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lode

1,961 karma · joined July 26, 2011

Opinions & mistakes are my own, they don't necessarily reflect the opinion of my current (or previous) employer(s). No longer working in tech.
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lode··on Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you
Related: You can also check geotagged Wikipedia pages on a map: https://wiki-map.com/

A fun way to find articles nearby that need photographs is Wikishootme - https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/ (although it seems to be offline at the moment).

lode··on Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?
suprisingly so... Haven't had any unplanned downtime in a couple of years. (But as I mentioned, I treat them as disposable and wouldn't miss anything if they disappeared suddenly.)
lode··on Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?
I have a couple of $10/yearly (so less than $1 a month) VPSs. (Found them on Lowendbox.com). Some uses:

- Tailscale exit nodes (I don't use them to stream Netflix or torrents over, but sometimes they're useful to browse "this content is not available in your region" sites, to use WhatsApp while transiting through Bejing airport, ...)

- Invidious

- FreshRSS.org

- Vaultwarden

- some silly scripts

I treat these as disposable and can spin them up again from daily backups if needed. So far the stability has been good as with more expensive infrastructure providers.

My home setup is not $5/month VPS but a sub $100 second hand thin client running KVM is used for: - Home Assistant

- Immich photo hosting

- Music Assistant

- Pihole

- Hister

- Invidious

Obviously the storage requirements for media and photos are higher, these go to a (more expensive) Synology NAS, and are backed up externally, but that's beyond the scope of this post. The Home Assistant + Pihole storage requirements are minimal.

lode··on Tell HN: Apple not letting removal of AI models on macOS 27 is outrageous
While I agree with you, there is an unofficial (and reversible) tool which can help you reclaim this space:

https://github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI (to be complete: it seems to be based on https://github.com/4evy/pared)

discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49957116

lode··on 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Deisseroth, Hegemann, Nagel
Press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2026/press-releas...
lode··on Denmark data breach exposes 8.8M people's personal data
Another non-paywalled English article from a Danish source: https://cphpost.dk/2026-10-05/life-in-denmark/cpr-data-breac...
lode··on 56k.rip – the 1996 dial-up internet experience
Like this concert opening from a few days ago: https://www.instagram.com/p/DdMF3D5OQyK/

How can you have DSL (connecting through WAN Miniport PPPoE) and dial up modem sounds at the same time? Infuriating...

lode··on Replacing the old battery on rechargeable bike lights
> company that sell pedals with integrated lights too but I can't remember the name

I use https://redshiftsports.com/products/arclight-pedals - originally bought them on Kickstarter.

They're not super cheap, but I'm very happy with them. You can change the mode from always on to pulsing. They automatically turn off when not in use, and they sense the direction of the pedal so that the front light is always white and the back is always red.

lode··on Airbnb Sets Up $250M Fund to Invest in Housing Construction
Archive link (bypass paywall): https://archive.vn/60SSw
lode··on Textream – A Free Teleprompter for Mac, iPhone, and iPad
apparently it's an option when using an external display - https://textream.net/docs/#external
lode··on Jellyfin 12.0
I recently switched from Plex's pretty terrible native players to Plezy (on iOS, iPadOS and tvOS).

Plezy supports both Plex and Jellyfin as a backend - I'm not sure if there is 100% feature parity.

lode··on Live map of public transport in Belgium
It depends.

From: https://openbaarvervoerbelgie.be/over-ons/

* For companies publishing real time positions (STIB-MIVB, TEC), live position will be shown. For companies that don't (De Lijn, NMBS/SNBC), we calculate the position based on the schedule (GTFS), corrected with published delays (GTFS-RT).

Every vehicle on the map is labeled with realtime / calculated position.

lode··on Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face
Discussed last week at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49458161
lode··on Why Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing that it had Tetris?
I also like https://computer.rip/ - not personal anecdotes from people who were there, but definitely well researched and interesting technology history.
lode··on Finger: the 1971 social network that never died
Related fun site: plan.cat (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29248368 )
lode··on Hyperspace
Discussed upon release at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43173462

You can also use the free fclones CLI tool that uses the same native APFS functionality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43173713

lode··on Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage
Never heard of this one either. FCKGW on the other hand still triggers muscle memory.
lode··on That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
I definitely experienced that “yellow badges” were viewed by long timers as somewhat of a lower caste. Starting with the first onboarding day where they were given hand-me-down phones and laptops.

(This was a long time ago, during the Ballmer era. Just my personal 2 cents.)

lode··on Weathergotchi – an E-Paper Climate Logger
M5Stack has black & white (https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stack-esp32-core-ink-dev...) and color (https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5paper-color-esp32s3-dev-...) development kits that look like exactly what you're looking for.
lode··on Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list
I think GP might be referencing to Rowan Atkinson interviewing Elton John: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl0HqlbX7dc
lode··on How the Big Four's wheels fell off Down Under
Archive link: https://archive.vn/DGcrR
lode··on Apple 'Hide My Email' vulnerability reveals peoples' real email addresses
archive link: https://archive.vn/mCbBw
lode··on Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers
Does https://sonocotta.com/louder-esp32/ look like something you might be looking for?
lode··on European Parliament committee backs digital euro
Press release from EU parliament: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20260622IP...

Further background: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-an-ec...

lode··on Asciline – real-time ASCII video rendering engine
While this is presented as a way to evade ad blockers, using it to serve ads is explicily prohibited in the license:

The permission granted by this license explicitly EXCLUDES the right to use this software, in whole or in part, for the purpose of serving, delivering, or displaying digital advertisements, sponsored content, or any form of commercial marketing to end-users. Any such use immediately terminates this license.

lode··on iOS 27 is adding a 'Create a Pass' button to Apple Wallet
The problem is that those are treated almost like an app, you need a $99/year developer certificate to publish them.

Many third party ticketing solutions venues and events use do support this, but for instance if you want to sell tickets for a party and self-host, you need another external integration, or a developer account. Generating a PDF with a QR code, and publishing an .ics file is essentially free.

lode··on iOS 27 is adding a 'Create a Pass' button to Apple Wallet
> The same is true in a physical card wallet.

Not at all.

In my physical wallet, those identical looking cards have different names on them, ie. <myfirstname mylastname> and <mylastname - partnerslastname> for joint accounts. I can also mark them up with a marker, or request a different picture from some banks.

In iOS I need to remember that the one ending with 0044 is mine, and 0073 is for our joint account. I have no way to add an alias or distinguish them otherwise. This is ridiculous.

lode··on Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
See this story from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738883

Basically, to combat pirate streaming of football matches, La Liga (the Spanish football association) can compel Spanish ISPs to block wide ranges of IP blocks that are suspected of hosting those streams.

This includes Cloudflare, which - due to lots of websites depending on them (see what happened when they went down last year: https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/ ) feels like half of the internet is unusable. This happens weekly when football is on.

Now it looks like those bans are going to become even more frequent, which will have all kinds of unintended consequences.

lode··on OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky dies of cancer at 43
https://archive.is/WfRAa
lode··on Pinterest is drowning in a sea of AI slop and auto-moderation
TIL this exists... C2PA can digitally sign the complete lifecycle of an image, starting from capture on the camera:

https://petapixel.com/2026/02/21/a-look-at-an-image-verifica...

(I submitted this article to HN too as I thought it was pretty interesting)

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