I’m currently reading Where the Wizards Stay Up Late. According to the book, Eisenhower was annoyed at how much the military branches jumped on projects to secure funding, so he made a non-military department called ARPA. And ARPA invented the internet.
Let’s do more of that.
I’ve been working on disassembling some 8-bit code from the 90s. Fuckers returned bits from functions using the overflow bit. Nuts.
Something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMuookENY90&t=137s
I once considered moving from Seattoe to Bremerton, WA to take advantage of the much cheaper real estate. In attempt to get a feel for the daily commute, I decided to stay at a Super 8 in Bremerton for a week. 5 minutes into that experiment, I flicked on the AC unit that looks just like this one and it reeked of cat pee.
I did not move to Bremerton.
When the animal council convened to decide what to do with the humans, only two animals stood in our defense.
The first was the dog.
The second was the mosquito.
Nope. I literally popped the SIM out of the sunbeam and into Minimal. They do offer a plan (and I even got a sim card in the mail without asking), but you don’t have to use it.
My biggest gripe with the Sunbeam was how insanely slow the T9 was. Texting was a total slog. I don’t know if that’s everyone’s experience, I had a theory that my huge contact list was bogging down the predictive text, but I can’t confirm that. Anyway, I’d have to wait a solid half second between keystrokes to keep from missing keypresses. And when you miss a keypress in T9, you basically have to completely delete the word as it’s impossible to figure out which letter you got wrong. Oh, and for some reason, it would always suggest names over very common words. Like “Cox” instead of “any.”
That and I spilled beer on it so the bottom half of the touch screen doesn’t work despite completely dismantling and cleaning it out.
I’ll say I liked the size and shape of the Sunbeam and I really liked being able to navigate menus without a touch screen. It was also a great conversation piece. But other than that, it was just too limited. I needed a few apps to get by. I also found it annoying how there was no easy way to send photos from it that I took with my Ricoh camera. And I can’t view videos that people send me? Why not? Gifs work!
The Minimal phone is hella buggy at the moment, but it’s already better than a lot of early review units I’ve read about, so I assume it’ll all get fixed in due time. Most annoying at the moment is that it takes like a full second to sleep, and if you so much as tap the screen during that second, it wakes right back up again. Oh, and auto-caps first word of the sentence on the keyboard also capitalizes the first letter of any password you’re entering. The only work around I’ve found is to type the first letter twice and delete the first one. I have auto caps turned off for that reason.
Unless you’re playing prophunt in which case, you’re golden.
From the looks of it, no.
Relevant thread:
Well I might be coming from the opposite direction as most. I found myself really distracted with my iPhone when I was out of the house which prompted the move to a dumbphone in 2023. I still used an iPhone at home for web browsing and whatnot.
Over the years, I got frustrated by certain small features that some apps could bring me such as the ability to set my home alarm system or check the location of EV chargers with PlugShare. So I needed some kind of smarterphone and Minimal checked the box.
I’d say that the real benefit of the phone is that the e-paper screen makes it hard to do anything heavily interactive. Scrolling a feed is difficult and watching a video or playing a game is downright out. Yet the keyboard makes sending messages trivial. I was worried moving to a full featured phone that I’d need to remove the web browser to keep me from doom scrolling somewhere, but that’s not really a temptation.
Also, if you turn the backlight off entirely, it becomes a really boring object to look at and I don’t find myself reaching for it out of instinct. Even checking a message in a dark bar I find myself leaning towards the nearest light source rather than enabling the backlight. Reading books with KOReader in full sunlight is great too.
It has just enough capability to function as a communication or reading device without much else, and it’s enabled me to completely stop using my iPhone at home. If I need a full web interface, I get out of bed/off the couch, and move to my PC.
tl;dr: The screen makes it hard to perform passive activities like doom scrolling while the keyboard makes messaging easy.
Article with basically zero content that overrides the back button? No bueno.
It’s definitely the worst of all of them. Zero redeeming features.
My wife got me a bottle of Da Bomb as a joke for Valentine’s and I’ve been working through that for over a year.
Answering my own question. iCEcube2 has a “Timing Analysis” feature that shows the worst-case path and how far off you are. It’s just odd that it shows no errors for a design that’s blatantly blowing through its timing budget.
No thank you to the Earth.
Seriously though kind of wild how simple the whole thing is. Like less dramatic than its portrayal by Hollywood by a long shot.
I used to get excited about new OS releases. I happily shelled out for Snow Leopard and Lion. Then in 2018 or so, my Mac Mini suddenly decided to put everything on iCloud and I couldn’t stop the syncing process until it had concluded and that was it for me.
Ok, I’m finding that I do have a timing report, so I’m guessing I need to go through that and adjust my verilog until the cumulative delays are short enough to prevent issues.
Little Bit Planet
You just vastly improved a family story that we’ve told numerous times over the years. Thank you for sharing your meth-related knowledge.
Also, I think this hotel was across the street from a house that exploded the previous year, so yeah. Bremerton.