HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

diarmuidie

72 karma · joined November 22, 2010

http://diarmuid.ie
submissionscomments
diarmuidie··on The 'invisible crew' who have 35 seconds to prevent a Eurovision blunder
Eurovision post videos of the technical blunders that happen during the live shows (some related to set changes) with side-by-side comparisons of what should have happened. An interesting watch! https://youtu.be/KeVaE8ldqfE
diarmuidie··on Ask HN: Why no transflective LCD portables?
Most of Garmin's smart watches use MIP transflective displays but that's slowly being phased out for AMOLED
diarmuidie··on Europe: close to power grid blackout (49,74Hz power line frequency)
There isn't a single grid, but there is a large synchronous grid covering most of continental Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...
diarmuidie··on Teardown: Identifying Apple M1's distinct circuit blocks
The process of removing a chips encapsulation is called Decapping if you're looking for a search term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decapping
diarmuidie··on 'Horrible hybrids': the plastic products that give recyclers nightmares
I wish there was some sort of scoring system for product packaging that would take into account the quantity and environmental impact of the packaging. Like, if the product comes in a small cardboard box it gets a good score, but if that cardboard is lined with a plastic film (effectively making the cardboard non-recyclable) then the score goes way down.

That score could then be used by consumers to make informed decisions or maybe it's used to charge producers to cover the cost of safe disposal of the packaging when it reaches its end of life.

diarmuidie··on In Ireland, a taste of the underworld
More like "Uaimh na gCat" (If my, admittedly, fairly rusty Irish is anything to go by).
diarmuidie··on China Will Resurrect the World's Largest Plane
The AN-225's little brother the AN-124 was once used to fly a diesel locomotive from Canada to Ireland. It worked out cheaper for the train manufacture to pay to have it flown over, and meet the contractural delivery date, rather than shipping it by sea and paying the fine for missing the deadline.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/48073612@N04/5124447894

diarmuidie··on 89, 263, 201, 500, 337, 480
This is similar to the Oak Island treasure pit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Island
diarmuidie··on Resize.ly – Images resized, responsive, and retina ready
I'm working on a PHP based solution for some personal projects ATM.

Feel free to check it out: https://github.com/diarmuidie/ImageRack

The big difference between ImageRack and most others solutions is that you pre-define the available image manipulations templates on the server side (for example a template for thumbnails, large images, iPad sizes etc.). I'm not a fan of letting the client generate multiple versions of an image by changing the URL (i.e. http://resize.ly/450x150/http://resize.ly/img/kittens/kitty-...).

diarmuidie··on Suspended jaccuzzi
I thought the same thing.

It seems like it would have been a better idea to bring the cables/ropes in through the hole at the bottom of the wall, rather than over the top. The lateral compressive load would then have been taken up by the bridge itself, rather than the walls.

diarmuidie··on Danish Startup Solves Roaming Worldwide
One interesting side effect of this capping is that it is cheaper for me to phone a number on my home network while roaming, than it is when I'm in the country on the same network!

Three Ireland Prepay account mobile calls 35c/min, roaming calls 19c/min.

diarmuidie··on U.K. National Grid status
You can see Ireland's real time wind generation here: http://www.eirgrid.com/operations/systemperformancedata/wind...

and total demand is here: http://www.eirgrid.com/operations/systemperformancedata/syst...

diarmuidie··on A Solar Boom So Successful, It's Been Halted
I should point out that it was only for a few hours in the early morning on a windy summers night (low base demand, no AC or heating demand).

On average though 2013 renewables provided ~17% of total demand [http://www.eirgrid.com/media/EirGridAnnualRenewableReport201...].

System Non-Synchronous penetration (SNSP) is a real-time measure of the percentage of generation that comes from non-synchronous sources, such as wind and HDVC interconnector imports relative to the system demand. In the Irish grid this is limited to 50% for stability.

diarmuidie··on A Solar Boom So Successful, It's Been Halted
One of the big problems with PV and wind power is that they don't offer any inertial load on the grid. This means that once the percentage of these sources increase the grid frequency stability decreases.

When using renewables you must still generate a majority of your supply from a big rotating generator. The inertia of the spinning generator keeps the frequency from straying from 50/60hz.

In Ireland they broke a record a few years back for having 50% of the electric generation coming from wind power. This was at the upper limit set by the grid operator (eirgrid) because above this level the frequency of the grid becomes unstable. Even though more wind power was available they didn't add it to the grid.

diarmuidie··on ‘Dutch sandwich’ grows as Google shifts €8.8bn to Bermuda
What Google is doing is not illegal (immoral maybe). They have an obligation to their shareholder to maximise their profits through all legal means. If they were to turn around tomorrow and announce that they will no longer use the "Dutch Sandwich" and profit falls as a result do you think the shareholders would be happy?
diarmuidie··on Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid
I use it to keep incremental backups of my VPS. It lets you use S3 as your backup destination and uses GnuPG to encrypt all files.
diarmuidie··on Microsoft launches an HTML5 version of Cut the Rope
According to the Whois info it is registered to ZeptoLab UK Limited as a Registered Trademark. Not much of a link to Ireland there!
diarmuidie··on Microsoft launches an HTML5 version of Cut the Rope
Anyone know why they are using a .ie (Ireland) domain? Just curious.