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torgoguys

1,845 karma · joined May 16, 2014

kenvarga@gmail.com
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torgoguys··on UTF-8000: Unlimited UTF-8
DOS in what way? Can you clarify? Thx.
torgoguys··on iPhone Duo
Very strange how in the middle of a specs page for the device they a pitch there suggesting you get an Apple Card (formatted on the spec page as if it was actually a spec of this device) before continuing on with the rest of the specs/features.

I haven't looked, but am guessing the probably exists on other Apple specs pages.

torgoguys··on 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
Yes, my daughter and I still will randomly say "worlds youngest self-made female billionaire" to each other and laugh when we hear someone use a phase that is only true because of an excessive number of qualifiers.
torgoguys··on IBM Bob
My first thought was it was going to be "Microsoft Bob for the AI Age" or something. I didn't look too closely -- maybe it is!
torgoguys··on Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
I suspect being able to visualize something feels so natural to you you have a hard time imagining it could be otherwise. However, for folks like me it just doesn't happen.

When I dream I see the dreams just fine (so I think I understand what it is to have a minds eye) but can't reproduce any remotely similar thing while awake. Imagining sounds works fine and occurs not in my "real" hearing (so I get the distinction you're talking about with visual imagination) but with vision there's basically nothing for me.

torgoguys··on Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse
I'll be there! Hoping the forecast changes!
torgoguys··on Show HN: I worked on a new browser for 2 years, today it passed Acid 3
96/100 with Brave on Android
torgoguys··on Show HN: Justif – Knuth-Plass justification and microtypography for the web
I haven't looked at the API yet, but the demo is great on my phone. Instead of just justified blocks, can you have it do a "justified" (even amount of spacing) from an irregularly shaped right edge (in my case, an image on the right side of a design template I made)?
torgoguys··on 1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored
I've always admired these sorts of illustrations. Botanical ones too. Please forgive the newb questions, but does this gorgeous illustration style have a name and how was it done (I.e., what is the medium -- some kind of colored ink?)
torgoguys··on Moebius: 0.2B image inpainting model with 10B-level performance
Click on the visualizations to see it in action. The purple areas are areas a user highlighted to tell the system to inpaint, and when you click on the image you see the results of the inpainting. Basically the model redraws sections of an image (the purple areas) using the context of what's in the non-purple areas to decide what might look best in the purple areas. Often used for removing objects but as you can see in the examples it can do other things too.
torgoguys··on Correlated randomness in Slay the Spire 2
Because they appear to have a curious way of doing their saves. From the article:

>The way Slay the Spire allows you to save and resume runs is by storing the total number of times each RNG has been called, and then calling each RNG that many times (throwing away the result) whenever a save file is loaded.

Depending on what the game is like (I know nothing about it), that could make sense, even if it is inelegant.

torgoguys··on Mmorpg World of ClaudeCraft, vibe coded with Fable 5
Care to share prompts so we can see how involved you were vs how habds off you were able to be?
torgoguys··on OneDrive data now has an expiry date
Hasn't this already been the case?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/unlicensed-oned...

torgoguys··on Node.js 26.0.0 (Now with Temporal)
I thought this was the release where the built in sqlite got its experimental tag removed, but I don't see it in the release notes. THAT'S got me excited more than Temporal. A stable API, huge utility and one less dependency.
torgoguys··on Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling
Wow, surprising that it was zero. Is there a chance that the cup was being separated from the tracker at a sorting facility with the cup going to a different destination than the tracker?
torgoguys··on VGA Memory Access Is Complicated
Because it was the only "standard" 256-color mode back in the day, supported by both mcga and vga. MCGA cards had just enough ram to support this mode (64kb) while vga cards were a strict superset and had a full 256k of ram.
torgoguys··on Forking the Web
>I'd certainly say PWA is something that could only come out of the mind that brought us Kubernetes

How so? PWAs are awesome! Democratizing for users. Democratizing for developers. They work well for the right class of apps. They would go much further if there weren't forces actively resisting them. Think of all the electron type-apps out there. Now imagine if the average Joe could just install them from the web with 2 clicks.

(Regular ole bookmarks get you a decent percent of the way but clearly something extra than that was needed.)

torgoguys··on Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)
And last I knew you ALSO can put in a GFCI circuit breaker (instead of outlet), swap in normal three prong outlets with ground not connected and use those stickers on the outlets.
torgoguys··on Direct Win32 API, weird-shaped windows, and why they mostly disappeared
>A freaking notepad app takes almost 50mb in memory when equivalent NOTEPAD done in pure Win32 C takes [only] 1.8mb of memory.

Kids these days! A full 1.8MB of memory for little more than a wrapper around an existing win32 multi-line text box control!

(Note that I added the "[only]" in the quote above to make it clear what the author meant since the quote was ripped from context).

torgoguys··on US Job Market Visualizer
I don't have any color discrimination deficiencies, but it is my understanding that for various types of signage, the move has been towards RED=bad/danger/etc, and BLUE (instead of green)=good/safe/etc.
torgoguys··on “This is not the computer for you”
Yes, exactly this. I'm using a 10 year old elitebook folio g1. It's about 2 pounds and does what I need it to do. Available with a 4k screen if that's your thing. Does not feel sluggish. Given that I'm not gaming, video editing, or doing local LLMs (and I think there is a big chunk of the population in that camp), I feel like I am missing out on nearly zero.

(And I'm not trying to say anything is special about the laptop I'm using. I adore using trackpoint (so much that I brought my own trackpoint keyboard in to work to use there) so would gladly trade for an old thinkpad if what I had didn't already do what I need it to do).

torgoguys··on Universal vaccine against respiratory infections and allergens
I don't know much about this, but wouldn't the description of this imply you're stimulating the body to be in an a long-term situation that would be commonly viewed as unpleasant (inflamed, maybe nasal drainage, that type of thing) with the positive tradeoff that you get fewer actual infections?
torgoguys··on The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)
Yes, this was the portal style and I still adore it and use it myself, where I can. As long as the page has a scannable information hierarchy, information dense sites are better when you just want to get stuff done (/look stuff up), which for me is most of the time. I don't care about the fluff and "hero images" and the rest.
torgoguys··on Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)
I seem to recall browsing what appeared to be the complete source back in the day. I put in a bit of an effort to get it compiling, but it was only released as poorly scanned printouts of the source code and OCR wasn't so good then so the project was bigger than I hoped.
torgoguys··on Show HN: Safe-now.live – Ultra-light emergency info site (<10KB)
I disagree. When I saw the page, I thought, "Finally an information dense page again! It's been so long since they've been common and I miss them."
torgoguys··on PicoPCMCIA – a PCMCIA development board for retro-computing enthusiasts
That's also not a perfect recollection, but is what my recollection was until I was looking up this history in the past week and found this nugget and posted it elsewhere. Quoting myself:

>So we know these were originally called PCMCIA cards, then later PC Cards, right? Well, I think I might have found the first mention of PCMCIA in PC Magazine. It is in a Dec 1991 column by Dvorak where he "introduces" the "PCMCIA PC-Card". Here's a quote, "In fact, the card should be referred to as the PCMCIA PC-Card, or the PC-Card for short. PCMCIA is the Personal Computer Computer Memory Card International Association (Sunnyvale, Calif., 408-720-0107), and it's the governing body that has standardized the specifications for this card worldwide. JEIDA works with the PCMCIA; it's specifications are identical."

>So at least according this Dvorak column, these were ALWAYS properly called "PC-Cards" (he used a hyphen), but early on people definitely were calling them PCMCIA cards and I remember the shift to everyone later (much later than this 1991 column) calling them PC Cards.

torgoguys··on The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago
Does anyone remember the 1980s PBS show Newtons Apple? A segment on that show was called "Newtons Lemons" and would show an old newsreel from I'm guessing from the 1940s or 1950s. Each one would feature some sort of "futuristic" gadget, and invariably it would be something that never panned out and I had never heard of as a kid. I distinctly remember one of these featuring basically a scooter with a small gas motor and the narrator talking about great it would be for commuting to work when we can all own these. By my recollection, it looked very much like escooters of today, just gas.

When escooters became a thing, I looked for this newsreel for a while and never found it. Anyone else remember this?

torgoguys··on Floppy Disk / Diskettes // retrocmp / retro computing
Using an SD card (or micro SD in an adapter) connected to a USB reader might meet your needs. You can then use the SD write protect switch.
torgoguys··on Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
>But it leads to ridiculous whoppers like this, and ends up in practice excusing what amounts to the most corrupt regime in this country in over a century, if not ever.

Amen. Preach it, brother!

>No, this is just bad, on its own, absent any discussion about what someone else did. There was no equivalent pardon of a perpetrator of an impactful crime in a previous administration I can think of. I'm genuinely curious what you think you're citing?

I don't know what the poster was referring to, but I AM mad at Biden for pardoning his family. It's a molehill of an issue compared to the current administration though.

torgoguys··on IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)
You called an "interrupt," which was basically a system call. That changed a bunch of timing registers within the video hardware. For a long time you basically could only do 40, 80 columns of text and 25, 43, or 50 lines. With some trickery you could get the video hardware to output 90 columns and with even more trickery you could get 60 rows.

If you made a custom font you could also have more diversity in the number of rows too but this was rarely done.

Eventually different text modes became available with higher resolution video cards and monitors. 132 columns of text were common but there were others.

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