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jdboyd

1,052 karma · joined July 28, 2010

http://blog.jdboyd.net/

jdboyd@boydtechnicalsolutions.com for professional inquiries.

jdboyd@jdboyd.net to find me more broadly.

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jdboyd··on StreetComplete: Fixing OpenStreetMap, one tiny quest at a time
I think adding things, instead of updating existing things with missing data is where you get into needing a more serious app. I keep Vespucci for when I want to initiate an edit, and StreetComplete for fun filling in missing information tasks.
jdboyd··on It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
> I am generally not in favor of adding regulation, but this is a place where I would support it. >Anything that you BUY needs to be your property.

This could also be fixed by removing regulation.

jdboyd··on President pardons 9 for Clean Air violations for 'fixing their car'
I thought that most of them were in for selling/commercially installing defeat devices so that others could roll coal or do other things with defeated pollution controls. I assume that would likely be easier to identify than just hoping to someday catching them rolling coal would be.
jdboyd··on How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps
In my part of small city east coast USA it is allowed except in the downtown business district (where it is syill mostly ignored.

On the one hand, not everyone wants to be required to have their 4yo ride on the road with no bike lane, but on the other hand, I hate having preteens on extra.heavy looking bikes below out of the way at me why they drive at nearly car speeds on the sidewalk.

Of course we wouldn't really have to ban bikes on sidewalks to deal with those preteens as preteens aren't allowed on electric bikes or electric scooters anyway in this state. And electric scooters aren't allowed on the sidewalk or road here.

jdboyd··on DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
I would prefer a coding agent to be somewhat independent of the model provider. Providers are trading off on quality, features, and price so frequently, and I don't want to keep changing my agent every time.

I am looking forward to things slowing down and stabilizing. I'm not saying that should happen today, just I am looking forward to it.

jdboyd··on Haiku
It appears to be usable for daily use for some people, in that enough of a web browser works that you could mostly get by. It would be hard to say it is really practical, nor that it has a convincing path to being practical in the way that say ReactOS does.
jdboyd··on Apple Cuts More Mac Studio and Mac Mini RAM Options as Memory Shortage Worsens
Maybe for the M6 or M7 generation that might happen?
jdboyd··on Work with the garage door up (2024)
Mastodon and blog both sound good to me. For some, they could alternatively use twitch or youtube.
jdboyd··on All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027
I certainly understand the value of replaceable batteries. OTOH, I'm concerned about what this will mean for how many common upper end phones are IP67 submersion rated. I don't want that to go back to being a feature only of clunky super expensive phones, and I would rather have IP67 over a replaceable battery.

Now, if I'm lucky, they will mandate both a replaceable battery and that the phones be ip55 or better, after battery replacement.

jdboyd··on Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
DO doesn't do high availability droplets, and their migration policy is will try, if we detect poor health of server before it fails.

If someone starts thinking about redundancy and load balancers than DO's solution is rent a second similar sized droplet, and then add their load balancing service. If you do those things with Hetzner instead, you would still be spending less than you did with Digital Ocean.

Personally, what is keeping me on DO is that no single droplet I have is large enough to justify moving on its own, and I'm not prepared to deal with moving everything.

jdboyd··on DaVinci Resolve – Photo
Do you have a link to learn more about that history?
jdboyd··on DaVinci Resolve – Photo
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has loading images into Resolve before for this very purpose, so I'm interested in trying this at some point.

There is a bunch of other stuff I think is interesting in this release's marketting as well. For instance. OGraf, a new EBU standard for HTML in motion graphics systems, as well as Lottie animation support.

The AI blemish remover looks interesting. The AI content search looks interesting. AI Slate ID looks interesting, although I've never actually used a slate. I'm less thrilled to see an AI speech generator though.

There is now Vertical Resolution support. Not something I have particularly wanted to do, but I can see it being useful to a lot of people. Also, the new Picture in Picture tool looks like it might be a time saver, as someone who does a lot of people talking next to slides.

jdboyd··on Just a Moment
Hey, that's my essay. Never had someone submit anything I wrote to HN before.
jdboyd··on Zed, A sans for the needs of 21st century (2024)
This looks like a cool typeface in how much it can vary itself, but the price feels extremely expensive, and I don't like having to keep track of which of my library of typefaces are allowed to be used on which projects based on which license I bothered to buy for that typeface. Saying that I want to load the font onto a video server raises the price for a single variant to $1500ish, and there is no clarity on what license you need for web videos. Does that count as a movie license, or a TV license, or a web site license?
jdboyd··on Automatically generate all 3D print files for organizing a drawer
This keeps deciding that I am done describing my drawer before I can mention a single thing that should be stored in the drawer. I basically get paste the dimension and it decides that I hit Generate already.

Now I'm going to try typing my command in a different window and then pasting it in all at once. That worked, but now it isn't at all obvious how my items are supposed to go in the boxes generated, nor how they are to fit into the space.

jdboyd··on LibreOffice Writer now supports Markdown
I don't know about converting PowerPoint and Excel to Markdown, but for Word, I'd say open the file in LibreOffice Writer 26.2, and save as Markdown.

Alternatively, use pandoc, and save the command in a .sh or .ps1 to remember.

jdboyd··on LibreOffice Writer now supports Markdown
Open .docx file, save as Markdown to nicely preserve things like headings, bold, etc. I moderately frequently have reason to want to go .docx to .md because I have a lot of ediing/rewriting to do and I'd rather work in Emacs than LibreOffice Writer.
jdboyd··on Restoring a Sun SPARCstation IPX part 1: PSU and NVRAM (2020)
If you get a root shell once, why not change the root password then?
jdboyd··on Interview with Øyvind Kolås, GIMP developer (2017)
If it started faster, you still probably would find it a bit unwieldy for crop scale and simple color changes. I wish it did those things better, but on the other hand it seems like it would be appropriate to have a simpler program for quick tasks as well.

And I say this as somebody who rather likes the gimp.

jdboyd··on Long Range E-Bike (2021)
In my city, travel habits and condition, I find I wish for more torque and lower speed. Every place I want to go has significant hills that the motor can't handle, and easing climbing hills is the main reason I want an ebike. My ebike's minimum speed for the motor is 15kph, which is ok by myself, but my family likes to go slower, so I have to go fully manual with them. When I look at ebike ads it feels like nobody else cares about these two areas of performance. When I talk to local ebike shops they are unprepared to talk about torque and minimum speed.
jdboyd··on Members-only Philly cop bar has been linked to two DUIs and a third crash
https://archive.is/0sGU9
jdboyd··on Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook
For those unclear on what the large pile of .doc and .pdf files are, it appears to be some revision of the design documents for "NT OS/2", which then turned into just NT. This appears to be the Smithsonian description of their physical copy: https://www.si.edu/object/microsoft-windows-nt-os2-design-wo...
jdboyd··on Do not apologize for replying late to my email
I think that for many cases that should be modified from 24 hours to by the end of the next business day. I feel no obligation to reply on a Sunday to someone who emails me on Saturday or late Friday. They can wait until Monday.
jdboyd··on Exploring a Modern SMTPE 2110 Broadcast Truck
I would argue that it is heavily used in professional AV, but not as much in high-end installations and usually not in broadcast setups.
jdboyd··on Exploring a Modern SMTPE 2110 Broadcast Truck
Just to add options, there is also the relatively new OpenMediaTransport ( https://www.openmediatransport.org/ ) that aims to be a licensing free, open alternative to NDI. At the moment, there are a number of programs supporting it, but sadly not many cameras, stand alone converters, nor audio gear. If line to see that change.
jdboyd··on Show HN: Micropolis/SimCity Clone in Emacs Lisp
There is a screenshot in the README, and according to the github timestamp, the project hasn't been changed since you write this to add such a screen shot.

Search for the section labeled: Visual Demo

jdboyd··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)
Location: Lancaster, PA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Embedded development, Full Stack RTOS, C++, Python, GoLang, Swift, Kotlin Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdboyd/ Email: jdboyd@boydtechnicalsolutions.com

Versatile developer with 20+ years of experience, specializing in bringing products from concept to market quickly with a focus on generating revenue and demonstrating value. Whether modernizing legacy systems or building new solutions, I create maintainable code that grows with your business. Core expertise: Embedded Development: Linux, RTOS, and bare metal systems using C, C++, and MicroPython Network Engineering: Distributed systems, protocol design, and networked applications Backend Development: Python/Django and Go microservices Mobile Development: Native iOS and Android applications DevOps & Cloud: AWS, DigitalOcean, Docker, and Ansible deployments Media Systems: Audio/video processing and streaming solutions Available for part-time or full-time contracts, I'm committed to building lasting partnerships through reliable delivery and clear communication. Looking to bring your product vision to life or need help with an existing system? Let's discuss how I can help drive your project forward.

jdboyd··on Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
I think Windows 11 would have had much more consumer buy-in in the early days if they would have at least extended non-OEM support back to the Skylake generation, if not further, which it looks like it would have be easy to do, since it ran just fine on much older machines. I didn't object to them making TPM 2.0 mandatory for new OEM builds, just to the making it mandatory for people wanting to upgrade to it.

Of course, then the ads and other broken-ness got a lot worse. But people might put up with that more if they had upgraded to Windows 11 years ago instead of just looking at doing it now that Windows 10 support has ended.

jdboyd··on Running the Stupid Cricut Software on Linux
I strongly recommend Cameo machines from Silhouette. I don't know if their software runs in Wine on Linux, but they aren't actively hostile to 3rd party software. I usually use the Inkscape-Silhouette extension, but there are others that appear more polished, so I don't know why I don't explore more, but the point is that there are more options on both Linux and other platforms.

I've used mine for vinyl lettering and decals, making stencils from old transparency sheets, and paper craft stuff. Cameo's can also double as pen plotters, for people who want to try getting into that cheaply. For pen plotter use, I don't think there is much difference between the oldest and newest Cameo, except the option to hold 2 pens at once, so get a cheap used one for $50. For actually cutting things, the autoset blade is a nice option that means a used one might be closer to $100.

jdboyd··on Ubuntu Pro subscription – should you pay to use Linux?
It looks like the desktop/workstation price is $25/yr, which seems pretty reasonable. For personal users, it is free for 5 concurrent machines. Unfortunately the per server price is $500/yr, which maybe competitive with some of the competition, but still seems steep to me. But then, while I run Ubuntu VMs or containers, I'm not really using it for bare metal servers any more.

For some comparisons, Proxmox is €370/yr/socket. RHEL Workstation is $196.90/yr, while server is $383.90/yr, and Oracle Linux is reportedly $1,199/socketpair/yr.

Given the free distro, subscription support model that tends to prevail, a pay once price with either no free, or on top of the free option might be a hard sell.

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