Top all-time · #2026
Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat
Personal blog · blog.fosketts.netsystemshardwaredata
Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat is a personal blog at blog.fosketts.net about systems, hardware and data. Since 2009, 39 different Hacker News readers have linked it 46 times, most often “Total Nightmare: USB-C and Thunderbolt 3”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Understanding the accumulation of data
Most-linked posts?
- Total Nightmare: USB-C and Thunderbolt 36 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-10-29
- GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening, But They’re Almost Done2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-04-06
- /2015/10/06/the-best-mac-os-x-terminal-font-glass-tty-vt220/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-08-31
- /2011/07/05/mac-dropbox-encrypted-volume/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-10-08
- Why You Should Never Again Utter The Word, “CIFS” (2012)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-08-30
- /2011/06/06/datacenter-equipment-apple/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-06-08
- 2016 MacBook Pro USB-C/Thunderbolt Survival Guide2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-10-31
What Hacker News says?
It's a reasonable way to live your life, but it's worth noting that most WiFi smart bulbs and switches can be liberated with a not-unreasonable amount of effort: https://blog.fosketts.net/2020/05/29/liberate-wi-fi-smart-bu... Personally I benefit from being able to control the type of light and change it over the course of the day, and I've found a couple of uses for automatic switches which improve my life as well.…
Comment linking /2020/05/29/liberate-wi-fi-smart-bulbs-and-switches-with-tasmota/
on “Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by”Submitted Total Nightmare: USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 as a story · 814 points
HN discussionI couldn't understand why. I found this article echoing your experiences: http://blog.fosketts.net/2016/11/26/beware-usb-c-hdmi-adapte... Note that it ends saying "The Good News: DisplayPort Works I purchased a couple of USB-C to DisplayPort adapters from Monoprice and am pleased to report that they both work just fine. As hoped, these simple adapters natively and passively attach Alternate Mode DisplayPort from the…
Comment linking /2016/11/26/beware-usb-c-hdmi-adapters-flaky-2016-macbook-pro/
on “Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports”Submitted ZFS Is the Best Filesystem For Now as a story · 311 points
HN discussionI found a USB-C -> HDMI -> DVI-D -> monitor works for that situation. But the HDMI adapter matters. Some Dell adapters we had laying around the office are what worked for me here, but it was flakey (plug in multiple times - plug in multiple monitors in the correct order). If your monitor supports Displayport then that is the route you want to use. The MBP 2016 supports USB-C displayport alternate mode, and quality c…
Comment linking /2016/10/30/2016-macbook-pro-usb-cthunderbolt-survival-guide/
on “Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports”Submitted Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion as a story · 199 points
HN discussionOne single cable or one single port? I thought the problem with the USB Type-C port was that there is a myriad of different USB C cables that "fit" into the port but each cable has different capabilities and thus your device may only work with a certain USB C cable. http://blog.fosketts.net/2016/10/29/total-nightmare-usb-c-th...
Comment linking /2016/10/29/total-nightmare-usb-c-thunderbolt-3/
on “How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists”Submitted GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening, But They’re Almost Done as a story · 132 points
HN discussionIf you're on Mac just create a sparse encrypted DMG using Disk Utility, put it into Dropbox, bam you're done. http://blog.fosketts.net/2011/07/05/mac-dropbox-encrypted-vo... I prefer applications to focus on one thing and do it very well, and leave other orthogonal functionality to other applications or the OS to then do the other parts very well. In this respect Quiver is well designed, I tip my hat to the author.
Comment linking /2011/07/05/mac-dropbox-encrypted-volume/
on “Quiver: Programmer's Notebook for OS X”Submitted Why You Should Never Again Utter The Word, “CIFS” (2012) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionNice! The list of six items is a more concise read than https://blog.fosketts.net/2016/10/29/total-nightmare-usb-c-t... , which also raised some concerns about the profound differentness of many identical looking cables.
Comment linking /2016/10/29/total-nightmare-usb-c-thunderbolt-3/
on “How many kinds of USB-C to USB-C cables are there?”Submitted Fun with hard drives as a story · 4 points
HN discussionNot sure why your comment was down voted - http://blog.fosketts.net/2016/10/29/total-nightmare-usb-c-th...
Comment linking /2016/10/29/total-nightmare-usb-c-thunderbolt-3/
on “The new MacBook Pro is kind of great for hackers”Submitted Remove ROM to Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere's industry-wide confusion related to the USB-C plug USB-C != USB 3.1 https://www.extremetech.com/computing/197145-reversible-usb-... USB-C != Thunderbolt 3 http://blog.fosketts.net/2016/10/29/total-nightmare-usb-c-th...
Comment linking /2016/10/29/total-nightmare-usb-c-thunderbolt-3/
on “Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results”Submitted 2016 MacBook Pro USB-C/Thunderbolt Survival Guide as a story · 2 points
HN discussionRelated, and similarly awesome: SGI screen fonts: https://njr.sabi.net/2015/11/01/sgi-screen-fonts-converted-f... DEC VT220 font: http://blog.fosketts.net/2015/10/06/the-best-mac-os-x-termin... (related blog post as canonical site appears to be down)
Comment linking /2015/10/06/the-best-mac-os-x-terminal-font-glass-tty-vt220/
on “A collection of text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era PCs”Submitted Adding a Second Ethernet Port to an Intel NUC via Mini PCIe as a story · 2 points
HN discussionRight, and that's exactly what I'm referring to. See this article that got a lot of attention: http://blog.fosketts.net/2016/10/29/total-nightmare-usb-c-th... Or just look at the USB-C cables sold by Apple. There should be standardized icons on the cable denoting what the cable is capable of doing.
Comment linking /2016/10/29/total-nightmare-usb-c-thunderbolt-3/
on “Japanese toilet industry agrees to standardize complex bidet controls”Submitted A Fairy Tale of Two Storage Protocols as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHP machines to be specific. http://blog.fosketts.net/2011/06/06/datacenter-equipment-app...
Comment linking /2011/06/06/datacenter-equipment-apple/
on “Report: Apple building its own servers to prevent snooping”Submitted Google Spreadsheet supports Regex as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's kind of this: https://blog.fosketts.net/2012/02/21/cubix-ers-blade-server-... but for Raspberry Pi's and Nvidia Jetsons.
Comment linking /2012/02/21/cubix-ers-blade-server-system/
on “Turing Pi V2 is here”Submitted Undocumented Apple Core Storage commands in Lion as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat's more USB-C than Apple. http://blog.fosketts.net/2016/10/29/total-nightmare-usb-c-th...
Comment linking /2016/10/29/total-nightmare-usb-c-thunderbolt-3/
on “MacBook Pro Launch: Perplexing”Submitted Why is the coolest Apple rumour ever not yet slashdotted? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf you think that was bad, just listen to what Theo de Raadt had to say. "NFSv4 is a gigantic joke on everyone....NFSv4 is not on our roadmap. It is a ridiculous bloated protocol which they keep adding crap to. In about a decade the people who actually start auditing it are going to see all the mistakes that it hides. "The design process followed by the NFSv4 team members matches the methodology taken by the IPV6 pe…
Comment linking /2015/02/03/vsphere-6-nfs-41-finally/
on “NFS: The Early Years”Submitted Introducing SDXC and exFAT in Apple Mac OS X as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere's a lot of misinformation and half-truths in this article. To pick one example, the filesystem: yes, we're sadly not using ZFS but that's in all likelihood due to licensing restrictions, not because Apple thinks HFS+ doesn't need replacing. What Apple has done is introduce CoreStorage, a "storage virtualisation system" (see link below), which beyond allowing new features to be added now (e.g. full disk encrypt…
Comment linking /2011/08/04/mac-osx-lion-corestorage-volume-manager/
on “Apple Core Rot: Introduction”Submitted Compression, Encryption, Deduplication, and Replication: Strange Bedfellows as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
