paleogizmo

8 ms·

31.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
The Curta is the most famous, but there is a whole range of different designs: http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/mechanical_calculator... Most of them are pretty cheap on Ebay, <$200 not including shipping. The
32.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
Smart lighting only makes sense in niche cases. I use the same Z-wave switches in my 60s-era house for a basement guest bedroom where the light switch is bizarrely in a storage closet outside the bedroom. I have another Z-wave switch to tur
33.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
I keep hearing this point brought up, but I haven't seen a good case for flat widget elements being confusing. In this very form I'm typing in, all the clickable elements (hyperlinks and submit button) are flat, but different styl
34.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
The issue isn't low standards of living in dense US cities but the lack of affordable housing. If you want an international example of providing affordable housing in an area with very high property values, Singapore accomplishes this
35.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
The better question is what the used enterprise computer market is in India. Given that engineering salaries are no longer an order of magnitude less than the USA, I would assume that there would be a large secondary market of sub $200 lapt
36.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
I was going to say the same thing. The RPi was introduced at a time when cheap SATA SSDs weren't a thing, nor were beefy ARM CPUs. It's starting to feel like an Edward Scissorhands situation.
37.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
Not sure about the older Alphasmarts, but the Neos have pretty standard laptop keys. The display contrast isn't great, but it's not terrible like the late 80s/early 90s graphic LCDs. The small footprint compared to a current
38.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
I got a Neo2 a while back and found it nice for note taking. I put my notes in Pandoc Markdown and then convert to pdf on a pc. While the Neo2 has no GUI elements, I'm not convinced that it's any better for distraction compared to
39.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
The suggestion I've been given is to watch a riff track version rather than the original. The biggest sin of the holiday special is that it's dull and no amount of cold medication will help improve it, as I discovered one January.
40.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
I use a desktop replacement laptop for my work computer as well. I wouldn't want to travel with it, but it's good for a home office and occasionally bringing to the living room or into my employer's office. I wouldn't sp
41.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
I swear I'm not trying to get the last word in, but my phone life hack was to get a spare Android phone to keep in my office where I install only a minimal set of apps. It's worked pretty well and I might even try putting on a VOI
42.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
Making a good general UI for E-ink is tough. Amazon would have been the ones to do it, but they put their attention to the Kindle Fire and left the regular Kindles as dedicated e-readers. Probably this was a good thing. Even so, I've n
43.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
I think this is the paradox that distraction-free phones always run into. Everyone including myself wants the useful or convenient niceties of a modern smartphone like maps, Spotify, various messaging tools, notes etc. without the dreck of
44.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
It's hackey, but PyInstaller works OK. I think there might even be an example in the official docs.
45.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
I added the weasel-word "spiritually" for that reason. If I had a teenager wanting to make a gui program I would point them to PSG as it doesn't require much conceptual understanding nor many lines of code to bang something t
46.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
Fish is amazing as an interactive shell. I've had it as my default for a couple years now. Oil isn't the only game in town for object shells, there is also NuShell and Elvish which follow the fish model of abandoning POSIX compati
47.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
I'd probably say pygame which repl.it now has support for. It's pretty slick and works on a crappy school ChromeBook. For "regular" gui stuff I'd say PySimpleGUI (see my earlier comment above/below).
48.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
In the spirit of HN contrarian comments, I'd say the closest thing spiritually to a modern-day HyperCard is PySimpleGUI: https://github.com/PySimpleGUI Previously the closest thing to HyperCard was WinForms, which PSG
49.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
I've never got the meme about numpads on microwaves being needlessly complicated design. On about any decent microwave made in the last 10 year, pushing 1-6 gives a cook time of 1-6 minutes, respectively. Pushing start again after cook
50.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
I vaguely remember this as a kid. For those who are better readers than I, does this site describe what all the computer hardware actually does? I was expecting something like primitive turn-by-turn navigation, but there doesn't seem t
51.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
I don't get it either. Can someone familiar with trains explain what on a train needs a desktop OS? A train is more like a car than an ATM machine, I would expect a collection of computers running either bare-metal or an RTOS like QNX&
52.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
No
53.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
When I travel in to Singapore to visit relatives, seeing WARNING DEATH PENALTY FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS in big red letters on the customs card always gives me a warm feeling of nostalgia every time I see it, knowing I'll soon be landing in
54.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
Per Wikipedia this uses reciprocating engines which I assume require less tolerance than turbines. Part of the mystery (probably) explained
55.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
I made a deduplicating version control system for large binary file based around the Restic chunker library: https://github.com/akbarnes/dupver I like to think that this (well, deduplicating version conrol in general,
56.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
I recall that at the time the movie was made, nothing was known of the Typhoon class except for spy photos of the portion above the waterline while they sat at the docks. One notable error from the movie was a fight scene between the rows o
57.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
I recall that there were some pretty long threads here after the US warship hitting some commercial vessel. The big issue wasn't using a screen but that the designers had taken advantage of having screens to create a multi-functional i
58.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
I was going to say something similar. The panels do look nice but don't seem much different than those of the West pre-digital era. I seem to recall that the nuclear ice breakers were a point of pride for the USSR, so it's likely
59.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
Can anyone explain how Mainframes differ from commodity servers or a high-performance computing cluster with low-latency networking? Is there really a practical difference? I get that they are useful for handling banking transactions, but I
60.
by paleogizmo 6y ago
Is this the HN equivalent of being a grammar nazi?

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