qingcharles (u/qingcharles)

qingcharles commented on Notes on Gamma poniesandlight.co.uk/refl... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

turnsout · 3 days ago

The amazing thing is that it's one of the oldest fields of study when it comes to human perception, yet it's still an active space with tons of new technologies, techniques and discoveries.

If you dig deep enough into the "best" way to map HDR values to a monitor (HDR or SDR), you'll eventually reach active discussions on the ACES forum, with new techniques and transforms posted constantly.

qingcharles · an hour ago

You can lose an entire lifetime going down the rabbit hole of trying to really understand the full differences between HDR and SDR :p

qingcharles commented on A giant ball will help this man survive a year on an iceberg outsideonline.com/outdoor... · Posted by u/areoform

mikestew · a day ago

It's still published, I get a print issue probably every quarter, yeah. I flip through really quickly before it gets tossed in the recycling bin. Sometimes I flip quickly enough that it doesn't even make it into the house before it goes to recycling.

It used to be great, then turned into kind of an airport magazine (you know, the kind you'll read on the plane but not subscribe to), and after it got bought out it's garbage now (see above: I mean this literally). Personally, I'm extra miffed that they took Trail Running magazine with them.

Why do I continue to subscribe? Because along with Outside magazine they (I forget who "they" are, exactly) bought the Gaia GPS app which I use extensively. So I'm basically buying the Gaia subscription and get a shitty print magazine thrown in for free (oh, yeah, and access to their online edition, which redefines "garbage". It's awful, I could spend pages on the topic.) I am currently reevaluating how much I really use Gaia GPS, and what a suitable alternative would be. In many cases, Footpath (an HN user creation, IIRC) might do the trick.

qingcharles · an hour ago

I mistyped Outside in my comment. But now I went to check my recent magazine arrivals and it turns out I also have a print subscription still. They're happy to send it to you for free because then they can publish higher subscription numbers and get more money from the advertisers who are the only ones funding these things now.

qingcharles commented on A giant ball will help this man survive a year on an iceberg outsideonline.com/outdoor... · Posted by u/areoform

antonvs · 2 days ago

*how many once-legitimate media outlets…

qingcharles · a day ago

I used to religiously subscribe to Outdoor magazine in print. I had to go check if it was still being published [0] and it is, although it is perhaps quarterly now?

[0] Since so many magazines and newspapers are going out of business and just selling their domains to dogshit spam factories for the incredible Page Rank they have.

qingcharles commented on A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/selvan

andai · 2 days ago

>"But Joy had followed me back because she was curious, you know, and she was standing in the hallway. We turned around, and Joy says: 'Needs work,' and turned out and walked away."

This part reminded me of the Black Triangle (2004):

https://archive.ph/qqOnP

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=698753

qingcharles · a day ago

I really like this, thank you.

qingcharles commented on A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/selvan

kragen · 2 days ago

The popular notion that "Kodak invented the thing that killed them" is basically nonsense.

Steve Sasson's tale of technical struggle in 01975 at Kodak is real, but dozens of other people were doing the same thing at the same time at different companies, or in their dormitories, because at that point the problem of building a handheld digital camera had been reduced to a problem that one guy could solve with off-the-shelf parts. In fact, earlier the same year, a digital camera design was published as a hobbyist project in Popular Electronics, using a 32×32 MOS sensor, and commercialized as the Cromemco Cyclops. (You just had to keep it plugged in; you couldn't take it with you to the Little League game, even though it was small enough to lift in one hand.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco_Cyclops

The reduction of the problem to such a manageable size was the result of numerous small advances over the previous 50 years.

Landsat 1 was a digital camera that was initially planned in 01970 and launched into space in 01972; it just weighed a tonne, so you couldn't hold it in your hand. https://directory.eoportal.org/satellite-missions/landsat-1-... says:

> It quickly became apparent that the digital image data, acquired by the MSS (Multispectral Scanner) instrument, a whiskbroom scanning device, were of great value for a broad range of applications and scientific investigations. For the first time, the data of an orbiting instrument were available in digital form, quantified at the instrument level - providing a great deal of flexibility by offering all the capabilities of digital processing, storage, and communication.

Landsat 1 was built by General Electric, RCA, NASA, and subcontractors, and the MSS digital camera component in particular was designed by Virginia Norwood at the Hughes Aircraft Company, not at Kodak.

Ranger 7 in 01964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger_7 was an electronic camera that was successfully launched into the moon and returned close-range photos of it over radio links, but, as far as I can tell, it wasn't a digital camera; the RF links were analog TV signals.

Handheld electronic cameras, for a very strong person, might date back to Philo T. Farnsworth's Image Dissector in 01927 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Experiments_... or Zworykin's Iconoscope in 01933 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Iconoscope, but in practice these were only reduced to handheld-plus-backpack size in the 01950s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_video_camera#Hist.... Farnsworth was at the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation, not at Kodak. Zworykin was at Westinghouse and RCA, not at Kodak.

The first experimental digitization of a signal from an electronic camera was probably done by Frank Gray at Bell Labs, not at Kodak, in 01947, for which he invented the Gray Code. To be able to keep up with live full-motion video data, his analog-to-digital converter was a sort of cathode-ray tube with a shadow mask in it with the code cut into it; this is described in patent 2,632,058, granted in 01953: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a3/d7/f2/0343f5f....

The video camera tubes that were the only way to build electronic cameras up to the 50s, and which made the cameras large and heavy, were supplanted by CCDs like the 100×100 Fairchild MV-101 that Sasson used in his prototype at Kodak. The CCD was developed by Smith and Boyle at Bell Labs, not at Kodak, in 01969–70: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge-coupled_device

However, any DRAM chip is also an image sensor, which is why they are encapsulated in black epoxy to prevent them from sensing light; without the CCD, we would have had CMOS image sensors anyway just because of the light-sensitivity of silicon. In fact, the Cromemco Cyclops used just such a chip.

The fundamental thing that made digital cameras not just possible but inevitable was microelectronics, a technology which owes its existence in 01975 to a long series of innovations including the point-contact transistor (Bardeen and Brattain, 01947, Bell Labs, not at Kodak); the junction transistor (Shockley, 01948, Bell Labs, not at Kodak); the monolithic integrated circuit (Noyce, 01959, Fairchild Semi, not at Kodak); the planar process (Hoerni, 01959, Fairchild Semi, not at Kodak); the MOSFET (Kahng and Atalla, 01959, Bell Labs, not at Kodak); the self-aligned silicon gate (Faggin, 01968, Fairchild Semi, not at Kodak); and, as mentioned in the article, the microprocessor. The microprocessor was overdetermined in the same way as the handheld digital camera, and arose basically simultaneously at RCA, Motorola, TI, and Intel, but whoever we decide invented the microprocessor, it certainly wasn't done at Kodak.

qingcharles · a day ago

It's interesting that you differentiate between analog and digital electronic cameras.

My first "digital" camera was one of the Canon Ion ones that use floppy discs but actually record the photos in analog, so technically just an "electronic camera", but was marketed as a "Still Video Camera" (!). You had to use a video capture card to get the images into the PC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Floppy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G_1uy_7B5w

qingcharles commented on A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/selvan

OgsyedIE · 2 days ago

How did you first come to use a five digit variation of the Gregorian calendar?

qingcharles · a day ago

https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an...

qingcharles commented on Notes on Gamma poniesandlight.co.uk/refl... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

tadfisher · 3 days ago

With "unmanaged sRGB" mode turned on by default, because look at the vivid colors!

Apple has its faults but the out-of-the-box display quality is second to none.

qingcharles · 3 days ago

The nice thing about Apple owning the whole stack is the color management is pretty decent. Really good for testing your stuff to see how it would look if everyone had calibrated displays with the correct settings all the way through the entire software stack.

I keep a janky 10 year old display hooked up so I can drag my content over to it and see how bad it's going to look on everyone else's systems.

qingcharles commented on Denial of service and source code exposure in React Server Components react.dev/blog/2025/12/11... · Posted by u/sangeeth96

theogravity · 3 days ago

You need to update again.

qingcharles · 3 days ago

My Umami stats box got "pwned" about 15 mins after the last CVE was published and I spent an hour or so cleaning up that mess and upgrading everything. Not looking forward to doing it again today.

qingcharles commented on The stack circuitry of the Intel 8087 floating point chip, reverse-engineered righto.com/2025/12/8087-s... · Posted by u/elpocko

lisbbb · 5 days ago

I made my Dad buy me a 387 math coprocessor when I was in college because I was taking math and physics courses but I bet none of the software I used ever even accessed that chip. It was more about the empty socket on the mobo looking out of place.

qingcharles · 3 days ago

I had to look up which PC games had an option to use the x87:

- Vette! - Falcon 3.0 - Quake

And some others:

https://www.mobygames.com/attributes/attribute/115/

Apparently the 87/287/387 weren't that good as a gaming co-pro as the marshaling of the data to/fro from the CPU was too slow. It was a lot better on the 486DX onwards, I guess.

qingcharles commented on Nokia N900 Necromancy yaky.dev/2025-12-11-nokia... · Posted by u/yaky

rboyd · 3 days ago

is this the phone Val Kilmer had in the movie The Saint? badass phone

qingcharles · 3 days ago

Yes! I was so excited he had that phone in the movie.

They even include an owner in-joke, which means someone in the production must have owned one of these phones. Everyone I lent the phone to would pick it up the "wrong" way -- they would put the external screen to their face, like every other phone. But the mic and speaker were on the back. I had to quickly find the scene in the movie here:

https://imgur.com/a/hojf5DZ