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tjakab

249 karma · joined February 8, 2008

Web application platform engineer, occasional photographer and artist.
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tjakab··on Infinite Mac: BeOS
The 68k emulator was inside the Mac ROM on PPC Macs, not the processor.
tjakab··on 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
It's almost like the rush to ship new features year after year without ever pausing to fix and optimize things has taken its toll.
tjakab··on Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?
The same Apple that reset a large number of iCloud passwords last year with no warning or notice, and no public acknowledgement or explanation? It was determined after to only have affected legacy Apple IDs that predated iCloud, but there was never any confirmation from Apple.
tjakab··on Elon Musk to put his technical experts on the Signals leak
It was clearly an 1D-10T error.
tjakab··on David Lynch has died
Eraserhead is highly watchable, but the first time you see it, it's best to just experience it without trying to process it too much. The nuance comes through on repeat viewings.
tjakab··on LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters
I largely see it as the digital next step up from something like the Mythic Game Master Emulator, which is popular for solo play and things like trying out new systems.

And there's quite a lot of us that like to play but because of life commitments, getting together with a group on a regular schedule is difficult.

tjakab··on Why did Borland ignore the Macintosh market?
My suspicion from early in my career is it was people that came from IT who just assumed that 'MAC' was an acronym for something, like pretty much everything else they dealt with, as opposed to the shortening of the proper noun 'Macintosh.'
tjakab··on Apple Delays Work on Next Year's iPhone, Mac Software to Fix Bugs
Tiger was Spring of 2005, Leopard was Fall of 2007. That one was delayed several months because Apple had to divert resources to ship the first iPhone. Snow Leopard was Fall 2009, then Apple basically moved onto the yearly release cycle in Summer 2011 with Lion and moved it to Fall of every year with Mavericks in 2013.

I believe Mavericks was also when Apple stopped charging for OS upgrades.

tjakab··on How the iMac Saved Apple
I suspect even if the Intel transition hadn't happened, assuming the Mac survived it probably still would have been destined for Apple Silicon once the ARM platform became powerful enough.
tjakab··on How the iMac Saved Apple
That was the secret expansion port that some third-parties made accessories for anyway. I recall it was gone by the Rev-B model.
tjakab··on NeXT Computers
Don't forget though that NeXTSTEP was also running on workstation-class hardware and priced accordingly (~$6500), vs. Windows running on late 80s commodity PCs (probably ~$1500-$2000) with lesser specs. For that kind of cost difference NeXTSTEP had better have looked and performed better.
tjakab··on Disney says it has more streaming customers than Netflix
Realistically the second season of Sandman and final season of Stranger Things probably won't materialize until 2024 given how long they take to produce.
tjakab··on How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports
I'll throw in the 'Ghosts' series by Nine Inch Nails. These land somewhere between Eno and Aphex Twin and were basically a precursor to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's soundtrack work (some of which may also be worth a listen).
tjakab··on Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop
Most business systems are using Intel GPUs unless there's a specific need for workstations with Nvidia or AMD discrete graphics.
tjakab··on The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons and Dragons
Gygax/TSR went so far as to claim that Advanced D&D was a different game from D&D to not have to pay Dave Arneson royalties on any of the releases. Arneson sued TSR multiple times and they settled out of court, granting him royalties on AD&D: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Arneson#After_TSR
tjakab··on Playdate pre-orders begin in July
Most likely Lua. The developer page says the SDK supports Lua and C.
tjakab··on Ask HN: How do I learn drawing?
It's been decades since I used it in a practical way, but "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way" - https://www.amazon.com/How-Draw-Comics-Marvel-Way/dp/0671530... is a surprisingly great tutorial for learning. You can ignore the bits on dynamic drawing that are more geared for comics, but it will give you a lot of foundational knowledge of composition and observing. The chapter on perspective is still one of the best writings on the subject I've ever seen. Pair it with a good life drawing book.
tjakab··on Dungeon Magazine
I never tried AD&D to 4th edition, but to 5th edition you can pretty much just do it on the fly. 5e characters are more powerful than their 1e/2e counterparts, so you'll want to increase HD and damage for monsters or just swap in the equivalent from the 5e Monster Manual. You also won't get direct indicators for skill checks or DCs, but those are usually simple enough to figure out.
tjakab··on DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use
I switched over from Google to DDG back in 2013 and never looked back. I use it heavily on a day to day basis ranging from obscure java error messages for my job to just general searches and once in a great while I have to throw a !g in front of the search, but that's really it.
tjakab··on Apple store workers should be paid for time waiting to be searched, court rules
Anything worth over $500 is going to automatically require a signature on delivery, so little chance it’ll just get tossed off the truck.
tjakab··on Dark Mode vs. Light Mode
There's the HN Special add-on for Firefox and Chrome. It lets you set a dark style or also use an alternate stylesheet for HN.
tjakab··on How “Silicon Valley” Nails Silicon Valley
"Many police officers maintain that the most realistic police show in the history of television was the sitcom 'Barney Miller,' far more so than that father of reality TV, 'Cops.' The action was mostly off screen, the squad room the only set, and the guys were a motley bunch of character actors who were in no danger of being picked for the N.Y.P.D. pin-up calendar. But they worked hard, made jokes, got hurt and answered to their straight-man commander."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/opinion/watching-the-detec...

tjakab··on North Korea announces successful hydrogen bomb test
Bush 41 is George H. W. Bush. Junior is Bush 43.
tjakab··on OS X El Capitan on the Mac App Store
I ran 'brew update' and 'brew upgrade' just prior to upgrading to El Capitan. After the upgrade I just had to change ownership on /usr/local back to myself, but everything else seems fine.
tjakab··on Mac at Work: IBM Launches Services to Deploy Macs at Scale to the Enterprise
Mainframes. If you're a bank or an enterprise of a certain size, then a chunk of your annual IT budget goes right to IBM for mainframe maintenance and licensing every year.
tjakab··on Introducing Apple Music
There's already a Beats Music app on Android, and possibly with a not-insignificant subscriber base. Since Apple Music is replacing Beats Music outright they probably didn't want to leave those subscribers out in the cold. They'd basically be handing over customers to Spotify and Rdio.
tjakab··on How I do my computing
The Lemote got stolen from him in 2012:

http://www.devthought.com/2012/06/09/richard-stallman-robbed...

tjakab··on Ubiquiti Networks is creatively violating the GPL
The article doesn't mention if they've contacted the FSF about the violation. Looks like they may be able to provide some assistance, particularly if any of the code is directly copyrighted to the FSF.

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/compliance

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.html

tjakab··on Ask HN: Do you take nootropics?
I was taking L-Theanine (capsules) regularly a couple years back and I found that I built up a rapid tolerance to it after about a week where it stopped being effective. I had to cycle off every few days. I'm curious if anyone else has encountered this.
tjakab··on Microsoft to invest in Cyanogen
Ironically, Windows NT was certified as POSIX compliant because at the time it was a requirement for systems used by the US government: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem
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