alphabetter
Joined 11 years ago
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Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Relevant previous topic:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43120186
"Test your adblocker" websites can harm users and the adblocker ecosystem (brave.com)
Comment · 1 year ago
Honestly, I think what TFA calls "Kagi’s implementation of Privacy Pass" is the integration of the feature into their server and clients, not the RFC (which they acknowledge), or the protocol implementation.
Comment · 2 years ago
Exactly this. As a British English speaker that works a lot with the US it was an early learning.
In British English a "scheme" has no negative connotations. It's commonly used in all kinds of legitimate places - for example the company you work at will have a "pension scheme".
In U.S. English it has a connotation that it is nefarious in some way.
Comment · 2 years ago
Not the OP, but I am opposed to the forced use of 2FA by GitHub for three reasons:
1) They are my repos. I should get to decide the appropriate level of security.
2) 2FA is often used as a pretext for identity harvesting which are then abused for other purposes.
3) If there is account recovery via email then the whole thing is a charade anyway.
Comment · 2 years ago
[2012] based on the copyright.
Note the disclaimer: "This course has not yet been updated to work with the Raspberry Pi models B+ and A+. Some elements may not work, in particular the first few lessons about the LED. It has also not been updated for Raspberry Pi v2."
And presumably not updated for the Pi 3,4,5 too!
Comment · 2 years ago
The 3A fuse is due to the way the UK wiring system works rather than what is optimal for this device.
All appliances in the UK have a fuse where they connect to the building wiring, normally in the plug, but can be in a fixed fuse-holder like this device. Somewhere in the process it was recognized that having lots of different fuse values would be confusing and awkward for users, so these fuses are the same size and always one of three standard values: 13A, 5A, and 3A. As noted elsewhere, you can buy these particular fuses in UK supermarkets and convenience stores.
If 3A is too high for the appliance then what the designer has to do is to fit it with a flex rated at 3A so that is protected by the fuse at the plug-end and then add additional, lower current, protection at the device end.
The UK system is clever and has subtle details like the standard fuse values which were good at the time it was introduced. But, it is also rather over-engineered, and not optimized for modern homes that have a lot of low-current appliances.
Comment · 2 years ago
Yes, the REM is the lookup table used in line 70.
Because BBC Basic had a built-in assembler it was pretty uncommon for BBC programs to inline machine code as raw data (unlike some other computers from BITD).
Comment · 3 years ago
It is software-related, but also physical: pong with the bats moved by exercise bikes: http://lushprojects.com/cyclepong2/
It's been around more than 15 years in various forms now, but people still love playing it. If you're in London it is at https://www.novelty-automation.com/
Comment · 3 years ago
4'17 mostly because I was laughing so hard.
The captcha with the hononyms and the selection boxes where you don't expect them is genius.
Comment · 3 years ago
I posted that rather quickly, so a bit more information for those who are interested (inspired by some of the comments on the thread).
I found Paul's sim by chance and really liked it because it was the first electronics sim that I had seen that was properly interactive and visual in its approach. I thought it was a great tool for building intuition about circuits. However, at a certain point it became clear that Java in the browser was on its way out, and this really needed to become a plug-in free experience if it was going to continue to be useful.
This was about the time that V8 was coming along and revoluationizing the performance of JS. Originally there was no license attached to the project, so I asked Paul if he was OK in me trying to port it to run on JS using the GWT framework. He was fine, but said he'd done old experiments with some of his other sims and found that JS wasn't performant enough, but with the strides in JS performance I was more optimistic.
I took the Jave code and commented just about everything out to get a minimal implementation of the standard LRC circuit just to see the performance. Once I was comfortable with that working I started adding every feature and every component back. Most of the work was replacing the Java graphics primitives with the equivalents from GWT.
Once the initial version JS version was out I did quite a lot of work mostly on UI features, especially the 'scopes. They were rather weak in the original and still not as good as I would really like, but much improved.
I have thought about monetizing and extending with EDA features, socials, etc. but its never been enough of a priority to do it. I kind of like its simplicity as it is.
It has been used a lot in education and a couple of teachers have contributed to the code to support their uses in classrooms.
It's kind-of amazing that it still has a very distinctive niche that nobody else has really gone after in quite the same way. I think a lot of that is because Paul's original vision and work on the Java version was so good.
There is a bit more context and some tutorials here: http://lushprojects.com/circuitjs/
Comment · 3 years ago
Yes, Paul did the original as a Java Applet. I did the port to run in the x-compile to allow it to run in the browser. After that we cooperated on it for a while. I stepped back a few years ago to focus on other things, but he's kept up with improvements. Kudos.
Comment · 3 years ago
And other home computer museums in Cambridge, Leicester, Derby, RMC (near Gloucester) to name a few.
I guess it will work for some sites, but it would be interesting to know what fraction.