Hacker News Reader

threeioon I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated

(for me) Sometimes your job might make you run reference time for a large service provider... and then you need multiple reference signals... and then you realize you have spares that are going to be thrown away... and suddenly your home lab becomes way too geeky for you to admit to 99.999999989% of your friends... unless they also are on the same time email list as you ;)

threeioon Codex Micro

I'd debate that the custom LCD buttons made the difference... I've got a few macro keypads for some specific use cases, I ended up with a elgato for a -very- niche radio related use case and love it

threeioon Decoding 137MHz signals from passing satellites to get images with a $10 SDR

If this spiked your interest... take a look at https://satnogs.org

threeioon Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless

I have a 3 character .com as my primary email... it gets rejected more often than I'd like... including at my bank :) I've got a longer more normal domain that I alias, but it annoys me none the less.

threeioon Improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin

Raised with my grandmother with Alzheimer for all of my childhood she called me by her long dead brother's name.

Walked out the door one day said "See you later grandma" and she said "Have fun ______" and called me by my real name, called my older siblings and said go spend time, she died two days later.

Very common.

threeioon I built a ceiling projection mapping of the planes flying over my house

https://conormclaughlin.net/2024/04/published-how-i-finished...

I have used this on my tidbyt (now a Tronbyt) for years for this purpose... simple solution tied into my adsb system

threeioon Reviving Teletext for Ham Radio

Ham radio as a whole is a great hobby to sink your random RF projects into already.. its a hobby within a hobby, no matter what path you may take ;)

threeioon Declassified CIA Cartography Maps from the 1980s

I have two of these up in my office.. absolutely love them

threeioon Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)

I remember the early gnutella releases and we'd use the search history as a chatroom for the first like 24 hours before it got too saturated ;)

threeioon Tracy Kidder has died

Its one of the books I include in my 'desk library' at the office.. I'm an old graybeard, but it's an amazing book for folks to understand the joy and shortcommings and pressures a project can put on you

threeioon Darkrealms BBS

God I remember overpaying for my boardwatch magazine subscription just to be aware of new trends so I could write better BBS Software... ahh memories :)

threeioon Offline 23 Hours a Day

I remember someone posting about being a passenger on container ships so they could get isolation for defined periods of time and travel to different places. They found the isolation allowed them to focus on their tasks better since the internet was limited when away from port.

threeioon Dole Kemp 96 Web Site

I used to host at a facility in DC that hosted Pat Robertson's presidential campaign's server.. they had surrounded his server with all of their adult hosting clients as a... show of support.

threeioon Telephone colophon: Or, how I overengineered my call audio (2020)

Reminds of of working with ISDN lines to board eons ago ;)

threeioon AccuWeather to discontinue free access to Core Weather API

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/weatherflow-tempest-wh...

Looks like it can be done with home assistant and then pushed up to collection locations, so I suspect things are pretty open

threeioon Trying to find meaning in owning an old Mac

The se/30 is a beautiful machine, but it’s got some of the worst battery and cap issues, so clean it up quick :)

threeioon Bulk Lots of DB-19s for Sale

I bought two for my NeXT a bit ago.. crazy how expensive the real DB-19 cables are

threeioon They don't make 'em like that any more: Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

I loved my Dat decks... TCD-D7 and a D8... graduated to an Alesis ADAT and then lost interest in the recording/mixing hobby

threeioon Too Many Open Files

Graybeard Devops vet chuckles softly to himself ;)

threeioon Putting Bounties on My Goals

I did this for a year or two when my first kid was born... I assigned penalty dollars with actions that I knew weren't good for me... didn't run for a week (outside of travel) 10$ to the kids account... stopped for fast food as opposed to having a real meal, 10$.

It was surprisingly effective for what was a stressful time and in the end gave some real benefit to their compound interest long term... all because I was being lazy and grabbed a burger for lunch :)

threeioon Matt's Script Archive (1995)

I spent so much time hacking on scripts from here in the those early internet days... ahh memories.

threeioon Paper Apps

I realize its insane, but I used that Hipster PDA workflow for about 3 years before moving back to a digital workflow..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_PDA for more details

threeioon The Taylorator – All Your Frequencies Are Belong to Us

Ham radio has gotten me into more devious activities than I'd like to admit... but that's half the fun of experimentation :)

Well done :)

threeioon Ask HN: Life-changing purchases since 2020? (Under $100 and under $1000)

This was a huge win for my family, we all have travel chargers that cover our needs and run off of common USBC.

I grabbed a Anker charging station/extention cable (https://www.anker.com/products/a9129-charging-station-67w) and can plug in one device and charge most of my families needs, including laptops in a pinch.

Also, 3 prong splitters for travel -- great for airports, bad ac plugs on planes, hotels with one AC plug, etc. (https://www.amazon.com/GE-Polarized-Three-Outlet-Power-Ivory...)

threeioon Ask HN: Life-changing purchases since 2020? (Under $100 and under $1000)

I've sworn by Plantronics headphones for years for work but started getting ear infections and my open air/bone conducting headphones are a huge improvement... I've got a pair of Aftershockz but these look great as well.

Audio quality suffers a little when it comes to music, but being able to hear conversations around me at the office is worth it.

threeioon Ask HN: Life-changing purchases since 2020? (Under $100 and under $1000)

Say you a member of the time-nuts mailing list without saying your a member of the time-nuts mailing list ;)

threeioon What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)

Literally got my Next Slab working over the weekend, seen presentation before and its put a good smile on my face today.

threeioon Morsle – A daily Morse code challenge

Very much this... and the Long Island CW Club (https://longislandcwclub.org) which has similar classes

threeioon Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?

This -- Stop is required action, but its passed to the vendor for management -- non-compliance is punishable by loss of shortcode/carrier acceptance.

Things may have changed since, but used to work sending 8m sms messages before breakfast every day to people who subscribed to news, sports scores, etc.

threeioon A terrible way to jump into colocating your own stuff

I had a similar mid 90's tour at a major provider in Washington DC (Ashburn) that had this exact problem, mantraps everywhere, great facility for the generation and then they took me out the back door to show me the basketball court in the back parking lot and no alarm went off.... Considering root dns servers, yahoo, hotmail and other majors of the day were running there, it was... sketchy at best.