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This sounds awesome. Did you ever filmed it working?

Sadly, I did not. I have the source code on an old laptop somewhere. I was disheartened when I considered productizing it and discovered just how deep of a patent tarpit I was dealing with.

It's on my list to revisit in the future. At this point, most of the patents are coming up on expiration, and it would make for a great open source project. Hardware has gotten much better over the subsequent years; there are nicer lower power solutions with integrated Bluetooth LE as well as other low power wireless technologies.


Exactly my thoughts! Where is the youtube video? :D I really want to see it. :)

PDF is also a lot less powerful, purposefully so. You can start an infinite loop just by double-clicking a PS file, for instance.

It is extremely useful to have a full programing language as a file format, though.

I miss macOS’s Preview.app auto-converting PS to PDF when double-clicked. It was a way to easily distribute a document that could randomize question orders each time it opened, print multiple bingo cards from a single file, etc.

The stack-based and reverse Polish notation thing was also fun.


You could have made a deliberately restricted subset of PS without going all binary.

Btw, doesn't PDF include Javascript these days? So you can still randomise stuff at view-time in a PDF. See https://th0mas.nl/2025/01/12/tetris-in-a-pdf/


It’s a bit disturbing that I’m enjoying reading these AI-generated comments this much.

Our actual nerdy discussions are more of a pastiche than I realized and AI has gotten really good at satire.

This is pure gold.


This is competing with “Hey [voice assistant] remind me of…” or an automation you can assign to the quick action button of your phone.

Open source hardware is very cool but phones have already taken most of our portable needs. It needs to be extremely compelling to justify another thing to carry, charge, update, etc.


> I've never been happy with a trackpad: they feel too imprecise

Everything non-Apple is. Apple's trackpad are great and have been for decades. I’ve done professional image editing on the go even with the tiny by today’s standards PowerBook G4s trackpads.

The real tragedy of our industry is that Apple got the basics right a few decades ago but seems determined to make their OS worse for pro user with every release. Yet no one else seems competent or willing to take on the challenge.


I see this comment about how awesome Apple Trackpads are all the time here, and just assumed I was missing out because I'd never used a MacBook. But I got given a MacBook Pro recently for work, and I'm super underwhelmed. The trackpad on it is no better or worse than any other trackpad I've used.

> The trackpad on it is no better or worse than any other trackpad I've used.

Compared to the thinkpad trackpad, it is light-years ahead. It is also more robust - functions with a little bit of dirt/oil/dirt/water. Get some oil on the thinkpad trackpad and you need to spend 10 mins wiping it away for it to work without driving you nuts.

Even hardcore thinkpad fans have grudgingly admitted to the superiority of the Macbook trackpad. Check the thinkpad forums to see their envy.


Part of their magic is the integration with the operating system in the form of gestures. Their UI for discovering those used to be stellar; every gesture had a little video preview. Right now I'd describe it as just okay. Check the 'trackpad gestures' section in system settings, or this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102482

The gestures are there in KDE already https://github.com/NayamAmarshe/ToucheggKDE

Touchegg kinda sucks (gestures are not 1:1 but rather just "triggered"), and you also don't need it. KDE and Gnome (as well as some WMs like Niri) have native touchpad gesture support on Wayland. Using my touchpad for history navigation also works flawlessly on Firefox with two fingers (essentially just horizontal scrolling).

I’m sure they manage to hit 120fps smoothly too just like MacOS? …

I find it worse, because it's far too big for me... the thinkpad T series one is acceptable.

What I'd want in a hack laptop is a full size TKL keyboard (and full height, or close), with a trackpoint (or 2 -- add one near the arrow keys).


Please provide evidence for that proof.

Which is why macOS command key is such an undervalued nicety. One key for GUI stuff, one for command-line stuff.


> In fact, the last meaningful change to my config was 6 months ago.

I know that's supposed to convey restraint, but it seems too much fiddling to me. But I've been using Vim for decades, so I only touch my .vimrc when something breaks.


That was available on previous versions as well. It gives the OS a System 7 vibe.


Ironically, Cloudflare is preventing me from reading the site:

  Sorry, you have been blocked
  You are unable to access rickconlee.com


Out of curiosity do you know why Cloudflare has blocked you? Browser integrity check, IP reputation, etc? I'm trying to have more lax settings for my static website, and would love to make sure it's as accessible as possible.


Likely country blocks in this case, can't have the mean Europeans read the precious content. Works fine with a US VPN (bad IP reputation), doesn't work with my german local provider (good IP reputation).


Works fine from Norway, so probably not a country block. Site blocking EU usually block Norway as well.


Working in the UK too. Also works with a VPN via Portugal, France, Netherlands, and Denmark. Only got blocked when accessing via Brazil.


Same here. My German IP is blocked.


From my experience with Cloudflare, hard blocks are either caused by something that is similar to known exploits or by the site operator blocking countries/ip ranges. Everything else it's the annoying captcha or the less annoying "managed challenge" (usually a quick check before loading the page or a request to manually click a box).


I'm blocked on Firefox on Ubuntu 25.04, on a German residential FTTH line, and I'm also blocked with Firefox and Chrome on Android 15 over 5G.


For me it's just visiting the site from my phone with a very typical German network provider (o2). Just followed the hacker news link ...


No idea. Vanilla desktop and mobile Safari, cable and 5G, all blocked.

Cloudflare Ray ID: 98d7e0b319f3f390


I have also been blocked. We are probably in a country where the author has decided to block us on CloudFlare.


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