HN user

jfoucher

1,403 karma

Studied Yacht design in Southampton, taught sailing, converted to software development 15 years ago, tinkering with electronics in my spare time. Living in the sticks in the south of France.

https://jfoucher.com My blog https://planck6502.com A 6502 computer I designed https://jfoucher.fr Some videos I made (in french)

Posts86
Comments104
View on HN
acoup.blog 26d ago

Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying for It

jfoucher
118pts33
www.youtube.com 3mo ago

They can fly 200 miles with no fuel - Tom Scott [video]

jfoucher
3pts1
www.youtube.com 3mo ago

New Tom Scott video–I helped break a 142-year-old bell, and that's okay [video]

jfoucher
1pts1
www.youtube.com 11mo ago

Machine Yearning (4096-byte album) [video]

jfoucher
1pts0
www.youtube.com 1y ago

Kaleidoscopico (A Demo for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2) [video]

jfoucher
1pts0
github.com 2y ago

DOS Subsystem for Linux

jfoucher
20pts2
en.wikisource.org 2y ago

The First Voyage Round the World/Pigafetta's Account of Magellan's Voyage

jfoucher
2pts0
www.youtube.com 2y ago

AT&T Archives: The Unix Operating System [video]

jfoucher
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 2y ago

Show HN: Inventronic, an electronics parts inventory management webapp

jfoucher
1pts0
www.systeme-de-design.gouv.fr 2y ago

French Governement Design System

jfoucher
1pts0
acoup.blog 3y ago

The Great War: Western Front, a Gain of Inches

jfoucher
1pts0
planck6502.com 3y ago

Using CompactFlash card as mass storage on 6502 based computer

jfoucher
2pts3
acoup.blog 3y ago

The Nitpicks of Power, Part II: Falling Towers

jfoucher
2pts0
acoup.blog 3y ago

Why Rings of Power’s Middle Earth Feels Flat

jfoucher
5pts0
xkcd.com 4y ago

Earth Temperature Timeline

jfoucher
21pts4
web.archive.org 4y ago

Show HN: My first website ever, just out of college (1999)

jfoucher
26pts6
github.com 4y ago

Gearboy, a cross-platform Gameboy emulator (iOS too)

jfoucher
1pts0
acoup.blog 4y ago

Nuclear Deterrence 101

jfoucher
15pts0
solar.lowtechmagazine.com 4y ago

How to build a bike generator with control panel

jfoucher
112pts102
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

My MacBook Pro M1 14' emptied it's battery overnight

jfoucher
1pts3
github.com 4y ago

Show HN: Jimmy – A Gemini Client for macOS

jfoucher
4pts0
electrek.co 4y ago

First flight of Candela’s upcoming C-8 flying electric boat

jfoucher
1pts0
shademap.app 4y ago

Map of shadows at any place and time

jfoucher
3pts4
thedailywtf.com 4y ago

CodeSod: A Dash of SQL

jfoucher
1pts0
www.phparch.com 4y ago

Education Station: PHP Is the Worst

jfoucher
5pts0
github.com 4y ago

Show HN: A Commodore Vic-20 Emulator on the Raspberry Pi Pico

jfoucher
5pts0
github.com 5y ago

Show HN: A MOS Kim-1 Simulator for iOS and macOS

jfoucher
4pts1
www.applefritter.com 5y ago

Applefritter's 100-Year Plan

jfoucher
1pts0
jfoucher.com 5y ago

Show HN: Planck 6502, an open hardware extensible retro computer

jfoucher
10pts1
github.com 6y ago

First project in Rust – 6502 emulator

jfoucher
2pts0

I used to work 5 days a week, 9 am to 2pm. I quite liked it, but my employer would often call or ask for "urgent" stuff to be down after my hours, which meant I could not be fully present for family or whatever I had planned. I have now switched to a 3 days workweek at another job, and I find it much easier to set effective boundaries. If I'm not there I'm not there and that's it. I don't think I could ever go back to working 40 hour weeks to be honest. When do you get anything personal done?

Sailcargo 3 years ago

I used to be a naval architect, and I completely agree with you. This type of design is extremely inefficient for cargo delivery. I think it is unrealistic to expect to be able to even remotely compete with diesel cargo ships. As another commenter said, the crew are in fact paying passengers (I have not verified this) which means this is actually a cruise ship, which makes a lot more sense. It must be a great experience. In my mind, the only way sailing ships can come back as work boats is if a way is found to make them nearly automatic and space efficient. In my mind this means large steel ships, not dissimilar to regular cargo ships, but with automated kite sails (e.g. https://skysails-marine.com/) as they do not tend to tip the ship over like regular sails do.

My car was behaving strangely recently. Sometimes when I gave it the beans it would pop up a flurry of scary error messages about the engine, that I had to take it to the mechanic to have it checked out and so on.

500 € later and the mechanic could not fix the issue.

Other times, just turning on the engine it would complain that some filter was almost full. And once, on a longer than usual trip, it gave up on me in a pretty steep incline and I had to stop on the side of the road, let it cool down a while, and turn it on again and it worked mostly fine if I didn't accelerate too much.

Then a few weeks ago it did not start at all. So I measured the battery and it turned out it was toast. I had a friend bring me to buy a new one and swapped it in.

The car started fine. But incredibly, it never again displayed any error messages and seems to be completely fixed!

Not really phone related, but yeah, sometimes it can be (surprisingly) just the battery...

Hi, I just wanted to show my latest project to you fine folks. It's an emulator / simulator (I'm never quite sure which one is correct) for the MOS KIM-1 microcomputer [1]

It runs on iOS devices (from version 9.0 up) and on macOS (from version 10.15 only unfortunately)

You can have the basic interface of a hexadecimal keypad and 6 led digits, but I have also added a serial terminal to it.

From the serial interface, you can load paper tapes (one of the media the KIM-1 used to save data). It's a fairly easy format to work with and is detailed in the original KIM-1 manual. Basically you just type L when in serial mode, and choose a file to import with the button just below the "screen"

I have also added some help which hopefully will get you going if you don't have experience with the KIM-1. I basically reproduced the start of the original manual, modified in a similar style where necessary.

The mac version works, but it's only an automatic "translation' of the iOS versions, and as such it has a few quirks.

The mac version is available as a release in the github repo, but since I don't have an Apple developper account at the moment, you will have to build the iOS app yourselves with Xcode :( Also, I'm not sure if Apple would approve that sort of application.

Anyway, I hope someone likes it and I'm all ears for your feedback.

Thanks.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1

I tried signing up and I got a collection of most useless error messages, such as Unauthorized, Forbidden, Email is in use and so on. The Email is in use one does not seem so useless, but it really is if you get it when you try again with the same email address after getting one of the other messages...

This is definitely the best site about motorcycle repair and maintenance I was able to find when resurrecting my old Honda. His style and instructions are clear and to the point, and he takes care to make sure you can do everything with regular tools, even going so far as to show you how to build special tools you might need for your bike. I actually downloaded the whole site with wget out of fear it might go missing some day... An absolutely essential website if you have a bike that is no longer under manufacturer's warranty.

So if you don't have massive amounts of engineers and test equipment to invent / develop new things that give you a performance boost for one year then you don't have a chance of winning. Doesn't seem like a very clever way to cut costs to me... Well, maybe it does cut costs, but it also prevents any small team from ever winning.

The only effective solution I have found so far to prevent my cat from hunting too many small animals is to have her wear a bell. Is seems that prey are scared away and manage to escape. Before we put it on we used to find dead mice, lizards and birds everyday in the garden or in front of the door...

I absolutely loved autocad for this. One hand on the keyboard, one on the mouse is an easy way to double your productivity. The speed at which you could draw things was amazing. I had a custom alias file with most commonly used shortcuts and the enter key was bound to right click which removed the need to move your left hand over the keyboard. This was in the 2000. Sadly the more recent versions I have tried make this harder to do. If I hadn’t switched career I’d still be using autocad 2000 !

100% agreed. Automation both requires capital and reduces ongoing expenditures due to salaries, which has the combined effect of a higher barrier to entry for people launching a new business where high automation is required to be competitive and at the same reduces redistribution of the value added. So it’s not so much that money is funelled to the top, but maybe more like it stops trickling down...