What’s something fun you’ve done with tech recently that may or may not be overlooked?
After I spent a few hours browsing through the titles and descriptions, I used yt-dlp to download the videos I wanted. It came out to be over 500. I added them to my Plex server, made some playlists, and now I can watch sketches on demand without youtube tracking me, showing me ads, making me go through their app, search/browse interface, etc. And without having to search and skip through full episodes.
I've been an SNL nerd for 30 years and while every episode has a range of good and bad content, what I do find rewatchable from its long history amounts to a pretty big library. I wanted to make it more easily accessible since there's a lot of good content that would otherwise get buried.
It’s not included in the episode on Peacock, any idea where I can find it?
We've built a headband that monitors your sleep state, including EEG, and uses auditory stimulation to improve your deep sleep by up to 40%. The website is https://soundmind.co
Building an EEG headband and learning about neuroscience and sleep has been really fun. Learning about the market opportunities has been great.
For the last few months I've been building our physical prototypes and figuring out how to fit the electronics and improving comfort and reliability.
I think there are a few different areas that are really interesting right now. We're based in Sydney, Australia, which has a few neurotech start-ups.
When I meet other health tech founders, I'm often hearing about really interesting and compelling stuff. Same with companies focused on environment.
Tech isn't that fringe anymore, so there isn't as much "weirdness" in core tech, the fun fringe is going to be in adjacent areas.
It's a baby ear, they are often hairy I think. Stock photography. We'll be re-doing the site as we get closer to launch.
After learning more, I've gotten interested in broader internet restrictions, such as restricting mobile internet to Facebook/WhatsApp (see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/20/facebook-..., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31465741, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/01/facebook-free-...). I have a lot more to learn, but it feels like there's more here to explore.
I took it apart. It has a custom ARM board with a removable 8GB micro-SD card containing the OS. The ARM board has a combo WiFi/Bluetooth unit and apps for Android and iPhone.
Turns out, this makes a heckuva cooling unit for my gaming PC without modification. It is completely silent and easily has the capacity to keep my CPU and GPU frosty. The price to buy one is prohibitive for this application, but the ol' "dumpster dive discount" makes it worthwhile.
I see why it is so costly. This thing is a combination of a robust Peltier heating/cooling unit, a high volume pumping system with auto-prime routines, two excellent Noctua silent fans, and a very capable custom Arm board. It's like a Bed Keurig.
That was fun!
Recently had lots of fun testing software security in creative ways. For example found that various sites use the login page as an unwalled gate and don't validate an actual session, so anyone can jump in, no matter if cookies are encrypted. Also unpacked APK's and found all the Firebase keys in plain text. Put together a quick Firebase client in Javascript and accessed their DBs. It's a weird and amusing world, and I'm not even a security expert to enjoy the whole thing.
Recently I found out about a very old piece of automation software written by 1 guy in India in like 2005. I've been using it to write botting scripts for a video game and its incredible. The documentation is purely 5 minute youtube videos where the developer types in notepad and clicks around the tool. Exploring the quirks, using it in uniqiue ways... really brings me back to being a kid with my first desktop computer. I'll never forget learning to dual boot linux, and now I'm in that same stage of discovery and awe. Everything is a puzzle of things I don't undstand and I need to be patient and creative to achieve what I want.
Looks similar to a nocode version of autoit maybe. Its one of those tools that is challenging to understand but has incredible amounts of power. If you're familiar with old school runescape, it lets me set up a pretty nuanced bot for almost any acitivity in the game in about an hour. There are 150 actions, and a ridiculous number of settings. Many of the actions are ones I wouldn't think of when doing automation, but turn out to be useful (ie waiting for the count of colors within a certain area to be above or below a threshold).
Surely one of those things most people here would look at and prefer to write python on their own!
In adtech a lot of people are very technically adept but never learned to code so tools like that can fill needs quite well. Even if a vendor has an api I’d have to get product to dedicate hours/etc etc, or I can write a little automation and skip the api.
From the UI challenges to fixing various OS issues, they're super fun to play with and explore!
Right now, I really like the X1 Fold with Windows 11: it still feels so weird to unfold my tablet! It's a fun device!
Also, it's hacker friendly: after fixing the most obvious stuff, I'm now digging into more obscure issues, like the 0x9F power issues: the fun thing is, they are common to quite a few devices, like the frame.work: https://community.frame.work/t/windows-11-bsod-bug-check-0x9...
...yet nobody has solved them yet!
Intel SST (IntcAudioBus.sys) seems to be the cause: it has a suspend eisenbug where the watchdog can fail, taking down the whole device. That made me learn about IRP and how power saving works on Windows.
The latest Intel SST drivers are proposed as a solution, but based on my test, they only make the bug occur less frequently: it's very visible on foldable tablets are go into sleep several times per day.
Some people are happy with disabling PCIe ASPM, but I don't find that very fun or daring: I want to know precisely what is happening, and if there can be clever workarounds like toggling ASPM for the PCIe device to a given state right before suspend.
This is also my first time playing with WinDbg and that's a lot of fun too!
Sites like https://www.sysnative.com/forums/threads/the-complete-guide-... and were helpful: https://bsodtutorials.wordpress.com/2020/01/17/debugging-sto...
Now I can go from a "0x9F_5_IMAGE_IntcAudioBus.sys" event message into the rabbit hole :)
One of the reasons I enjoyed building this was because it was just for me. There was no pressure for it to be production-ready or to make a profit.
Im having a really good time reading about „whats new” and „whats cool” and see that everything frontend has „innovated”, last few years, is just a rehash of something we already had for a loooong time but didnt have a „catchy” name.
Seems like WAT was only the beginning.
Weird, hacky, interesting.
I love it.
What hardware is needed for playing around with this?
The most cost effective way to get started is a quest 2. With a link cable you can use it as a pcvr headset as well.
It does however require a Facebook account.
One place you can look for some of the more unusual content on the quest is https://sidequestvr.com/
I find myself in a similar boat to the poster. When I joined Google the world was trying to figure out how to run cloud applications. NodeJS, no-SQL and other new server technologies were relatively new; we didn't have good patterns, tools or libraries for rich web client development, and mobile development was just getting going. There was a lot going on in pure software. But then I joined the insular (and relatively advanced) world of GOOG, during which it seems the outside world has figured out a good amount of how to do large server applications, the client frameworks are getting decent and mobile is very mature. So I'm not sure what the big, new, interesting problem spaces are but it seems like we're near the end of a technology cycle.
This feeling could just be me. I'm a pretty experienced engineer at this point and have seen a lot. I've done late-90s LAMP stack development, PC desktop development, early rich web development (my startup built a collaborative browser-based video editor in 2014) and then within GOOG saw and touched a ton of stuff. Maybe because I've seen so much my bar for "what's interesting" is a lot higher than it used to be?
Either way, I still find myself asking: what's the next cycle? - Is AR/VR going to really stick this time and be a big thing with lots of interesting problems and products? - Is ML going to result in some really killer apps that aren't just iterative improvements on current stuff? - Is anything in Crypto non-BS? This space seems to have sucked a lot of air out of the room, but there SO MUCH NOISE it's hard to know if there's anything really there. - Have we hit peak pure software and the really interesting stuff from here on out is software applied to atoms? Eg. automation, robotics, etc.?