jdblair

Lufthansa still flies a 747-8 between FRA and SFO.

https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/DLH454

I booked it once when I couldn’t find a direct flight from AMS to SFO.

The best mechanic I ever had kept my ‘98 Subaru going past 200k miles. Once during a repair I asked him to do an inspection and tell me if there was anything else I should replace. He told me not to do that, and that any mechanic would always find something, but not necessarily the next thing to break.

He said it better using an expression I hadn’t heard before or since, something like “don’t go looking for goats when your herd is already with you.”

When I was quite young I attended a lecture by Bill Watterson held at the Akron Art Museum. He spoke without notes, with an easel and a large pad of paper, describing his career. He illustrated his story with the pad, drawing his unsuccessful characters (I remember one looked like a short Hobbes) as he told his story about how he created Calvin and Hobbes. I was really struck by how much Watterson looked like Calvin's dad.

I stayed after the end of the lecture hoping that he would give me one of his drawings. He politely declined. As I recall, he said he had to be very careful about how his work was distributed. I don't know if this was b/c of his contract with the syndicate, or b/c he was already thinking about the legacy of the strip.

"Dehydration" in this article is the chemical process of separating magnesium atoms from water molecules. It is not about drinking enough water.

Most of the comments here are based on the title alone. Like always.

Yes, literally this. No verilog decode, just looking for signals in the image of a 1 vs. a 0. For example, a 1 may be the existence of a transistor at a particular intersection of wiring.

Done! Thanks for coming here to read the tough hacker new comments. I really like what you're doing with Framework, and I hope you are able to keep iterating and improving.

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Update: Sorry, there is no mistake! The i7 order was my original pre-order, which I canceled. My order is correctly recorded.

Also, something weird:

I looked up my purchase using my Framework account to confirm my purchase date, and it lists my mother board as System: Intel® Core™ i7-1260P. Sloppy record keeping like this doesn't inspire confidence.

It is definitely not, and /proc/cpuinfo confirms it:

model name : AMD Ryzen 7 7840U w/ Radeon 780M Graphics

I'm also a laptop weirdo and I've had a Framework 13 with the Ryzen 7 motherboard since May of 2022. I run Ubuntu (currently 25.10) on it.

Its a good laptop, but not a great laptop. Its very light and compact (very important to me), and its been reliable, at least since the AMD GPU driver issues were resolved. The matte screen is fine, battery life is adequate, and the CPU meets my needs as a hobby developer.

Overall, I'm happy with it and I expect to use it for many years.

Its biggest issues are the touchpad (it's a diving board design, so you have to always click in the bottom 1/3 of the pad) and the quality of the case. The case flexes slightly if the computer is on an uneven surface, or if you are holding it in one hand by the corner while typing/mousing with your other hand, and this can cause the mechanics of the touchpad to jam. I've trained myself to tap instead of click, but that's me adapting to bad hardware.

I wish the case were more solid, even though I know this would add to the expense, size and weight. I expect to eventually replace every part of this laptop except the case, so I would appreciate more durability.

peace be with you

a funny thing happened why i added and emacs eval mcp tool to claude code

https://hachyderm.io/@jdblair/115605988820465712

In the 90s my dad turned into an organic lawn grower. He was always suspicious of Chemlawn but he used the standard recommended treatment of granulated fertilizer and herbicides. Then he had a revelation about root and soil health, and phosphorus pollution, and he never looked back. The result isn’t the “golf course” monoculture of his neighbors, but its good.

Some research suggests it works, some research concludes it is no better than placebo. :shrug:

When I read "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" when I was about 18, there is a mention of how in the summer they would get nettles in their gruel at the prison camp. Midwestern American me had no idea of the nutritive value of nettles and thought this was another layer of cruelty that the Soviet gulag heaped on its inmates. I had only encountered nettles on hikes in the woods, and held them in the same category as poison ivy.

Years later, dating the Finnish woman who is now my wife, I learned how to gather nettles, about nettle soup, and even that eating nettles can de-sensitize you to seasonal allergies. I had completely misinterpreted that part of Solzhenitsyn's writing, and that his point was that at least when the nettles were growing the gruel had some additional nutrition (like vitamin c) in it.

A lot of knowledge like this has been lost in suburban America.

Offline credit card transactions are still supported, and Square even supports it in the US.

Europe use of debit cards instead of credit cards is much higher than the US.

the point of knowing the rough conversion is to be able to do head-math to get a close number. I use 30 a lot of the time, b/c most of the time a close estimate is all I need.

if you're cutting off the borders of your map, by all means, use a calculator

1 oz =~ 28 grams is a really useful conversion to remember

(signed, an American living in Europe)

I had a SPARClassic at home in 1996! It was pretty underpowered, but it worked great as long as you didn't use X. I worked from my brand new PowerMac 7200 over ethernet to the SPARClassic, which gave me MacOS + Solaris as a development environment.

I'm a US citizen living in The Netherlands. Am I a US Person or a Foreign Person?

but it was so much fun to write my own serial networking protocol! and my 2nd stage bootloader for arduino!

...and by the time I finished, the esp32c hardware was released and I didn't need it anymore.

In 2014, in a Starbucks in Los Gatos, CA, I saw someone bring in a (small) desktop PC and a monitor and set it up at a table.

“your choice of energy input” is carrying a lot of weight in your statement. producing steel from iron ore is extremely energy intensive. it’s true that once produced, recycling steel is less expensive.

but steel doesn’t store carbon (except the small carbon input used to turn iron to steel)

wood, on the other hand, is a carbon sink.

We're spending a lot of effort discussing what we thought in 2012, when the acquisition on the surface seemed insane ($1B!! For a photo app!)

What is more significant is what Meta did since then.

I do think Meta didn't see simply a photo sharing app, they saw another social graph they could ingest. They did this quite successfully.

That's right, the Concorde had engines capable of supercruise - long distance supersonic flight without afterburners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercruise#Aircraft_with_supe...

I'm having memories of being asked to remove "the curse words" from the cracker startup screens on AppleII 80s games and stuff. These were almost always graphics buffer files (memory dumps) and the fix was hardly hacking (find file, edit in paint program) but it made me feel l33t.

I don't know how any software houses made money with the floppy copy scene in the 80s.

the new rick rolling is wordpress installer?

I thought this would be about ditching the vestigial pedals on electric bikes, especially "fat bikes."

UPDATE: I updated my DNS server config (I run my own already) to use root DNS rather than forward to my ISP, problem solved.

And I was so close! I just disabled forwarding to my ISP DNS on my home DNS, now there is no block.

It appears that the IP of the server is blocked in the EU. I get this from my ISP (Ziggo, in the Netherlands):

Deze website is geblokkeerd

Europese sancties

De Raad van Europa heeft besloten dat de websites van RT (voorheen Russia Today) en Sputnik News niet meer mogen worden doorgegeven. De website die je probeert te bezoeken, valt onder deze Europese sanctie.

VodafoneZiggo is verplicht de sanctie uit te voeren en heeft de website geblokkeerd.

To answer your question, there is no "embrace of opensource tools" and I'm not aware of any in existence. They could exist, I haven't looked for them.

Here's a quick writeup of my experience:

I'm a very happy Garmin customer. I'm on my 2nd watch, a Venu 3. My favorite feature: the battery lasts multiple days, usually a week, w/o a charge (depending on how I use it).

The watch provides access to its flash storage using MTP (Media Transfer Protocol). This allows me to access the contents and update the music on it using my Linux computer.

I manage the other watch features (tap-to-pay, custom watchfaces, apps) using the Garmin Connect and Garmin IQ app on an Android phone. These are not open source, and I don't know of clones.

The watch UI itself is a pretty clunky, menu-driven design. It took quite a bit of tweaking to configure it to my tastes, but the combination of "glances" and "shortcuts" let me access the features I want within a few swipes, taps, or button presses.

Configuring apps and custom watchfaces requires internet access, as these use javascript-based applets running on your phone inside the Garmin app to do the configuration. This is annoying. Everything else works offline, or with a bluetooth connection to an offline phone (for example, I have a habit of changing the time to my destination timezone when I'm on a flight, this works once I update the timezone on my phone with no internet).

There is a desktop Garmin program for updating firmware, but it is terrible. It is designed to work with every Garmin product (not just watches) and has a definite "design by committee" feel. Luckily, I don't need it. I think I would need to use it if I had one of the larger watches that supports offline maps.

The features I use the most:

- the clock

- sports tracking, step & stair tracking

- tap-to-pay (this is so nice)

- pulse

- the compass (sometimes I just want a cardinal direction when I'm disoriented)

The sleep tracking is interesting, though I don't need it (mostly it says I don't sleep enough).