These would be good additions to SwiftBar/BitBar.
Readit Newsincanus77 commented on Show HN: Port Kill – A lightweight macOS status bar development port monitor github.com/kagehq/port-ki... · Posted by u/lexokoh
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incanus77 commented on PHP: The Toyota Corolla of programming deprogrammaticaipsum.com/... · Posted by u/secstate
Yep. I was doing Perl CGI scripts at the time, and you often ran into deployment issues somewhere along the line of uploading the scripts via FTP, making them executable, and setting the permissions on any files that needed to be written. Building PHP into the web server instead of external CGI scripts eliminated a lot of that, so it was more likely to just work without some back-and-forth with a web admin to get things setup right for CGI to work. It wasn't the language, but the way it was deployed.
Yes! This was huge. You could go from coding to uploading to refreshing your application as fast as you could perform those actions. And don’t forget, with Perl CGI, you had to output the right Content-Type header (and two carriage returns) at the top of your outputted page content for the browser to even parse it correctly.
I wonder why it's not standard that you can simply connect two PC's to each other with a USB cable and have them communicate/transfer files. With same protocol in all OSes, of course. Seems like it should have been one of the first features USB could have had since the beginning, imho
I know there's something about USB A to USB A cables not existing in theory, but this would have been a good reason to have it exist, and USB C of course can do this
Also, Android to PC can sort of do it, and is arguably two computers in some form (but this was easier when Android still acted like a mass storage device). But e.g. two laptops can't do it with each other.
I realize you are asking for cross-OS, but Mac OS X was doing this in 2002 (and probably earlier) for PowerBook models with an ethernet cable between them. As I recall, iBooks didn't do this even if they had the port, but PowerBooks would do the auto-crossover, then Finder/AFP would support the machines showing up for each other.
The smackbook pro! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uvQTTPr9Rw
That's it exactly. I clearly remember the nonchalantness.
I wrote that software, called SeisMac. Someone figured out the Apple-private API for the Sudden Motion Sensor that parks your laptop's hard drive if it detects free-fall. Working from that, I wrote a free app that used the API to show three-axis acceleration graphs. I was proudest of the calibration utility, which had you tip your laptop on its side (with properly rotated dialogs!), and then on its screen.
People would send me recordings from all over the world (e.g. on a ship in the Drake Passage showing enormous surges). It was a lot of fun, and I even got an educational grant to improve it.
Big bummer when Apple switched to solid-state drives (well, a bummer for my one small reason...)
Awesome, the name rings a bell now! Thanks for that. Honestly didn't remember the software involved (nowadays, I'd mention it in the blog post).
Reminds me of the people who used their ThinkPad's vibration sensor to detect smacks on the machine, and rigged their X window manager to switch virtual desktops when smacked from the appropriate side, panning right when smacked on the left, and left when smacked on the right.
Oh, I vaguely remember someone hacking that for some sort of windowing back then on OS X!
This reminds me of how, twenty years ago, I used the PowerBook’s hard drive vibration sensor to rig up a seismograph to measure construction noise:
https://allthegooddomainsweretaken.justinmiller.io/2007/04/0...
incanus77 commented on The year of peak might and magic filfre.net/2025/07/the-ye... · Posted by u/cybersoyuz
I played the shit out of HOMM3. I bought it, though, only after sneaking plays in between customers while working at Radio Shack. We had some ~300MHz Compaq machines that Radio Shack had recently partnered with to sell and on slow days, it was a good way to pass the time.
incanus77 commented on Burning a Magnesium NeXT Cube (1993) simson.net/ref/1993/cubef... · Posted by u/leoapagano
On the '65 beetle we have, I always heard that the main culprit wasn't the fuel lines themselves, but the brass flange for the fuel hose being a (not great) press-fit into the zinc carburetor. And that's after the fuel pump, so if that flange comes out the loose end of the hose sprays gasoline all over the engine. It's not uncommon to tie that end of the hose on with some safety wire, just in case.
Makes sense. I'm talking mostly from the perspective of fuel injected Vanagons. Connections generally seem good; it's usually the hoses.