Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson had a subplot where a main character used morse code on his keyboard, or some other layered encoding on top of the keyboard, to write software and communicate surreptitiously even while his screen was being recorded.
This reminds me of that section in the book Cryptonomicon, where our hero is programming on a laptop that he knows is being spied upon using Tempest and probably more, and is using clandestine input via morse code on the shift (?) key. I really enjoyed that book.
At risk of derailing the conversation, I finished Cryptonomicon earlier this year and really enjoyed it. Any recommendations for similar books?
Snowcrash? REAMDE was also good.
So nice to find someone else who enjoyed REAMDE.
My favorite of his, and I’ve read most of them.
The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is the sequel to Snow Crash, and is excellent and in many ways more relevant and subversive now, given that more or less Snow Crash has passed into retrofuturism as all the things kind of happened, like Jules Verne.
If you can get past the absolute slog of a beginning, Anathem is amazing.
yes, give it a try and try to get past the first few chapters. The first time I read it, the world building almost put me to sleep. Somehow I decided to give it another try on a long flight, and this time I grok'd the world building, and thoroughly enjoyed it all the way through to the end.
Anthem is my favorite Stephenson book, by far. My copy is the only book I own with a broken binding because I've read it too many times. I don't think that one gets enough attention, especially from a world building and technical perspective.
I thought Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir had a similar "feel", though it's more future-looking rather than past looking.
Daemon and Freedom(tm) by Daniel Suarez is another book (printed as two books, because reasons) that is ~1K pages but I've read 3 times (like Cryptonomicon).
Others in this thread have recommended The Baroque Cycle, but I just couldn't get into it. Ditto with Anathem. Maybe I should give them another try. However, I do love Diamond Age and Snowcrash.
The Baroque Cycle by the same author.
I didn't like Snowcrash nearly as much.
His Diamond Age is pretty good, too.
on the shift (?) key.
Disabling Windows accessibility features is an indication of anti-social behavior.
? even on one's own computer? I don't follow
It would follow from your statement that not disabling the screen lock is also anti-social.
Windows has a "sticky keys" accessibility feature that is enabled by pressing "shift" many times. I believe it's intended for people who have a hard time holding multiple keys at the same time.
It's something that would be easy to trigger accidentally if you are using the shift keys to play pinball or type morse code.
Any gamer who maps shift to something discovers this very quickly
Same on MacOS, press shift 5x to activate.
Was that not tongue-in-cheek?
The sticky-keys popup used to be a fun way to get past the screen lock used at computer shops etc. since it took focus off the screen lock window, which then let you use other hot keys. :D
Laptops are not generally social objects. The notion makes me a bit nauseous actually.
Not more nauseous than any other shared keyboard, I assume?
Welp, I know what I'm reading on my next flight :)
You won't regret it, classic book.
That book directly inspired my "blink my caps lock light when someone visits a web page" hack from nearly 8 years ago: http://lelandbatey.com/posts/2016/12/Making-lights-blink-for...
I think it was something to do with one of the keyboard keys with an LED if I recall correctly, so possibly caps/numlock.
Edit: seems I'm misremembering, just read - https://www.reddit.com/r/programmerchat/comments/3aknvw/pris... the LED was to output data, but they used another key to tap code
Haha. Tangentially - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Send_Me_to_Heaven -
"developed by Carrot Pop which measures the vertical distance that a mobile phone is thrown. Players compete against each other by seeking to throw their phones higher than others, often at the risk of damaging their phones."
Why would apple ban this? Seems like a great way to increase sales!
applecare abuse
Seems like the solution is right there. "Your claim was denied because we found and app installed on your device that promotes physical abuse."
Do you mean a browser with a HN comment section open?
The sensor was only needed to park spinning disks when the laptop was in free fall. Without the spinning disks they no longer fitted the sensor.
Also: Smackbook - https://stevenbock.me/Smackbook-Yosemite/ (more modern recreation or the original)
A way to switch virtual desktops on macbooks with a hard drive by slapping them on the side.
IBM had this sensor on their laptops too, around 2 years before Apple added it to theirs: https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/HDAPS#Other
NOTE: This script will not work with any Macbooks shipped with SSDs. This includes the Retina Macbook Pro and recent Macbook Air models.
"This update broke my workflow! Just add an option to reenable HDD smacking."
Also iAlertU. It used the sudden motion sensor to make a loud noise like a car alarm. The fun part was that you could use the remote to turn it off and that kept up with the theme.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4XZpU1zzWs&pp=ygUHaWFsZXJ0d...
My first phone was a RugGear RG930. If you think Nokia’s 3310 was built like a brick, then this thing may as well have been a rubberised titanium brick.
It was so solid I used to play ‘catch the phone’ with friends, and it ended up face down on concrete more times than I can count, but I don’t think it ever sustained so much as a scratch.
If the RG930 ran Android, I reckon I could go for the high score.
I had a rugged android phone from Blackview that was deemed to survive terrible stuff...I managed to drop it into the ocean.
Bought another one for my significant other after changing the screen of her samsung smartphone 3 times. She has used it for more than a year, it slipped from her jacket once from my motorbike. Someone found it 1h later in the middle of a roundabout face down with tire marks on the case. He saw it only because I was calling it and it has some notification lights at the back. Not a single scratch on the screen! Her only complaints is the quality of the photos taken with the camera.
I wish they were supported by alternative roms like lineageos or /e/os.
When I lived in Sierra Leone circa 2012, a lot of expats had phones like this. Ruggedized, could handle anything - dust, falling into a silty river, anything. Many a game of catch were played with them.
A colleague showed me their Caterpillar-branded phone, it was proper ruggedized like you see in construction radios and the like, big bumpers, plastic screen, he casually yote it onto the floor to demonstrate. Mainly so he can pass it to his kids if they're bored.
The current generation Cat branded phones look pretty regular, but are probably still much more rugged than most phones.
Postmodern decadence. Funny, yes. But more akin to slaves fighting in an arena. Yes, I know, machines have no feelings (yet), but it still seems excessive.
On the contrary, this is how humanity advances - one "hold my beer and watch this" moment at a time.
I had some smartphone, I think a Motorola, with a plastic screen instead of glass. Never shattered on me, but took scratches very easily. I think it may have died when it was dropped in a toilet? IDK, been a while, I think it was before nearly universal IPS waterproofing on phones.
All we need now is the "slam head on keyboard" version :)
Should be pretty straight forward to modify the code, just look for key presses of R, T, Y, U, D, F, G, H, J, V, B, and N.
You're assuming I have good aim.
And/or an easily targetable forehead :)
I think this is doable; and practice makes perfect.
I can enter passcode on my apple watch with my nose. It’s the smaller apple watch model. Nose is quite big.
I do this to my watch and phone, most often when cuddling the wife because one of my arms will doubtlessly be unavailable.
Nipples work too. They also register as valid Touch ID prints.
The original touch interface.
Swear. Gonna retire to the English countryside one day and just dump everything and open a pub:
"The Nipple & Clit"
Still counts as FaceID.
The nose as a pointing device ...
Gotta go find me a scientific study on that :)
Fantastic.
Did anyone else have nostalgia for the Thinkpad track point?
Better, I have one right in front of me!
Do they still make them or do you have an old one?
You have to zoom in a bit, but the knob is there for the ride.
https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/lenovo-thinkpad-p1-gen-...
The clit?
The Thinkpad TrackPoint mouse has over 20,000 nerve endings
Did you use the trackpoint for navigating an onscreen keyboard or something? Trackpoint gestures for the the alphabet?
No.
I recently had a ThinkPad Z13 for over a year. I tried earnestly using the TrackPoint on multiple occasions. It had inconsistent pressure pickup, bad haptics, and poor button integration.
I think I had a different opinion 25+ years ago, but that was an era where the laptop might ONLY have a TrackPoint, and its design was intentional---not an afterthought like the current gen.
In fact, one of the main selling points (reducing wrist strain) doesn't apply to the Z13, because the cold, hard, right-angled aluminum edge of the case digs into your wrists the longer you keep them in the same position.
This is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.
Beautiful wording.
So, I had to see where it was from, if anywhere else (Amazon.com):
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. This exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together.You are a liberal arts major at an American university in the first half of the first decade of this century. At every house party you attend, you see a copy of this book on every coffee table. You are aware that it is critically acclaimed and you participate in numerous conversations regarding its merits (or lack thereof). You have never read the book. You regret nothing.
My suspicion is, the same would work with Gödel, Escher, Bach in Silicon Valley circles.
"It's such a profound book with incredibly deep, life-changing insights about the hidden connections and symmetries of the universe. I really should read it some time."
A wonderful, wonderful read. An audacious title, but the book absolutely makes good on it.
well it will break something alright
I have no better comment and I must scream.
Need one for the car brakes, so I can communicate road rage with it.
I use the horn for this. For example, if someone cuts in front of me, I use Morse code to communicate the phrase "I am attempting to exercise empathy by putting myself in your shoes, and to be maximally charitable I am assuming that you're probably in a hurry, quite likely for a very good reason, such as perhaps your wife is going into labor, or you're running late for a big meeting, or your father in on his deathbed and you need to say goodbye to him for the last time, so I don't begrudge you for cutting me off, quite the contrary in fact, I wish you the best on your journey through life."
They then often use their horn to communicate something back to me, but sadly I'm not yet good enough at decoding Morse code to understand what they're trying to say.
Meta data like tone, timbre, amplitude also communicate intent and meaning beyond ‘dah’s and ‘dit’s.
I often wish for a way to communicate to other drivers via something that's a bit more clear than horn or blinking lights. Like one of those LED text things to say "oi mate your lights are off" or something like that.
Wasn't there a Cold War era communication method accomplished via a car with squeaky brakes? I think it was nicknamed "the duck"?
It even works offline, just slam harder for “over the air” transmission. Has a shorter range though…
There is a video of a guy shouting into a can which was changing the pressure of a piezo ... I think they picked it up in the shack but didn't mess with it much more. Completely passive I think.
Shorter range and shorter lifespan too :D
(Talk about "air gapped", eh?
This is how you destroy your hinge.
Not the Thinkpad in the video though
Yes, it's a shame that laptop manufacturers fail to account for the critical need of sending Morse code.
Yeah. build quality these days makes this really risky.
does indeed seem rather unhinged
RIP that person's laptop hinge. With use, hinges loosen, and I can't imagine that sort of stress would slow the process.
I like to imagine that the animated gif featured at the top is in fact in real time, not accelerated, and they have long passed the point where this is an issue.
Perhaps that was even the inspiration.
Not to mention the display cable, fortunately you can order new hinges and display cables by slamming the thing shut a few thousand times in the right cadence. This is not just a solution in search of a problem but also a solution to the problems it causes.
I think this is just to show off how strong a thinkpad x/t hinge is :)
absolutely brilliant solution for if your keyboard breaks and you REALLY need to send an email
Definitely needed when you must order a new keyboard
Also great discoverability. When you need to send that email so badly that you start repeatedly slamming the laptop lid out if frustration, you get presented with this extra input method.
Surely you can very discretely and ergonomically use this... if you move your lid jussttt above the point where it decides it is closed and then tap.
Yeah, "slam" seems a bit hyperbolic, if not click-baity.
Click the link and watch the video in the github read me.
It IS slamming the lid...
How was this posted both 2 hours ago and also on the 15th?
I got really confused when someone said something about "monday morning" but all the timestamps read 15th.
https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
There's a "second-chance" pool for posts which didn't get a lot of discussion but the moderators feel deserve more. When it's added to the front page again, the timestamps are updated to make it seem like a fresh post, presumably because people will be more likely to comment.
I think that happens when it comes in via the second-chance pool.
This distinctly reminds me of spacebar heating workflow [1].
I wonder if anyone has ever implemented spacebar heating?
On this topic, my Dell laptop detects that it's closed by having 1 (!) magnet in the screen, and a sensor on the case. So when I put my magsafe phone to the right of the touchpad, it thinks I've closed it and logs me out.
My MacBook has 2 magnets in the screen to avoid this issue.
Seems like they should have put the magnet in the case and the sensor in the screen.
Reminds me of knock-age, a perl script to send commands by "nudging" your thinkpad (hitting it not too strong).
The original link was at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/l-knock... but it's gone and archive.org doesn't seem to have a copy anymore :(
There's a fork at https://github.com/esantoro/knockage it seems
Recommended by 9 out of 10 independent laptop repair shops!
The ultimate hinge test
Gloriously pointless, yet frightfully well carried out.
I really appreciate an old style HN "Hacker" post!
This is why the universe loves humans.
Information finds a way [1]
[1] Around 28:00 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZX-1QybZEQ
Thanks for the Monday morning laugh. They should have used this method of communication in WWII instead of those signal lights! /s
And someone posted the other day that there was no way humans would be creating new works anymore because of AI...
It would be slighly more useful to have something that uses the microphone to detect when you physicially tap the laptop e.g. with your finger, it could be used to keep typing even with your laptop screen down, imagine a spy movie where the baddies close your laptop and put a gun against your head and you have to put your hands in the air, but you use your knee under the table to tap type "shred -vzn 0 /dev/xxx", poof, all data gone.
YES! This project, this is what the internet is for!
Gotta love the marketing!
Use a battle-tested encoding trusted by pilots, submariners, and amateur radio nerds
Technically accurate, yet entirely missing the point.
Wild, laptop would be broken so fast!
Kinda reminds me of the signal language typing, used computer vision for that.
A head hanging Morse code version would be interesting as well. Or perhaps a mobile phone accelerometer Morse code would be fun too.
I once bought one of those Lenovo something hybrids between touchpad and notebook, horrible design as it turned out. It had a docking type of connection with the keyboard, very sensitive to vibration of the desk. Since the touchpad piece had the CPU, and the keyboard piece had the external connectors, it was practically unusable. If you connected an external storage device, it would randomly disconnect (and possibly lose data) due to vibrations of the table. So yeah.. you could probably tap morse code on the table and have it detected on this device.
Emacs has a built-in command 'morse-region'. I wonder if I can do the reverse - make the laptop flap for a given string? I guess you just need to find a small but powerful enough servo.
love this and author's previous posts + work
How about the #headdesk'ing of Morse code on a touchpad?
You could probably get better "framerate" by just hearing the slamming sounds from the microphone instead of querying acpid.
Or using the webcam to look for darkness of the shutting.
version 2.0 will ship with the most requested feature: ability to also use the space bar
For when you want to spend more on a key than a Begali
Peak hacker news
Just what I've been looking for
Came across that book just recently in one of those free book libraries, tell me, was it a good read?
Yes, it's an amazing book. But skip the last 20 pages, they're deeply unsatisfying writing.
The Neal Stephenson experience.
That, and the 20-page grad-level dissertation on some esoteric subject randomly in the middle of the book.
The man’s truly one of the best out there, and I’m convinced a more aggressive editor would ruin him, but it wouldn’t be a Stephenson without some real head scratching authorial decisions.
So true about the endings! And he's actually aware of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE&t=654sIt’s not a meme, the man really can’t write an ending to save his life. But generally the pages other than the last ~25 make it totally worth it (other than that post-death MMORPG book, that one was terrible and just a slog the whole way through).
Have you read Termination Shock, and if so, how do you feel it stacks up? It was, regrettably, my first (and still only) Stephenson book, and I thought it was really quite bad in all the ways that matter to me. (The action was good, but I don't read sci-fi for the action.) But I see so much love for him in hacker circles online that I wave on whether or not I should give his more famous works some attention.
Termination shock wasn’t great, no - Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future was a much better work in that vein. I think Cryptonomicon is very good, I really liked Seveneves, Anathem is fantastic, and I liked REAMDE as well, as far as his latter day works go. Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are what made him famous and are both Very good, if a bit dated now.
Literally everything about that book except the main plot was fantastic. It read terrifyingly prophetic once he could peel himself away from whatever greek fable bullshit he was on about on the main thread.
Don't forget the cereals!
That, and the 20-page grad-level dissertation on some esoteric subject randomly in the middle of the book.
This made me smile because while I enjoyed Seveneves there was an entire interlude discussing swarms of spacecraft cooperating to avoid debris.
I still can’t quite place his digression on monads in The Baroque Cycle.
Pynchon always managed to integrate this tendency into the narrative much better. Stephenson is still worth it tho.
Cryptonomicon is one of the best reads on the planet, it's famous.
Is it now, though? I read it and didn't manage to get into it much, and don't really remember anything from it.
I think it's one of those works of art that were so revolutionary that they started a whole genre, but now they seem badly done and clichéd just because everyone has copied them and iterated on them.
I found it witty and somewhat educational, but man is it long. I read it on the kindle and when I thought that I must be getting close to the end, I had only read 30% of it. It takes some determination to get through.
Yeah, it's been a while since I read it, but I did find it to be a slog.
Some of the tech's a bit long-in-the-tooth (the whole data haven concept), but the genre was already well-established when the book turned up (Gravity's Rainbow (1973) in particular and postmodern literature in general). I, personally, enjoy it.
I got about halfway through and forgot I was in the middle of reading it. The story never really grabbed me. I say this as someone who usually rips through a book a week.
A lot of my guy friends have a crush on a lead character in it (not Elias or Elon, but a similar name?) and praise it extensively. I apparently read it one time and remember nothing about it, so YMMV but if you’re into hacker guys, you’ll apparently love it!
Enoch Root?
It is a story of technology and history. It grew out of the author's interest in the way we communicate, and also out of his interest in WWII legends. It's huge, and hugely readable. It's a very good read if the intersection of those things interest you.
I have read and can recommend everything by the author between and not including 'The Big U' and 'REAMDE'.
REAMDE disappointed me so much, that I haven't touched his later novels.
'Snow Crash' reads like a graphic novel, 'Anathem' is just unique and maybe in my fav top 10 (not considering 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' :), 'Cryptonomicon' + 'The Baroque Cycle' are slow but very rewarding.
'The Diamond Age', what can I say, do yourself a favour and start reading it now.
Sure I forgot one or two, it's been a long time.
I've read it probably a dozen times or more. I'm actually mid-way through it again after not having read it for a year or two.
I think it's still a great story. The technology is definitely dated.
There is also some language that will offend or make some people uncomfortable (Racial slurs epithets, among them).
If you're a computer nerd, yes, definitely.
There are plenty of people I wouldn't recommend it to, though.
Specifically, IIRC, the character used the "Scroll Lock" LED to blink out some coordinates in Morse, to avoid the location being displayed on-screen and thus captured by Van Eck phreaking[0].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking
… and, for input, tapped out Morse code on the space bar while viewing man pages so it looked like the character was just paging through documentation.
Jinx