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damieng

128 karma · joined May 29, 2014

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damieng··on Sinclair Spectrum Designer Rick Dickinson Has Died
They look nice but they're the same as on the + and the toastrack 128K and incredibly awful to type on - keys rub against each other and don't depress evenly.
damieng··on Sinclair Spectrum Designer Rick Dickinson Has Died
Did you have a joystick or RAM expansion on the back by any chance?

Basically the edge connector was not sufficiently protected and a loose connection could fry the ULA or other components quite easily.

damieng··on Code together in real time with Teletype for Atom
There's been a massive amount of performance work in the last year. Definitely give it another try :) (disclaimer, on the Atom team)
damieng··on Hack – A typeface designed for source code
A lot of fonts feel like this. It's only once you set a whole page set in them it they start to look different especially when you do side-by-side comparisons.

Programmer fonts are even more samey as they are used at such small sizes comparatively and of course have the additional constraint of being monospaced (most of the time).

Personally with the amount of code I stare at each day even an oddly placed pixel can be annoying.

damieng··on Windows for Linux Nerds
You get much more than that - you are installing native binaries direct from apt-get.

No waiting for ports, patches, recompilation or people trying to get the latest version working on cygwin.

It pulls binaries direct from Ubuntu as if you were on a Linux box and just runs them.

damieng··on Introducing Atom-IDE
And thanks to the way the extension system works in Atom you can keep your editor that way. These packages are entirely optional.

The only changes made to Atom at all to facilitate this were better built-in watching of files in Atom (benefits all packages and should improve things like the tree view when it switches over) and an async shutdown mechanism for packages.

damieng··on Introducing Atom-IDE
The servers run entirely locally on your machine.
damieng··on Git and GitHub Integration Comes to Atom
The snapshot feature introduced recently makes a big difference to app start-up time.
damieng··on Git and GitHub Integration Comes to Atom
Yeah, he's now a developer on Atom and worked on the GitHub package...
damieng··on AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store
Just issuing a GET doesn't cause a somebody to be charged.

It's a process involving delivering specific tracking cookie along with the ad that should you end up clicking through to the intended destination gets tracked through either more cookies or tags in the URL.

damieng··on Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case
Surprised so much confusion around this.

You log into http://alexa.amazon.com/spa/index.html#cards and you see all sorts of queries Alexa/Echo heard from you but didn't understand complete with the audio snippet.

If Amazon gave them the account details they just need to log-in to hear them.

damieng··on Making an MSX font
Oops, now your comment makes total sense including the CP437 remark, sorry!

Glad you enjoy Envy Code R :)

damieng··on Making an MSX font
They're really not - the IBM PC set is double-pixel wide and with quite different choices for many of the letters because the MSX is 5x7 while IBM PC used 8x14 (EGA) or 8x16 (VGA).

It is far more likely they took inspiration from the Apple ][ font and tried to add serifs in the limited space.

CP437 is the codepage - chars outside the ASCII range of 0-127. The font you are thinking of is probably the BIOS font from either the IBM EGA or VGA adapter.

damieng··on RoslynLinqRewrite – Compiles C# by rewriting and optimising LINQ expressions
Worth bearing in mind that this only helps if you are using LINQ against in-memory objects (i.e. LINQ to Objects). Depending on how this detects IQueryable providers it will either skip it, break it or worse of all silently 'work' but pull all the remote data into memory for evaluation. I'm hoping it's skip.
damieng··on Feature Request: Manual Refresh of external calendar feeds
I've lost form content so many times from backspace going back a page (thumb just glances the touchpad to change focus from editable control).

Backspace isn't a navigation function. It's to delete the last character. We have navigation keys they're called cursors.

Glad to see the back of backspace.

damieng··on Ask HN: Have any of you switched to Bash on Windows?
It's a Linux subsystem with apt-get access to Ubuntu packages.

# apt-get install fish

# fish

Welcome to fish, the friendly interactive shell Type help for instructions on how to use fish

There you go :)

damieng··on Ask HN: Have any of you switched to Bash on Windows?
You can apt-get anything you find on Ubuntu.

There is no need to run setup.exe each time and hope somebody ported it to Cygwin.

damieng··on LibriVox: free public domain audiobooks
Heads up: If you buy the US version you're getting Jim Dale. A totally different experience.
damieng··on What the new video compression strategy from Netflix means for Apple and Amazon
"To do that, Netflix will transcode every one of their videos a bazillion times at different resolutions and at different bitrates, finally selecting the smallest one for a particular title that doesn’t suck visually."
damieng··on What the new video compression strategy from Netflix means for Apple and Amazon
Author seems to think that they'll choose one file as the winner - that's not the case. Each video needs to be available not just in a few bitrates but also in different resolutions, codecs and profiles for broad compatibility with the various player apps many of which aren't updated any more.

While I haven't keep that abreast of video encoding tech I'm surprised people are saying animated shows will take less bandwidth. Typically video codecs use DCTs which are great at roughly approximating complex patterns but do a bad job at solid blocks of color and contrast. The result is ugly artifact especially on the edges. Perhaps things have greatly improved with h.264

damieng··on The fall of Jersey: how a tax haven goes bust
Guernsey and Jersey are independent countries that have an agreement with the crown of England that has been in place for hundreds of years. They are under no obligation to placate your current government or adhere to their wishes. They have their own elected governments that suits them better.

Yes they get some benefits from that agreement such as military protection which didn't help them much during WWII where they became occupied by Germans.

damieng··on Apple’s New San Francisco Fonts
The language is elegant, lets you perform tweaks down to an individual level and works across many platforms and can be used in any font.

It's totally possible to create a safe virtual machine for specific uses. There have been many attack vectors for fonts over the years due to the complexity in parsing them. I do not recall any of them being due to the hinting language.

The Mac one is hard coded for a single OS and font combination and a specific size down in the operating system.

I disagree that the later is less of a hack.

damieng··on Apple’s New San Francisco Fonts
Font hinting lets you move points around based on sizes, dpi and rendering modes using a stack-based bytecode language.

Sure the primary use case for many years was to cope with low-resolution but it can be used in the way the poster above described. In fact you can use it in the other direction too so that larger sizes take on more specific characteristics instead of having two fonts and a hack that switches at 20pt like they're doing with San Francisco.

Source: Have actually TrueType hinted fonts.

damieng··on Netflix responds to Verizon
They also offer free hardware that caches and serves up the most popular content automagically.

[)amien

damieng··on Typography in 8 bits: System fonts (2011)
It is an interesting font although very different from the Sinclair Spectrum font. (I added a bunch of those to Cathode)
damieng··on Typography in 8 bits: System fonts (2011)
They modified the upper case characters to shave 1 pixel off the height tho - presumably to fit it in an 8x8.
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