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enthdegree

1,185 karma · joined March 9, 2012

meet.hn/city/us-New York

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enthdegree··on Apple iPhone 18 Pro Camera test
The value I see in the iPhone's variable aperture is videography, where to lock the exposure at 1/48s + best ISO setting, previously you'd need a clip-on ND filter for bright lighting conditions.
enthdegree··on Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?
How did you learn to use one?

As someone who has only touched one once, heat guns kind of scare me mostly because the airflow is invisible. I have destroyed things with it and almost burned myself. It's hard for me to gauge if you have too much or too little heat on something. Too far away it's doing nothing and too close you're frying a piece, and there is no indication where on that range you are without some learned intuition.

enthdegree··on Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?
I also recently had to decide what soldering iron to get and I found this video extremely informative https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXGb5q1OTA

I got an SL108 I'm really happy using with my 67W Anker brick (far more convenient than the FX 951 station I had to store + set up every time). I think I could do some precision work with my SL108 but if it became regular or a new project involved it I'd get something smaller, like the TS101 or similar, I guess.

enthdegree··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
>For most of my life, I treated art museums like celebrity scavenger hunts. [...] This ended when I encountered The Garden of Earthly Delights

closed tab.

enthdegree··on Show HN: Nikon F100 Film Camera Repair Notes
Sadly it seems a lot of Nikon lenses were not designed with reducing focus shift as a priority. That completely wrecks them near their minimum focus distance on film bodies. Phase-detect AF only sees light coming from the f/5.6 direction so AF will systematically miss its target at any aperture with a different focal plane. There is no live view on film, obviously, so no on-instrument way to correct it.

I am going through this right now... I really wanted an 85mm 1.4G but according to reviews it will put focus completely behind the subject from f/1.8-f/5.6 when closer than head+torso distance. In headshots if you target the eyes it will focus somewhere on the temples. I have no idea if it really matters in real life. So I am stuck with the 1.8 G.

Edit: A focus screen with some kind of prism mechanism would let you manually focus, at least, by holding down DOF preview. Richard Haw describes cutting down and shimming off-body focus screens so it's possible. Actually now that I look it up, whoa, an off-the-shelf one exists on aliexpress ("Dual 45 degree Split Image Focus Focusing Screen for Nikon D1 D1H D1X F100 PR129")

enthdegree··on Dostoyevsky isn't difficult
From the circles I am exposed to Pevear and Volokhonsky's translations are not seen as the most natural ones (although they are the only ones I have read because of the cool abstract paperback covers). I have heard they miss anecdotes and humor in favor of word accuracy. Characters are always "twisting their mouth" and similar. I'm looking forward to re-reading Demons in some other translation. He might have been well served by Garnett.
enthdegree··on The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader
I love my X3. I glued its magnetic folio to the back of my Apple Wallet. It turned out perfectly, for me. Pictures below. I've read The Odyssey and several other shorter books on it and have yet to recharge it.

- https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFaPCStWYAAOj6f?format=jpg&name=...

- https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFaPCO8WIAASMEn?format=jpg&name=...

- https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFaPCPEXgAE3O4z?format=jpg&name=...

enthdegree··on A website that lists websites to submit your website to
"X are Y but Z is real." Closed tab.
enthdegree··on Agentic Mfw
I'm fatigued by this hyperbole and profanity, especially when written by an LLM. There is too much of this. Human-written or not it makes it very difficult for me to engage with. The sentiment is bad. Is building this better than building nothing?

Just because this is how things are does not it's how they should be. I'm very tired.

enthdegree··on Photo GIMP – A Patch for GIMP 3 for Photoshop Users
Your point number 3 is very irritating to read.
enthdegree··on Bliss (Photograph)
Does anyone have any idea what RZ67 lens was used? People have found the exact hill and from this one might be able to figure out from what perspective it was captured, thus which focal length it was shot at. I haven't found anyone who has done this, only vague, unconvincing speculation. Maybe confounders like fact that it is now covered by a vineyard and erosion long since changed the shape of the hillsides makes this impossible.
enthdegree··on People Hate AI Art
People with low social literacy need to hear more that they have low social literacy. Bad behavior is objectively bad, and just because some people have exuses doesn't make their behavior less bad.
enthdegree··on I have officially retired from Emacs
They're coming for that stuff next
enthdegree··on SFO Quiet Airport (2025)
No materials on the escalator
enthdegree··on Daft Punk Easter Egg in the BPM Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?
Good Luck Babe by Chappell Roan has a chorus that is 1 bpm slower than the verse!
enthdegree··on Let's put Tailscale on a jailbroken Kindle
The details in this comment are messed up and shouldn't be taken as authoritative.

- Getting the device's BL1/BROM into download mode (where it waits for an upload of a Preloader/BL2 from outside), for these devices itself does not involve exploits. Kamakiri is an exploit in the upload process that gives an execution point at that stage.

- The BROM on Kobos (at least the old ones, P365's) don't have security enabled as far as I know. (Unless somehow they are lying to us when we ask, which there is no evidence of). They only do some integrity checks (header magic #s, checksums).

- Security on Kobos happens down the chain, starting at the Little Kernel apparently jumped to from the Preloader. I am still learning about the Clara BW's boot process.

enthdegree··on Let's put Tailscale on a jailbroken Kindle
mtkclient does not seem to correctly interpret the usb output of the device past some part of the early boot process. Really, any of those messages formatted by mtkclient are unfaithful to the intended meaning. So yes maybe it is "just a checksum step" or maybe something else entirely. Last year I collected some UART logs on the device during bootup in a zip here:

https://github.com/bkerler/mtkclient/issues/1289

enthdegree··on Let's put Tailscale on a jailbroken Kindle
As far as I know, yes, it's possible. No SELinux. Kernel is a branch from 4.9.something pretty far off mainline with a few proprietary binary blob modules. As far as I know the real impediment here is lack of demand.
enthdegree··on Let's put Tailscale on a jailbroken Kindle
The latest Kobos use MediaTek SoCs with locked bootloaders. The Kobo Clara BW's MT8113, for example. As far as I know, one of the early bootloaders it, BL1, refuses to execute the next bootloader (BL2) unless its signature is valid. We can get the device into a mode where BL1 waits for upload of a BL2 via USB using an exploit called Kamakiri, but in public there is neither an exploit to get BL1 to boot an arbitrary BL2, nor an authorized BL2 image to upload. See here: https://github.com/bkerler/mtkclient/issues/1332

Kobo devices have root exposed but don't let users boot their own kernels (and the kernel they ship was not compiled with kexec either).

I really don't know the reason so many devices these days don't have an unlock method. It seems predatory. Who knows where in the chain this happens... maybe it's Kobo, or maybe MediaTek won't sell you their SoCs for mass-market devices unless you lock them.

enthdegree··on Nook Browser
Another thing called nook? Another browser? Bad, presumptuous name. How many months will this project last?
enthdegree··on Cable bacteria are living batteries
>“What is this?” I asked. “It looks like hair.” Marshall chuckled. “That’s them — the cable bacteria,” he said. “If you watch closely, you’ll see them twitching.” I stared harder. The filaments shifted.

This schmaltzy student-teacher roleplay immersion-journalism feels false and infantilizing to me. It makes me mistrustful of the text and I avoid reading essays written like it. The facts are embedded in an artificial adventure narrative as one feeds a dog a pill by hiding it in peanut butter. Why? Would the non-sensationalized, plainly framed information content be too un-stimulating for readers? Are false narratives hidden inside?

>Obama chuckled. "You mean the Chaos Emeralds?"

enthdegree··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
Any pointers?
enthdegree··on On Not Carrying a Camera – Cultivating memories instead of snapshots
I like seeing pictures taken by my friends. I like discussing those pictures with them. Conversely I also like creating and curating my own pictures to share with like-minded friends. It is prosocial all around.

The article is appalling. To me it more effectively conveys his character than his ideas. Maybe for some people it really is hard to find a balance.

enthdegree··on Librarians are dangerous
Reminds me of the old The Oatmeal infographics. Very epic mustache
enthdegree··on An Introduction to Stochastic Calculus (2022)
Great post, "Wiener" is misspelled a few times.
enthdegree··on What is GNU Radio?
I would love to be able to use GNURadio for something, I've just never found flow diagrams to be more expressive than writing procedural instructions over whatever SDR API. GNURadio's flow diagrams introduce a lot of hidden complexity that is difficult to observe and understand. For example, every arrow you draw represents a buffer and so for all but the simplest graphs this will quickly lead to difficult-to-interrogate sample over/underruns. There are workarounds for fine grained control over these buffers but they cannot be called simple (like message passing via tagged samples and flow control blocks).
enthdegree··on Palma 2
They won't do anything. Every time this comes up I remember this shocking email they sent: https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/hsn7kx/onyx_usin...
enthdegree··on Framework's first desktop is a strange–but unique–mini ITX gaming PC
In the title, how does "unique" contradict "strange?"
enthdegree··on Show HN: Emacs on a Kobo Clara BW ebook reader
Yes it’s running in a terminal. GUI emacs would be nice because it can show images and rich text. People here have probably read things like this https://blog.aaronbieber.com/2016/12/29/don-t-use-terminal-e... (though the tramp criticism doesn’t apply here)

It would require further compiling an X server or Wayland, the Lucid GUI toolkit, freetype and fontconfig, a bunch of image libraries and maybe more stuff I don’t know about, plus of course all their dependencies.

It would likely take some effort to get X or Wayland to refresh the screen responsively, possibly using xdamage or Wayland protocol stuff to intelligently ask fbink to do limited refreshes.

The keyboard and touchscreen might be configurable but I haven’t done it. If it turns out to not work out of the box another option besides fighting drivers would be to be translate the event devices in /dev/input into virtual devices like efbpad kbreader does.

GUI emacs seems doable and requires, in my estimation, about “this project” again more work. The issues with the terminal version should probably be resolved before continuing. I’m unsure how much less responsive it will be than the terminal one.

enthdegree··on My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner
Very interesting. What camera/lens/lightbox did you use and around what DPI you achieve?
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