Maybe someone here can help me remember. I had a PalmOS app that I loved, back in the day, and I can't remember what it was called. It was a shareware clock app, with hand-drawn time that animated from one numeral to the next. I used to use it as an alarm clock, in my Sony Clie dock, by my bed. Would love to see it again.
Readit Newsnonesuchluck commented on UI elements with a hand-drawn, sketchy look wiredjs.com/... · Posted by u/nickca
nonesuchluck commented on Serial murders have dwindled, thanks to improved technology nytimes.com/2023/08/06/ny... · Posted by u/fortran77
Yeah. Now we have parallel murders.
That's right- Larry wanted a question-answering machine. Larry and Sergey "got bored of search" (I heard this from the engs who were going to weekly presentations to show new search features) when they felt it was just chasing a larger index and showing people what they wanted to click on.
That would certainly be an improvement over their current strat (ignoring what I want to click on, showing me what's most profitable for them instead)
nonesuchluck commented on PRQL: a simple, powerful, pipelined SQL replacement prql-lang.org/... · Posted by u/NicoJuicy
Well an LSP server would be a welcome addition.
But before that i would put some effort into the actual "repl/session" -like tool. Pipe a PRQL query to a PRQL session, and then the PRQL translates that to SQL, and returns the underlying response from the database.
If done right, this would open the possibility to build all sorts of cool editor plugins, that could directly interface with the PRQL session.
IMHO this is where a tool like PRQL would shine, as it would make writing SQL more enjoyable and way faster, but at the same time being both language and sql-dialect agnostic.
Seems a natural fit for a notebook UI. If a PRQL cell doesn't start with "from," just continue adding filters to the pipeline above. Would let you progressively build pipelines by adding filters and derivations, while previewing the data each step along the way. Split a cell to debug a pipeline at any point.
nonesuchluck commented on Building a website like it's 1999 localghost.dev/blog/build... · Posted by u/boffbowsh
This is fantastic, but not fully in the spirit of the old web. Personal pages looked like they did because they were essentially outsider art: the product of experimentation by teenagers and rank amateurs, who had no idea what we were doing. In 1999 we were using Netscape Composer and FrontPage Express, because they came with our browsers and were fun to explore. Only a web professional could use these tricks today to simulate that appearance.
The click-and-drag tools and absolutely garbage code generators were integral to the experience, because they brought in the weirdos who didn't know we were doing it wrong. We learned, but lost something along the way.
Indeed, a 286 would cause some breakage and some OS-level APIs would need more complicated code, and some programs would be difficult to port due to HGA, VGA, and SVGA graphics being very different from Amiga modes (although somewhat superior).
Still, would be fun to have a 386 version of the Amiga OS.
Could have packaged up the Amiga chipset on an ISA card, an all-in-one video/audio/io gizmo. Sell that to 386 owners and give the OS away. Bonus points for a ROM socket to insta-boot AmigaOS with no disk.
nonesuchluck commented on My Initial Thoughts on Bluesky's AT Protocol havenweb.org/2022/10/19/b... · Posted by u/mawise
I feel a bit bad about that. I'm 36 and I'm the oldest on the team, but Usenet was before me (which seems to be why it's widely known? though I see it's more than that). Googling brought up the Hayes commands but we had no idea it was this strong of an association.
AT stands for ATTENTION. In command mode, it configures the modem for data transfer. It is an excellent name for a social network protocol.
nonesuchluck commented on My Favourite Computer, an Old Mac muezza.ca/thoughts/favour... · Posted by u/BizarreByte
I did wish Apple had released a Mac in the original form factor with an 15" screen (9" width by 12" height). It would have been fun to have a machine that could show a whole page.
They did just that in 1989, with the Macintosh Portrait Display [1]. It was designed to fit snugly on the Mac II. Like other CRTs with fixed resolution and refresh rate, the phosphor persistence was perfectly tuned for comfortable, fatigue-free document viewing.
Curiously, tho, I don't think it was a perfect 72dpi like the 9" CRT in compact Macs, so it's not precisely scaled with printed output.
Looks very interesting but I see one obvious issue that may or may not be significant --- any satellite to be launched will have to be built to withstand the 10000g launch.
Forget satellites: launch water, rocket fuel, 3D printing material!
Relativity Space is building 3D printers large enough to construct orbital-class rockets in one piece. Others will follow. If they can make printers work in vacuum at 0g, that's how we build our next-next generation of space stations. SpinLaunch wants to launch around the clock, multiple times per day. Just keep flinging materials and consumables to the construction robots building our future habs.
nonesuchluck commented on Short story about my Steam Deck 0ut3r.space/2022/08/25/st... · Posted by u/h0ek
I like my Steam Deck, but I've found it only works for games that were designed for controller input. Controlling the cursor with the capacitative pad never clicked with me. Unfortunately that rules out most of the games I like to play most.
E.g. I tried Rimworld, which even makes special affordances for the Deck, and it was just painful compared to keyboard and mouse.
I guess I'll try connecting a mouse, but that kind of defeats the purpose.
Yeah, the capacitive touch screen feels really tetchy and imprecise. Frustrating to use, even for simple card games with large touch targets (ex. Dicey Dungeons).
But I've found the dual thumb pads to be surprisingly good for mouse input. And with the inbuilt controller mapping software (WASD etc), I don't even need mouse all that much. I've been playing a little bit of Guild Wars 2, which doesn't even support controller input in the options. With a community-made control mapping provided in Steam, it works surprisingly well for casual adventuring (probably not for PvP).