This is not a criticism but just an observation. I wonder how many of their members have any clue about what Calyx is about. Calyx is quite well known in the RV community where I suspect most members simply see themselves as "customers" for the T-Mobile internet service which is a "free" membership benefit. It got better recently because they now have a plan where you can put the SIM in your own router. There are very few other "unlimited" data options available for private non-business users that allow "bring your own device".
Readit Newsztetranz commented on A Letter to the CalyxOS Community calyxos.org/news/2025/08/... · Posted by u/pabs3
ztetranz commented on 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2025/07/... · Posted by u/svenfaw
In the most cases, you should imho skip the traffic lights all together and use a roundabout. Automatically balancing, can work to large capacities (not as large as traffic lights, but visit France if you need to see how much traffic they can handle). No fragile electronics, no power consumption, less maintenance, less accident-prone (really!).
Yes roundabouts generally work well despite the fact that many American drivers seem to have problems with them.
There are some traffic patterns where roundabouts don't do well. I've seen the following. Imagine a four way roundabout with north, east, south and west. Predominate rush hour traffic is towards the east. Heavy traffic entering from north. More entering from west. Most exiting at east with very little going around beyond west. Entering from south can be nearly impossible since they're waiting for a break from both north and west.
ztetranz commented on Websites are tracking you via browser fingerprinting engineering.tamu.edu/news... · Posted by u/gnabgib
Wouldn’t things like iCloud Private Relay and other VPN-ish things throw a wrench into IP-geo-based tracking? Seems like it’d make the targeting so broad as to be useless.
As an aside, we just spent a couple of weeks camping in our RV with a cellular router connected to a VPN at home. Now that we're back home, Google maps (on a non-GPS equipped device) and Roku still think we're at the campground several states away. I guess my GPS equipped tablet reported the new location of our home IP address. On past experience, it takes about a week to reset.
ztetranz commented on Show HN: Rotary Phone Dial Linux Kernel Driver gitlab.com/sephalon/rotar... · Posted by u/sephalon
There was a deep technical reason for it, too. I suspect I'm one of the very few living people that know what it was., so I'll share it with HN so the knowledge doesn't die :-)
A relatively early type of mechanical telephone exchange was the rotary exchange [0]. The pulses from the phone cause a clutch to connect the rotary driver in the exchange which then moved the switching stuff around (details can probably be inferred from the linked article). One of the issues with the rotary exchange is the pads of the clutch wear, leading to unreliable connections. Aotearoa/NZ had an existing number plan when they decided to install rotary exchanges. Some bright spark knew of the wear issue, and calculated that, given the existing number plan, if they had the 1 position on the dial giving 9 pulses (etc.) then the overall wear on the pads would be much lower and so the maintenance requirement would be less. And that's where it started.
And another fun fact. I believe Norway chose the same configuration for their rotary phones. I'm not sure if it was for the same reason, though.
Thanks for this. I'm a kiwi and wondered why we were different.
When friends started bringing pushbutton / cordless phones across from Australia, I was able to convert them to NZ numbering by reversing a few wires on the keyboard matrix. These generated pulses long before DTMF.
ztetranz commented on A brief history of the numeric keypad doc.cc/articles/a-brief-h... · Posted by u/ThomPete
A line early on in the article caught my eye:
> they serve the same functional goal — input numbers
Well, yes and no. Same as how, when it comes to data types, it often has to be pointed out to inexperienced developers that a phone "number" isn't a number in the mathematical sense - you can't add or multiply 2 of them together to get anything meaningful. It's an identifying string, that happens to use only digit characters. "123" in a telephone number is three individual unrelated digits, whereas "123" in a calculator represents the number one hundred and twenty-three.
So the functional goal isn't exactly the same. One is entering individual characters, but on the other you're more likely to be thinking "one hundred and twenty-three" as you type its digits.
It may or may not be related to the actual reason for the inversion of layout, but the subtle difference felt like a (possibly minor) error in the initial premise.
It's sounds silly when the Android auto in my car reads a text message. "Message from twenty four thousand, five hundred and thirty nine ..."
Sean Carroll's cat is awake or asleep.
ztetranz commented on In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio newslttrs.com/yes-in-the-... · Posted by u/spzb
The post man always bent our magazine and pushed it in the cat flap making the included disk useless (even though it was clearly marked "DO NOT BEND!"), so I remember having to type everything out and sometimes correct the typos introduced into the print version. Fun times.
Floppy disks DO NOT BEND!
Oh yes they do.
ztetranz commented on Ask HN: What less-popular systems programming language are you using? · Posted by u/fuzztester
I've been learning Elixir just for fun. I wish I was using it in my day job.
I use Skype for cheap international phone calls so I'm looking for a replacement. I have't tried it yet but Viber looks promising.
I saw a post on twitter about how game devs were using ChatGPT for localization and when you translated the text to English it said something like “as a chat assistant I’m unable to translate this concept” or an explanation instead of the translation.
This is exactly the sort of future I imagine with AI - not that the grunts on the ground will be sold on it but management will be convinced they can fire the people who know what they’re doing and replace them with interns armed with a ChatGPT subscription
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7702913.stm