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grvbck

360 karma · joined June 26, 2024

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grvbck··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
> even the evolution of macos and IOS.

ESPECIALLY the evolution of macos and ios.

grvbck··on Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back
And language packs for 30 languages one would never use!
grvbck··on A 12-year sequence of telescope images of a star and four planets orbiting
> B. You could have multiple panels operate as a swarm.

Is that level of precision even remotely achievable with today's technology?

My understanding is that orbital insertion accuracy is in the ±10-50 meters range, with the most advanced formation flying satellite swarms hitting 10 cm to 1 m precision between satellites with the help of optical navigation.

But the precision between the panels on a telescope like JWST is in the sub-mm range, no?

Also, I'd assume stuff like orbital decay, atmospheric drag, gravitational perturbations, and solar radiation pressure would make it difficult to maintain precision over time.

I'm sure/hopeful there's some people here at HN working on stuff like this, please fill in and correct me!

grvbck··on Barcodes are about to go extinct
Useful, but "your phone" will probably not the be the one telling you that. You'll have to use your supermarket app, and better be sure it will do all it can to track and extract every last bit of information about you and the contents of your fridge.

You're only buying eggs every second week? We can't have that, let's present you with a recipe that uses eggs. You still have those cookies you bought four days ago? Let's give you a coupon for milk.

And there will be a nice recipe or a coupon or a Very Limited Exclusive Offer you'll need to send to a friend, so now the app need access to your contacts, and why not sync that info with Meta, and oh look at that, we have a map of all our customers and their spending habits and geographical location and political orientation.

grvbck··on Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock
> Written on 11th April

> I had hoped we could do a "test" by letting the clock chime thirteen

What in the Orwell

grvbck··on Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds
Does the adrenal gland count?
grvbck··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
I'd take the widget! For me typing "calc" finds the "com.apple.calculator" folder. If I continue to "calcu" etc, it suggests "com.apple.ncplugin.calculator" instead. Brilliant intelligence right there.
grvbck··on LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'
As far as I know, watermarks never took off because the technical complexity and lack of standardization. Nielsen researched and developed ACR technology but it never required watermarks.

When Nielsen first started collecting data (1950s), they handed out diaries to a group of around 5 000 selected households. Nielsen would then collect these diaries and extrapolate viewing patterns across the entire population.

After that came phone surveys. Next step (1980s) was the "people meter", a small box attached to the TV that could automatically detect which channel was tuned and which household members were in the room.

In the 1990s the set-top box made all of that redundant as the cable and satellite providers could directly see which channel every single box was tuned to at all times.

grvbck··on iPhone Duo
3G also got gps and the app store. I'd say that was a pretty significant upgrade.

MacBook Air -> MacBook Air 2: unibody aluminum construction replaced plastic, ssd option introduced.

iPad -> iPad 2: cut thickness and weight by 30 %. A4 -> A5 doubled performance. Dramatically better screen. Introduced the magnetic case ecosystem.

iBook G3 -> G3 dual usb: from colorful clamshell/toilet seat design to sleek laptop. 30 % lighter, half the volume, twice as durable, 2-3x the performance.

And… Apple I -> Apple II? Apple I was a motherboard, the II was a complete computer.

grvbck··on iPhone Duo
Yes, but 1:√2 keeps the ratio even when you rotate the screen vertically. A folded 1:1 screen becomes 2:1 when "unfolded" and the area doubles, so you can go from showing one 1:1 window to two 1:1 windows side by side. But when rotated to a vertical orientation, you can't just scale that 1:1 window to double its size. With 1:√2 you can.
grvbck··on AirPods 5
The touch bar was not a bad invention. Apple just neglected it and never gave it the software support it deserved. With some proper development it could have been great.
grvbck··on Glacier Mice
Thanks to your comment TIL that snow algae is a thing

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

grvbck··on China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes
No, I tried to be pretty clear that "at least one side got caught" is not always better than "nobody got caught" if corruption dictates who gets caught.
grvbck··on China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes
I understand that perspective to some degree, but imagine a hypothetical country with say, two parties in power, where prosecutors only crack down on white collar criminals if they are supporters of one party and not the other. We would call that system corrupt, and probably not celebrate that at least some of the criminals face justice.

Also, from a practical standpoint, charging some and not others is not necessarily better if the selection is made politically. That moves the needle from "at least something got done" to "law is just a tool of oppression".

grvbck··on OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
Wireless Router or Wireless Router Technology is the common interpretation, but to my knowledge, Linksys has never officially confirmed this.
grvbck··on The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
Sure, a common use of bread, potatoes, cabbage/other vegetables, hearty meat dishes etc but the Polish kitchen is closer to Ukrainian/Russian in technique/ingredients.

Barszcz, pierogi, fermented everything, pickles, sour rye, and many dishes built around wheat/rye, mushrooms, dairy, and Eastern-style fillings are much more like Ukrainian/Belarusian/Russian food.

The biggest German influences are probably the sausages and the beer culture.

grvbck··on Commodore Releases Flip Phone
I really want to like this, but does it bring anything new to the table? I see the same low-effort buzzwords I've seen on other "dumb" phones.

And the design…it looks like a Motorola.

grvbck··on sRGB profile comparison
It is a rabbit hole. I just checked the latest release of GiMP (3.2.4). The "GiMP built-in sRGB" profile is supposed to be a functional match to the ArgyllCMS sRGB color space – the true sRGB profile according to the addendum in the above profile comparison.

But if I embed it in a photo and then open the photo in GraphicConverter, it shows up as "sRGB IEC61966-2.1", which to my understanding is identical to Apple’s sRGB Color Space Profile.icm.

But that's an sRGB v2 profile. Should I download and use a v4 profile instead? Or download the ArgyllCMS sRGB.icm [1] and convert all photos to it? Or just select the Apple default sRGB profile everywhere?

I'm not a pro and don't have a calibrated display, but it annoys me when photos I upload online look vastly different in my browser than they look in my editing software on the same display.

[1] https://argyllcms.com/icclibsrc.html

grvbck··on The Mushroom That Makes People Have the Exact Same Hallucination
I'd bet my money on no. To my understanding, those hallucinations are basically brain-level disturbances in perception, where the brain does its best to fill in ambiguous activity with known objects. So I guess if you've never seen hats (or men), your brain would just interpret the signal as something different.

Extreme tangent but interesting (to me): people in different cultures experience voice hallucinations differently. In the west, "hearing voices" is often frightening because the voices are hostile. In other cultures, the voices are friendly!

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/07/voices-culture-luh...

grvbck··on 1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)
> This masterpiece by an unknown artist

Not unknown. It is signed "G. Clement", for Gerald Clement. The title is "Lesson 3d" because it actually is the third lesson in a tutorial for MacGrid, a software developed by Clement that teached people how to draw in MacPaint.

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macgrid

grvbck··on You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
> You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts.

Continues to tell us how he did listen to the advice because the editor actually had a point that made the story better, got the book published and won him an award.

grvbck··on The paper computer
On one of my first qualified jobs, my manager (a lovely older lady) did exactly this. All incoming emails were printed and put into a binder. Then she would go home, write an answer with a pen on the back side of every single one, and on the next day write a new email to the recipient. 10-15 % of all emails she sent this way would bounce because she had written the address incorrectly.

When I showed her the reply button in Eudora (this was in 2001), she was so happy that she bought me a cake.

She struggled with IT but was tack sharp otherwise. So far she's the only boss I've ever really liked.

grvbck··on Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs
Broken calculator or am I missing something here?

  Macbook Air M2  8GB   12h/day -> $647/month

  Mac Mini M4     32GB  12h/day -> $290/month
I mean, I'd be happy to buy a few used M2 Airs with minimal specs and start printing money but…
grvbck··on Filing the corners off my MacBooks
Not strictly DIY because a professional anodizing workshop did the actual anodizing, but cool results nevertheless:

https://lowendmac.com/2024/ryan-andersons-colorized-anodized...

grvbck··on You can't trust macOS Privacy and Security settings
That is really poorly worded by Apple, because if I understand it correctly, the "Files & Folders" list is just a list of apps that have requested Full Disk Access/FDA (or other locations).

It's really confusing that some of those settings can be toggled on/off, while the Full Disk Access is greyed out and can only be toggled under "Privacy & Security".

To add to the confusion, toggling FDA off just protects a few selected folders that Apple decided are extra sensitive, like:

  Messages                     ~/Library/Messages
  Safari browsing history      ~/Library/Safari
  Cookies                      ~/Library/Cookies
  Identity services            ~/Library/IdentityServices
  Spotlight data               ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight
  Phone call history           ~/Library/Application Support/CallHistoryDB
  Facetime data                ~/Library/Application Support/Facetime
  TCC database                 ~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.TCC.db
"Normal" files and folders on your disk (including Desktop, Documents, Downloads, network volumes, and removable volumes) can always be accessed (even with FDA permission revoked!) after a simple prompt. [1]

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/security/controlling-app-acc...

grvbck··on Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones
Won't those cut right through the ANC just by volume alone? A domestic fire alarm is 85–120 dB, I don't think my airpods can mute that.

And of course there will always be fringe cases. What if I go to sleep with regular foam earplugs, what if I take a sleeping pill etc. Or what if the warning sound can't be engineered to fit a ANC friendly frequency, like somebody screaming, a car tire screech behind me and so on.

grvbck··on Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones
> imagine if you were at the grocery store, blocking the isle and someone lightly chimed a bell at you instead of just saying "excuse me"

Greetings from Sweden, where some people will verbally announce "honk honk" (tuut tuut) while avoiding eye contact – then bump into your leg with their grocery cart.

grvbck··on Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones
I don't know… If I'm sitting at home or at a cafe working, I want my headphones to block all bicycle bells and ambulances on the street. Those in traffic could perhaps just turn their ANC off?
grvbck··on Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones
For anyone that wants to actually hear the bell before reading all the marketing material:

Bell sound starts at 2:09 in the video.

grvbck··on Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps
> Things leave your field a view much faster than anticipated.

Not sure about that. NASA has been using Kineto Tracking Mounts and ROTI (radar-assisted and optical tracking) since 1981. Those systems were developed for the Columbia launch. I find it hard to believe that today's computer-guided cameras would let anything slip out of frame unintentionally.

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