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Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
111–120 of 443 posts
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#112I got a ZSA Voyager split keyboard and then spent weeks exploring custom layouts. The first question was QWERTY vs something better. Then there was layers and layer navigation. And should I swap out the key switches? And Keyboard Maestro.
Now I'm trying to abandon 30 years of muscle memory and typing at 4 wpm while I learn Colemak-DH. Maybe what I should really do is build a custom 34-key board...
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#113[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#114Self-hosting and homeserver stuff!
I started out when I got a new phone, and didn't know what to do with the old one. One of the ideas I had was a homeserver. Turns out it's not trivial to run Docker even on rooted Android phones, and you need a lot of kernel patching, tweaking and more and it still had issues after that.
The next step was when I figured out I could install postmarketOS on it, and I managed to flash it, SSH into it and set up Nextcloud for our photos and unbound as a recursive DNS for my home network. I thoroughly recommend postmarketOS, and the contributors are amazing as well.
I was however running out of storage, so I ordered an 256GB SD card, and set up mergerFS between it and local storage, worked fine.
After some time however, I got paranoid about having and old device with a LiPo battery constantly being charged in my home, so I decided to get a mini PC from Aliexpress and chucked a 2TB SSD in.
In the meantime, I discovered Immich, which turned out to be much better for photos than Nextcloud, and fell in love with it.
The final thing I added was a miniDLNA service to play my local movies and shows on my LG TV without having to bother with Plex/Jellyfin and reencode anything. Unfortunately, it kept disappearing after roughly 2 days of operation, so I just added a cron job to restart it at 5 AM.
For the time being, I don't need anything more and am turning my attention to other things.
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#115[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#116I've been interested in making a homebrew playstation 3 (childhood console :D) game for a while, and finally got an environment setup yesterday.
Ended up getting a simple rust function built, with some slight miscomplilations via wasm + wasm2c. Now I'm going to try to get graphics working.
There is a surprising amount of public code containing calls to sony's licensed SDK, if you know what to search for (Not to mention the SDK, which was, "obtained" dubiously). Fascinating stuff
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#117I have bought recently a bunch of ICs from 8080/8086 computers (mostly peripherals like PIC, I/O, Timers, memory) for next to nothing and i am trying to build a "retro" synth. It is way more fun and challenging than arduino or esp32, and not really complicated! A lot of instruments of the (Roland Juno, Oberheim Matrix 6, Akai AX-80) are using these chips too, so when in doubt i can take a peek at the schematics and move on with construction.
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#118[dead]
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#119I've been making milk punch for friends as a gift for years now. On a lark I wanted to figure out how to produce it in larger batches with less manual labor and discovered the tip of the iceberg of what is the field of beverage filtration and food chemistry. Turns out getting particulates out of a solution is a massive, massive industry with a large body of science, literature, and engineering practice behind it. EDI…
What's your milk punch recipe?
I got my first intro to milk punch from How To Drink: https://youtu.be/zr8dtT9siq4?si=akpHbgmLrtIcgXJk
I originally used their spec, but have since learned milk punch is pretty forgiving. It works really well for complex flavors that have a lot of tannins or volatile constituents (tea, wine, citrus, etc). I’ve found good black tea and a deep, sweet port tends to be a winning combination.
Done correctly, the resulting punch is shelf stable. That said, it has a neat trick: since no filtration is perfect, you end up with trace amounts of milk fats in the solution that continue to react with any left over volatiles. This leads to a smoother, rounder flavor over time. The last batch I made with a bergamot tea and port ended up tasting like a fruity, complex boba tea after a couple months of rest.
Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
#120Started like this. I had a few talks with startup founders interested in if they were hitting the market at the right time (their "why now"). Seeing more interest I ended up running a workshop on the timing topic for a few accelerators. I kept digging into what clues there are that a product will hit the market at the right time. Researched how the same products have been reintroduced again and again over years until finally they work out. Most surprising to me is how many people realize timing is important, yet how few have a framework to assess timing.
Fast forward a few years... I just wrote a book on the timing topic, called Why Now: How Good Timing Makes Great Products.