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kbouck

525 karma · joined March 13, 2012

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kbouck··on WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do
i've used a treedix tester like this. the edition with many led lights, not the one with a screen.

wiggle the cables around to see if and when any of the lights flicker, indicating a bad or broken connection. i've found a few bad cables that would intermittently fail.

kbouck··on Termixer (TUI DJ Mixer)
some controls lend themselves well to a TUI, others not so much. buttons and pads: no problem. knobs and faders: passable but compromised. jog wheel for scratching: pretty much needs to be controller/midi.

No reason this project couldn't add midi controller support directly to the backend (not via TUI!).

kbouck··on Termixer (TUI DJ Mixer)
the constraints of a TUI force you to be creative (in a good way) how to represent/encode information to the user.

In a DJ TUI, how to represent the track waveform? Encoding waveform amplitude in ascii blocks or dots is a pretty low fidelity representation. Instead, you can encode waveform amplitude in single row of blocks with 256 color/intensity averaging the backing sample peaks.

And's if you ever do stems separation you have 4 such rows for each track - efficient and dense!

As the track is playing, or user is zooming or jogging, this representation would give more of the feel that the playhead is moving through the track smoothly.

kbouck··on Oomwoo, an open-source robot vacuum you build yourself
my interest in this would be to customize the cleaning plan/logic... especially regarding traversing difficult carpets edges (which my roborock struggles with)

maybe something like:

  - this specific part of the carpet is the best place to enter onto it
  - once successfully on a carpet, stay on it until done cleaning it
kbouck··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
if you have all of that info, could you then automate the mix transitions by sending MIDI commands back in? would be fun to play a playlist or radio but where the track transitions are automated, phrase-matched and non-trivial (perhaps lasting for a number of phrases)
kbouck··on A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth
Clever name that changes depending on where you put the space
kbouck··on Show HN: Stash – Sync Markdown Files with Apple Notes via CLI
on my iphone the readme ascii art title gets truncated to just "STASI" :-)

been looking for something like this! will definitely check it out.

kbouck··on Show HN: Wario Synth – Turn any song into Game Boy version
A few fun ones:

Walk this way: https://www.wario.style/s/Eg9zi56k

Live and let die: https://www.wario.style/s/8qt4OfdS

Ramblin Man: https://www.wario.style/s/wSd51DBA

Smells like teen spirit: https://www.wario.style/s/CQq6Dc6f

Paranoid: https://www.wario.style/s/202Hs3lV

and of course...

Stairway to heaven: https://www.wario.style/s/SNPSmI8u

kbouck··on Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?
That was my experience too. The experience with powerline ethernet adapters was unbearable on a daily basis.

We had an unused coax (which we disconnected from the outside world) and used MoCA adapters (actiontek) and it's been consistently great/stable. No issues ever... for years.

kbouck··on Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
> compression is ambiguous

I think the unambiguous term for this is "Dynamic Range Compression"

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

kbouck··on Show HN: Omnara – Run Claude Code from anywhere
> moving toward a world where coding isn't really about sitting down and grinding out syntax

Love the idea of "coding" while walking/running outside. For me those outside activities help me clear my mind and think about tough problems or higher level stuff. The thought of directing agents to help persist and refine fleeting thoughts/ideas/insights, flesh out design/code, etc is intriguing

kbouck··on Hiroshima (1946)
Tokyo was (fire) bombed a few months earlier causing ~100k deaths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_194...

kbouck··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
I really like the nest encoder/button feel, so I was considering trying to hack mine into a becoming desktop volume control/button... but probably lacking the skills to not make a mess of it. Would love to see how you interface with the existing hardware!
kbouck··on Show HN: Ask-human-mcp – zero-config human-in-loop hatch to stop hallucinations
Rotate phone to landscape
kbouck··on Identifying Unmarked Iron
Great website. Such a comprehensive explanation of the cast iron seasoning process.
kbouck··on DDoSecrets publishes 410 GB of heap dumps, hacked from TeleMessage
if a heap dump is a copy of all the bytes in memory, then wouldn't "thousands of heap dumps" likely be larger than 410GB?

napkin math:

  410GB/1000 dumps = 410MB per dump?

  410GB/2000 dumps = 205MB per dump
kbouck··on Show HN: Doxxer – CLI tool for dynamic SemVer versioning using tags
From the FAQ:

> Why is the project called doxxer? Because it's like somebody who doxes, by exposing the version information about Git repo to you!

kbouck··on A 1980s toy robot arm inspired modern robotics
didn't read article due to paywall, but the answer is most likely yes. i was able to build a basic 2-degrees-of-freedom robot-arm grabber using lego technic and power functions and was controlled by scratch on a raspberry pi. lego also has pneumatics.
kbouck··on Atari Missile Command Game Built Using AI Gemini 2.5 Pro
Did same but for Asteroids. Had a working wireframe version after only a couple of prompts! I think using the term "Asteroids" in my original prompt was a bit of cheat/shortcut.

My lessons learned for prompting were to have project broken down into clearly defined modules (duh...), and to constantly feed the latest module source back in as context along with the prompts. This helps ground the responses to only adjust the code related to the prompt, and to not break stuff that was already working.

kbouck··on Atari Missile Command Game Built Using AI Gemini 2.5 Pro
Probably quite a few prompts.

Should we be checking in our prompt history into version control as a kind of source code or requirements spec? Seems prompt revision and improvement would be valuable to keep a history of.

kbouck··on iRobot made Roomba into an icon. Now, it's in a mess
In the rare event that robovacs manage to traverse the treacherous rug tassels, their algorithm should cause them to stay on that rug and finish it before exiting.
kbouck··on DIY Synths Database
Anyone tried the SC1000 in this list? I want to make this, but as a MIDI controller instead of having self-contained music.

https://diy-synths.snnkv.com/synths/SC1000

https://github.com/rasteri/SC1000

kbouck··on A love letter to the CSV format
trimmed the version path off and went a bit too far! thanks.
kbouck··on A love letter to the CSV format
Xan looks great. Miller is another great cli tool for transforming data among csv, tsv, json and other formats.

https://miller.readthedocs/

kbouck··on Bigscreen Beyond 2
Beat Saber with custom songs is the killer app for VR
kbouck··on Some notes on Grafana Loki's new "structured metadata"
If your source emits logs in OpenTelemetry format, using an OTel Collector inbetween you could do sometimes-JSON parsing of log content before the backend.
kbouck··on Some notes on Grafana Loki's new "structured metadata"
Re: storage, Kibana (Elastic) has a new (as of v8.17) "logsdb" index mode which claims to be ~2.5x more storage efficient than previous options.
kbouck··on Some notes on Grafana Loki's new "structured metadata"
It's also not ideal to have a different query language for different Grafana datastores (LogQL, PromQL, TraceQL). Are there any plans on making a unified Grafana query language?
kbouck··on Launch HN: Sift Dev (YC W25) – AI-Powered Datadog Alternative
From the docs it looks like you ingest directly from apps instrumented with your libraries. Do you also plan to ingest OpenTelemetry events, such as those exported from an OpenTelemetry agent, or OpenTelemetry collector?
kbouck··on Handling Database Failures in a Distributed System with RabbitMQ Workers
Proposed Solution 1 is preferable in that it accounts for both DB outage, slowness, and worker crash, and you describe additional safety mechanisms to prevent queue becoming blocked by poison/invalid messages.

Proposed Solution 2 without ACKs would be vulnerable to message loss if a worker were to crash before successful message delivery.

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