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Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

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Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

#123

Post by indigochill »

Been tinkering with my personal site again for no particular reason.

1. Looked at what it would take to turn it into a sort of "pubnix" for some friends

2. ...which got me looking into how to set up Postfix to manage local emails (allegedly this works out of the box, but I must have screwed something up since I never did get my test messages from one user to the other)

3. Then on to looking at BBS systems, starting from Enigma 1/2. Didn't get too far into that since the theme customization scared me away (and not enough of my RL friends are nerdy enough to get into it)

4. Finally backing away from the pubnix thing again because of insufficiently nerdy friends (although one is humoring me in experimenting with SSB), I then instead set up a Synapse server to have my own identity in the Matrix ecosystem.

Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

#125

Post by chris_st »

Got a ARTinoise Re.corder (an electronic wind instrument, basically shaped like a recorder, but MIDI) for my wife. Works with an iOS app for basic sounds. She's spent very little time with it :-)

The REAL rabbit hole is the astounding amount, and quality, of AUv3 plugins for iOS. Sounds, effects, looping tools, MIDI things, just... wow. And almost all of them are under $20, and many are free! I've spent less on a dozen software toys than on the first two guitar pedals I got. And infinitely more powerful.

Check out this video of someone doing the looping thing way way way better than I'll ever be able to (but it's fun to work towards a goal). Software she's using is called Loopy Pro, another amazing thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1O0pwUMbnw

Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

#127

Post by datavirtue »

umvi wrote: post #78
poyu wrote: post #64

USB! I’ve tried and failed couple times in understanding how USB works under the hood, from electrical, to protocol, then classes, and also Power Delivery. This time around things seem to make more sense now. It started out as an ambitious goal to emulate an FTDI USB DMX converter with the ESP32-S2/S3, but realizing that might be too big a goal, so I’m starting small. I want to be able to make a custom device class o…

USB is a frighteningly deep rabbit hole. I thought it was going to be easy when I first dipped my toes into the USB stack but boy was I in for a shock.

I had a peek at the USB spec recently, no desire. I thought it would be trivial to even just enumerate USB devices on a Windows box. It is not.

Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

#128

Post by Arcuru »

I started by looking into LLMs outside of ChatGPT (self-hosting ollama, API services, etc.) I got annoyed that they all had their own 'chat' interface, or that all the chat interfaces were some bad rebuild of a chat application.

So I wrote https://github.com/arcuru/chaz to connect any LLM to Matrix so that I could use any Matrix client with any LLM.

That got me writing a Matrix bot account in Rust, and I couldn't find a simple bot framework so I split out a bot framework in https://github.com/arcuru/headjack

But _then_ I realized a really easy bot I could write that would also be very useful for me, and I wrote https://github.com/arcuru/pokem which is sort of a clone of ntfy.sh but using Matrix. Send yourself (or others, or a group) a ping on Matrix using an HTTP request or a simple CLI app.

Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

#130

Post by greensoap »

user_7832 wrote: post #36

For me, it's DIY audio. The thing about diy'ing audio (primarily speakers but also amps, DACs etc) is that you can get top of the line performance for a fraction of the market price. A $50,000 speaker setup that would bring tears to your eyes could be made for perhaps $5000. A DIY $500 kit can perform similar to a $2-3000 set of speakers. Open source amps with gerber files on github are amazing. The biggest reason it…

All that build up and not a link to be seen?!?! Where do I go to spend $ on a new hobby I didn't need?
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