workers online amid wildfires
"... between five and 10 minutes to set up and connect ..." I took that to mean unboxing, hooking up cables, etc - not just link establishment
barryp··on Getting the most out of YubiKeys for your business
Oh crap, thanks for the heads up!
barryp··on PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database
It doesn't matter for coding or functionality, but it is nice when you're manually eyeballing the results of 'SELECT * ...' statements or browsing tables with something like Navicat, or looking at schema dumps - to have your fields ordered in some way that makes sense to you, rather than strictly in the order they were created.

Sure, you can list the fields in the order you want in a SELECT statement, but that's tedious - it's handy to have something reasonable in the table definition.

There's a wiki page on the Postgres site:

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Alter_column_position

talking about workarounds and a plan from 2006 on how they might implement that feature.

barryp··on 15 states are trying to make the electoral college obselete
Yes, Colorado gained states, but some other states lost seats. The overall size of the House is unchanged in over a century.
barryp··on A Linguistic Introduction to D3
Nice! Very timely for me too, I was just doing some D3 stuff this morning, and this very clearly explained what's going on under the hood.

I was definitely in the "copy/paste pieces of code from various snippets over at bl.ocks.org, cross my fingers and hope for the best." camp. It makes much more sense now.

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