Smart lighting only makes sense in niche cases. I use the same Z-wave switches in my 60s-era house for a basement guest bedroom where the light switch is bizarrely in a storage closet outside the bedroom. I have another Z-wave switch to turn on an existing front porch light at dusk. This spared me needing to install a separate photocell.
The main value for smart home is in monitoring. I mostly use it for flood and door sensors without having to pay for a Ring/ADT subscription.
I keep hearing this point brought up, but I haven't seen a good case for flat widget elements being confusing. In this very form I'm typing in, all the clickable elements (hyperlinks and submit button) are flat, but different styles immediately distinguish them from non-clickable elements, even if these styles vary between web pages and browsers. It's never been the case that GUIs consistently used 3D appearances to denote clickable widgets. 3D elements add a lot of visual clutter for complicated interfaces, which is why those "flat UI sucks" posts only show <10 GUI elements side-by-side. Google "Word 95" and "Word 98," both have a flat menu bar, though Word 98 has the addition of flat toolbars which helps readability.
The issue isn't low standards of living in dense US cities but the lack of affordable housing. If you want an international example of providing affordable housing in an area with very high property values, Singapore accomplishes this with the government-run HDB apartments.
The better question is what the used enterprise computer market is in India. Given that engineering salaries are no longer an order of magnitude less than the USA, I would assume that there would be a large secondary market of sub $200 laptops and SFF desktops. Is that not the case? Do businesses keep them till the wheels fall off? Do they get exported overseas? Can schools not compete on price with middle class consumers for used computers?
I was going to say the same thing. The RPi was introduced at a time when cheap SATA SSDs weren't a thing, nor were beefy ARM CPUs. It's starting to feel like an Edward Scissorhands situation.
Not sure about the older Alphasmarts, but the Neos have pretty standard laptop keys. The display contrast isn't great, but it's not terrible like the late 80s/early 90s graphic LCDs. The small footprint compared to a current laptop is nice.
I'm also building something like what you are thinking about with an old intel NUC mounted on an even older LCD monitor and running Xmonad. It's a surprisingly fun project. My notes on the build are here:
https://hackaday.io/project/174680-distraction-free-linux-ba...
I got a Neo2 a while back and found it nice for note taking. I put my notes in Pandoc Markdown and then convert to pdf on a pc. While the Neo2 has no GUI elements, I'm not convinced that it's any better for distraction compared to an airgapped pc running Word/OneNote. Curious if anyone has tried the latter(which I admit is getting harder to do as my newer computers don't have removable wireless adapter).
The suggestion I've been given is to watch a riff track version rather than the original. The biggest sin of the holiday special is that it's dull and no amount of cold medication will help improve it, as I discovered one January.
I use a desktop replacement laptop for my work computer as well. I wouldn't want to travel with it, but it's good for a home office and occasionally bringing to the living room or into my employer's office. I wouldn't spend my money on one, but the economics make sense for a primary work machine. The thermals are good enough to run with the lid closed, which my cat likes and it keeps him off the keyboard.
I swear I'm not trying to get the last word in, but my phone life hack was to get a spare Android phone to keep in my office where I install only a minimal set of apps. It's worked pretty well and I might even try putting on a VOIP app so I can use it for calls. I don't care about getting distracted when I'm stuck in a long line at the grocery store.
Making a good general UI for E-ink is tough. Amazon would have been the ones to do it, but they put their attention to the Kindle Fire and left the regular Kindles as dedicated e-readers. Probably this was a good thing. Even so, I've noticed that tablet swipe gestures have made their way into the Kindle UI which just doesn't work with the slow refresh time of E-ink.
I think this is the paradox that distraction-free phones always run into. Everyone including myself wants the useful or convenient niceties of a modern smartphone like maps, Spotify, various messaging tools, notes etc. without the dreck of social media. At this point, a stripped-down android launcher makes more sense than trying to bring back the candybar phone or some weird hardware middle ground. There are a bunch of minimalist launchers out there, but I haven't found anything really great. I was using "A Decluttered Launcher" until an update screwed up its handling of soft keys and have moved to Niagra.
I added the weasel-word "spiritually" for that reason. If I had a teenager wanting to make a gui program I would point them to PSG as it doesn't require much conceptual understanding nor many lines of code to bang something together. There are still graphical programming environments out there and there is even a general one in the form of LabVIEW community edition. However, they just don't have the network effect of Python which is the de facto "learn to program" language.
Fish is amazing as an interactive shell. I've had it as my default for a couple years now. Oil isn't the only game in town for object shells, there is also NuShell and Elvish which follow the fish model of abandoning POSIX compatibility for ease of use. I think OP had mentioned it elsewhere on this thread, but I've found object shells mostly useful for scripting that involves a lot of calling and processing the output of programs that produce structured data. I mostly use PowerShell for this, though Nushell/Elvish/Oil seem to be actually usable now. I'm pretty excited that the Unix community seems to finally be moving on from defending the old unstructured text model of program interaction to embracing the benefits of object shells. Whatever you think of its implementation, PowerShell is a great idea.
I'd probably say pygame which repl.it now has support for. It's pretty slick and works on a crappy school ChromeBook. For "regular" gui stuff I'd say PySimpleGUI (see my earlier comment above/below).
In the spirit of HN contrarian comments, I'd say the closest thing spiritually to a modern-day HyperCard is PySimpleGUI:
https://github.com/PySimpleGUI
Previously the closest thing to HyperCard was WinForms, which PSG borrows heavily from. PSG is probably the fastest way for anyone moderately familar with python to throw together an ugly-but-servicable GUI program and I reach for it when I'm in a hurry. The two tricks behind PSG are: 1. very concise and memorable GUI layout with only python code and 2. use of an event loop instead of handlers. All of this sounds pretty basic and obvious, but no one else does it this way.
I've never got the meme about numpads on microwaves being needlessly complicated design. On about any decent microwave made in the last 10 year, pushing 1-6 gives a cook time of 1-6 minutes, respectively. Pushing start again after cooking has started will add 30 seconds. For longer cook times, press "time cook." Maybe this sounds a bit complicated, but it's efficient and all written down on the keypad. Mechanical timers really don't work well for less than 5 minutes. Good microwaves with a dial use a rotary encoder and increase time logarithmically. It sure looks elegant on the builtin over your stove, but log scaling really isn't intuitive outside volume controls, and probably more fiddly than buttons.
If there is a gripe to be had about microwave numpads, it's the useless popcorn setting. The microwave popcorn bag tells you not to use the popcorn setting. It's like something out of bad standup. /rant
I vaguely remember this as a kid. For those who are better readers than I, does this site describe what all the computer hardware actually does? I was expecting something like primitive turn-by-turn navigation, but there doesn't seem to be focus to this, just a whole lot of desktop hardware grafted on a bike. It doesn't make any sense even in an era before common mobile hardware.
Edit: While mobile hardware really didn't get good until 20 years later, the TRS-80 Model 100 existed in 1983 which had a real keyboard, could run third-party programs weighed under 4 pounds, had battery-backed memory and ran 20 hours on a set of 4 AA batteries. So a non-absurd solution for some portion of his design requirements existed.
I don't get it either. Can someone familiar with trains explain what on a train needs a desktop OS? A train is more like a car than an ATM machine, I would expect a collection of computers running either bare-metal or an RTOS like QNX/VxWorks (the pictured train is from 2000, so embedded linux hadn't taken off yet).
When I travel in to Singapore to visit relatives, seeing WARNING DEATH PENALTY FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS in big red letters on the customs card always gives me a warm feeling of nostalgia every time I see it, knowing I'll soon be landing in Changi airport. This is actually part of the cleverness of Singapore. With so many migrant workers from many different cultures with different social mores, the ominous warning signs everywhere make it pretty hard to inadvertently get in trouble with the law.
The weird zoning AFAIK is an artifact of the city being planned in the 70s-80s when the idea of mixed-use development wasn't a thing. One particular issue is the lack of high-end apartments within or adjacent to the financial district.
I made a deduplicating version control system for large binary file based around the Restic chunker library: https://github.com/akbarnes/dupver
I like to think that this (well, deduplicating version conrol in general, not my crufty project) will be the future of version control and we'll leave the ugliness of git-lfs behind us. For now at least it's a fun project.
Edit: There is an existing project called Boar that does the same thing, though it appears to have been abandoned and is stuck in Python 2
I recall that at the time the movie was made, nothing was known of the Typhoon class except for spy photos of the portion above the waterline while they sat at the docks. One notable error from the movie was a fight scene between the rows of missile tubes. In reality, the submarines had two pressure hulls stuck side-by-side and that space was filled with water.
I recall that there were some pretty long threads here after the US warship hitting some commercial vessel. The big issue wasn't using a screen but that the designers had taken advantage of having screens to create a multi-functional interface so one station could serve different functions, or functions could be moved between stations. Flexible, but confusing. I think the move is not to analog control, but back to single-purpose controls. Also, even if mechanical controls replace touchscreens, I'm sure that there will still be an optical encoder and field bus behind everything.
I was going to say something similar. The panels do look nice but don't seem much different than those of the West pre-digital era. I seem to recall that the nuclear ice breakers were a point of pride for the USSR, so it's likely that the panels received an above-average level of attention and are atypical.
I don't think that the appeal is just nostalgia though. Modern control rooms and equipment racks just don't have the pretty-looking hardware that the older ones do. Control rooms usually have big displays with network diagrams on them that aren't sexy anymore, along with a bunch of workstations. Equipment racks usually are dominated by LCDs and membrane switches that look a bit chintzy, no big pushbuttons in chromed bezels anymore.
Can anyone explain how Mainframes differ from commodity servers or a high-performance computing cluster with low-latency networking? Is there really a practical difference? I get that they are useful for handling banking transactions, but I've never gotten a good explanation of why a collection of networked servers is poor for this.