Why Plain Text Is Still One of the Best Technologies We Have
45 by speckx | 10 comments on Hacker News.
Monday, 5 October 2026
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Nightwatch – a Mac menu-bar app that tells you when tonight is clear
Show HN: Nightwatch – a Mac menu-bar app that tells you when tonight is clear
24 by delphidolphin | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Here in the north of England clear nights are at a premium, and it's never guaranteed that you'll be able to see anything but cloud. That's why I developed Nightwatch, so that I could be notified when one of those precious few nights where I could see into the heavens was available. Finding out whether tonight was worth setting up meant reading forecast charts every evening, usually to learn that it was not. Nightwatch does that reading for me. It sits in the Mac's menu bar and refreshes the forecast every 30 minutes. An hour before sunset it sends one notification, and only if there is an unbroken run of clear sky in astronomical darkness long enough to image in. Otherwise it says nothing: no news means "clouds". I hope this is useful for other hobbyist stargazers too! When I was a child I wanted desperately to be an astronaut or a dinosaur. I'm now old enough to be the latter and was born in a country where the former was never an option. I've had a fascination with the stars since a a friend of my father gifted me a telescope, and have faded memories of sharing time with my father staring at the stars. My father passed away a few years back and the memory of those nights came back, along with the want to share the same experience with my kids and grandchild. The app uses two forecasts: Apple's WeatherKit is the main source and Open-Meteo is a second opinion. When they disagree, the alert says so instead of averaging them. Thin high cloud counts for half. Stacking many short frames works through a veil of cirrus, so treating it as full cloud threw away usable nights. It works on your own horizon: hills come from terrain data, and you set the houses and trees in each direction, so they are accounted for when it says what is up. It works out, a year ahead, when the Moon will pass in front of a planet, a bright star or the Pleiades as seen from your site. You don't need an account. What leaves the Mac is the coordinates of the place being forecast, sent to the forecast and sky-survey services listed in PRIVACY.md. Limits: Mac only, and the aurora alerts are UK only. The worldwide light-pollution data is new this week. I have checked it against Britain's finer grid and a handful of cities, so I would especially like to hear from people elsewhere whether the darkness it suggests for your site looks right.
24 by delphidolphin | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Here in the north of England clear nights are at a premium, and it's never guaranteed that you'll be able to see anything but cloud. That's why I developed Nightwatch, so that I could be notified when one of those precious few nights where I could see into the heavens was available. Finding out whether tonight was worth setting up meant reading forecast charts every evening, usually to learn that it was not. Nightwatch does that reading for me. It sits in the Mac's menu bar and refreshes the forecast every 30 minutes. An hour before sunset it sends one notification, and only if there is an unbroken run of clear sky in astronomical darkness long enough to image in. Otherwise it says nothing: no news means "clouds". I hope this is useful for other hobbyist stargazers too! When I was a child I wanted desperately to be an astronaut or a dinosaur. I'm now old enough to be the latter and was born in a country where the former was never an option. I've had a fascination with the stars since a a friend of my father gifted me a telescope, and have faded memories of sharing time with my father staring at the stars. My father passed away a few years back and the memory of those nights came back, along with the want to share the same experience with my kids and grandchild. The app uses two forecasts: Apple's WeatherKit is the main source and Open-Meteo is a second opinion. When they disagree, the alert says so instead of averaging them. Thin high cloud counts for half. Stacking many short frames works through a veil of cirrus, so treating it as full cloud threw away usable nights. It works on your own horizon: hills come from terrain data, and you set the houses and trees in each direction, so they are accounted for when it says what is up. It works out, a year ahead, when the Moon will pass in front of a planet, a bright star or the Pleiades as seen from your site. You don't need an account. What leaves the Mac is the coordinates of the place being forecast, sent to the forecast and sky-survey services listed in PRIVACY.md. Limits: Mac only, and the aurora alerts are UK only. The worldwide light-pollution data is new this week. I have checked it against Britain's finer grid and a handful of cities, so I would especially like to hear from people elsewhere whether the darkness it suggests for your site looks right.
Sunday, 4 October 2026
Saturday, 3 October 2026
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Our space game has a built-in RISC-V emulator that runs Linux
Show HN: Our space game has a built-in RISC-V emulator that runs Linux
26 by nor-and-or-not | 9 comments on Hacker News.
(Edit: original URL was https://againstallodds.games/ , but we've switched it to https://againstallodds.games/blog/2026/10/03/our-risc-v-emul... in response to user requests for explanation.) We're a tiny indie studio, all with a background in the demoscene and for about 3 years now we're developing a space planet terraforming game called SEEDS - Echoes Beneath the Sands. Our protagonist Naxiah is stranded on a small, desolated planet. You're working for an intergalactic distributor of seeds and terraforming equipment, to kickstart new planets in far away galaxies. You must deliver seeds and utilities to an unchartered region, but on your way, you crash on a small planet. Luckily, you have some equipment with you in the ship, so you're able to spawn a base and survive. But for how long? And is the planet really deserted..? :) Well, of course not, there are aliens and other space creatures. And of course, there's ROBO RB-23, which accompanies your adventure. The game is written in Object Pascal and uses our own game engine PasVulkan, our own physics engine, as well as our own RISC-V 64-bit emulator PasRISCV. We love to build stuff, a lot of these things are FOSS. The emulator is quite complete (even with RVV, but that's way too slow emulated to be useful) and runs a stock kernel (6.18.3 as of today). We're using Alpine Linux for our base distribution. All our in-game programs to interact with the planet are native RISC-V Linux programs. We also have our own (free and open source) scripting language POCA (class and prototyped based, JS/Lua inspired, which makes it quite easy for us to script things like HUD, animal behaviour, our story flow graph, etc. We have most of the wiring ready for players to be able to program and reshape and populate the whole planet in automation, although it's not our primary concept for the game (building stuff by hand, making the planet beautiful is also fun). As it's a normal Linux system, you'll be able to use Ruby, Python, or even Rust, C, C++, and Go to change and automate your world. We're also thinking of making a bunch of small games which you can play inside the game, in the base on a computer, on an arcade machine, or in the spaceship. And of course, it also runs DOOM. We already prototyped a small 2D space shooter and a small arcade game, both playable within the game. We also feature a table with hologram games to be played, e.g. chess and a certain block game. We also plan to make this hologram game engine available from the computer, which means, you'll even be able to program own hologram style games. We generally want to make the in-game computer more hackable in future, so that people can create and share their own little games. Currently, it's only a sandbox game (with beginnings of automation), to build stuff with our pre-made items. You can also assemble these to other, ready-made and shareable bigger items. This is the foundation for us to further develop survival and complete our story mode. Our game is still under active development, and we finally got our Steam page ready. We have tons of other things planned, but right now, it's more about polishing and quality for the Early Access. You can watch some videos and screenshots on our website. And we'd love to read your thoughts about his. It has been quite a ride, so far..
26 by nor-and-or-not | 9 comments on Hacker News.
(Edit: original URL was https://againstallodds.games/ , but we've switched it to https://againstallodds.games/blog/2026/10/03/our-risc-v-emul... in response to user requests for explanation.) We're a tiny indie studio, all with a background in the demoscene and for about 3 years now we're developing a space planet terraforming game called SEEDS - Echoes Beneath the Sands. Our protagonist Naxiah is stranded on a small, desolated planet. You're working for an intergalactic distributor of seeds and terraforming equipment, to kickstart new planets in far away galaxies. You must deliver seeds and utilities to an unchartered region, but on your way, you crash on a small planet. Luckily, you have some equipment with you in the ship, so you're able to spawn a base and survive. But for how long? And is the planet really deserted..? :) Well, of course not, there are aliens and other space creatures. And of course, there's ROBO RB-23, which accompanies your adventure. The game is written in Object Pascal and uses our own game engine PasVulkan, our own physics engine, as well as our own RISC-V 64-bit emulator PasRISCV. We love to build stuff, a lot of these things are FOSS. The emulator is quite complete (even with RVV, but that's way too slow emulated to be useful) and runs a stock kernel (6.18.3 as of today). We're using Alpine Linux for our base distribution. All our in-game programs to interact with the planet are native RISC-V Linux programs. We also have our own (free and open source) scripting language POCA (class and prototyped based, JS/Lua inspired, which makes it quite easy for us to script things like HUD, animal behaviour, our story flow graph, etc. We have most of the wiring ready for players to be able to program and reshape and populate the whole planet in automation, although it's not our primary concept for the game (building stuff by hand, making the planet beautiful is also fun). As it's a normal Linux system, you'll be able to use Ruby, Python, or even Rust, C, C++, and Go to change and automate your world. We're also thinking of making a bunch of small games which you can play inside the game, in the base on a computer, on an arcade machine, or in the spaceship. And of course, it also runs DOOM. We already prototyped a small 2D space shooter and a small arcade game, both playable within the game. We also feature a table with hologram games to be played, e.g. chess and a certain block game. We also plan to make this hologram game engine available from the computer, which means, you'll even be able to program own hologram style games. We generally want to make the in-game computer more hackable in future, so that people can create and share their own little games. Currently, it's only a sandbox game (with beginnings of automation), to build stuff with our pre-made items. You can also assemble these to other, ready-made and shareable bigger items. This is the foundation for us to further develop survival and complete our story mode. Our game is still under active development, and we finally got our Steam page ready. We have tons of other things planned, but right now, it's more about polishing and quality for the Early Access. You can watch some videos and screenshots on our website. And we'd love to read your thoughts about his. It has been quite a ride, so far..
Friday, 2 October 2026
Thursday, 1 October 2026
Wednesday, 30 September 2026
Tuesday, 29 September 2026
Monday, 28 September 2026
Sunday, 27 September 2026
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