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pixelface | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: What's your use case for iPads/Android pads?

purchased an ipad mini for the singular purpose of running foreflight on it - an electronic flight bag application which replaces a whole bunch of frequently updated aviation charts and printed material, gives convenient access to aviation weather data, simplifies managing a digital logbook, plus lots of hand-calculations like weight and balance that are not difficult but are more annoying to do by hand. in flight the ipad sits in a claw mount sunction cupped to the canopy where it's easy to keep an eye on adsb traffic, pull up airport information, and so on. there are other EFB apps that will run on android tablets but foreflight is more or less the standard and default used by most people so far as I'm aware.

since owning it i've found it's also very handy in the kitchen for viewing recipes as it can be set in place and read without being picked up in the hand as a phone might require.

pixelface | 5 years ago | on: Multiple Beverly Hills PD officers now weaponizing copyright against streaming

I think if you time your destructive interference to the source of the audio perfectly and cancel out the sound, you haven't gotten the whole picture. As sound travels away from the source it reflects off surfaces and some of those reflections also reach the microphone. Those sounds have traveled a different distance than the original source and are no longer timed with your interfering element. Imagine holding your hand to block your direct view of a person in a house of mirrors but you can still see them in the mirrors. On top of that these reflections won't contain identical audio as the surfaces will absorb different spectral content, so now even if you had infinite perfectly timed anti-signals for each reflection, your anti-signal has spectral content that is missing from the incoming reflected audio and now your anti-signal is a signal unto itself. In order to create a signal that perfectly cancels out all of the copyrighted audio you would have to have knowledge about the form and materials of the physical environment as well as the position of the microphone within that environment.

pixelface | 5 years ago | on: My ISP Is Killing My Idle SSH Sessions

you can still get around this with some effort [1] and a pfsense box, the pfsense box gets wan from the ont and the original att router is hung off a third nic where it's allowed to do 802.1x and nothing else. the setup was a little challenging at first but has been maintenance free since. maybe there is a technical reason they have their network set up this way but i was offended at the idea of being prevented from using my own router.

[1] https://github.com/MonkWho/pfatt

pixelface | 5 years ago | on: Sci-Hub: Scientists, Academics, Teachers and Students Protest Blocking Lawsuit

I'm a non-academic taxpayer trying to read articles and don't have access through my employer or public library. I know other people in the same situation. Emailing the authors directly to request a copy is a known legitimate workaround, but in cases where I'm trying to read a paper on fungal propagation from 1971 (most recent example, from last week) the options are limited.

I would also imagine that if these things were more readily available people would be more likely to use them.

pixelface | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

Absolutely and I am aware of its origins, but I've seen the analogy brought out at least a few times here on HN when discussing the merits and potential of an idea that seems obvious but has gone unexplored or uncommercialized. I get the sense that there may be some beliefs around the evaluating of ideas, at least in this crowd, that lead some to see it as being comparable to noticing a sum of money on the ground. I'd love to understand that.

pixelface | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

Something that bugs me about this metaphor is the foregone conclusion that the thing on the ground is identifiably a $100 bill. Clearly anyone seeing a great idea for the taking will do so, but the discussion is really more comparable to seeing a bit of trash on the ground and pondering whether it might be money or not.

The issue is having ideas but not the ability to determine whether they are good ideas nobody has capitalized on yet or bad ideas that others have abandoned. I find myself asking this question often about a lot of things -- am I somehow so fortunate or clever that I've conjured a great idea, or do I lack the clarity of thought or prior knowledge to understand why my idea is bad, useless, or somehow infeasible?

pixelface | 5 years ago | on: Pine64 September update

not parent commenter but as someone who also has casual user family members on Linux - Ubuntu on a ThinkPad x220 is what I've set them up with.

pixelface | 5 years ago | on: 25th Anniversary of the Theatrical Release of "Hackers"

i think it was a really good choice, i'm certain i'm not the only person who saw that movie as a small child and decided thats what they want to be. it was exciting and cool back then and it still holds up now. i want to imagine that someone truly and deeply understood having a love and understanding of computer systems when they made the choice to express it with such artistic license.

pixelface | 5 years ago | on: 25th Anniversary of the Theatrical Release of "Hackers"

i've always seen the flashy computer bits as something that isn't intended to be viewed literally, but rather a way to understand the mental models they had for things. in the same sense that i would explain something as "hopping into a box and poking around systemd to see what's on fire", the movie used big flashy graphics as a metaphor for the minds of expert users. i think that was the best possible choice to bring you into their world without requiring the viewer to have an expert understanding of the inner workings of a computer.

pixelface | 5 years ago | on: Is San Francisco about to return to its Bohemian roots?

hardly limited to the 1960s, you can still do this in 2020 even in an expensive place like los angeles. pandemic aside, people living cheaply with many roommates and getting by on the wages of a bartender or minimum wage film set production assistant aren't even rare - the old pabst brewery on the eastern fringe of downtown LA is an entire campus of it. it just requires compromises on things that one is less likely to make if $2000/mo/bed is an option.

pixelface | 5 years ago | on: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

as someone who is waiting on their pinephone order right now, a major factor for me is supporting the existence of not-google not-apple. i want other options and even though they are not great yet, if enough of us support that niche it will become better. i hope enough people buying into it now will hasten viable daily driver phones running linux proper.

pixelface | 5 years ago | on: Amazon has 10k employees dedicated to Alexa

it's hard not to see this as the wasted potential of 10,000 human minds that could otherwise be solving real problems and needs. i'm curious to hear how alexa (and google assistant, et al) can be justified beyond small novelties that would be completely adequately serviced by non-cloud and/or non-voice means. i'm aware of the trickiness one can accomplish with a rube-goldberg-esque system of custom triggers, custom hardware, and carefully spoken phrases. i remain unimpressed by the segment and coupled with the significant privacy issues it feels like such a net-negative.
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