julesallen

Thank you for sharing this.

Absolutely agree, have been looking for something like this for a while now.

Did you build this yourself? Would love to know more if you’d be so kind to share.

Used to do similar things with Trello before the focus went all in on enterprise (getting acquired by Atlassian will do that).

There’s need and there’s want I suppose.

My oldest computer book I won’t part with is Alan Simpson’s dBase III+ Programmer's reference guide, circa 1987. This book was transformative and allowed me to get a gig as a coder, so much self driven practice on a crappy underpowered generic clone PC. That crappy hardware was an advantage I didn’t see at the time, having to think about routines that were fast enough based not because of faster disks and tons of RAM.

Do I need this book? Not so much. But it brings me joy carefully flipping through it on occasion.

Glad I'm not the only lunatic who would do something like this. At least until I got my paws on dBASE.

I worked with somebody with your name in the early 90s on a Sequent/Dynix system, that wasn't you by chance was it?

Skimming this and thoroughly enjoying it, back in the mid to late 80s I worked in London's phototypesetting industry mostly serving ad agencies and others who needed high quality, quick turnaround type. I didn't work with Monotype, all Berthold, but it looks like they were all in a similar place.

Check out the Cold Type section on this page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berthold_Type_Foundry#Cold_T... . What was fascinating about this is it wasn't laser produced type, it came from a serious of glass grids and prisms. Laser output at the time was awful and nowhere near production quality but this prism-based output could only scale from 4pt to 36pt(? or somewhere thereabouts). That said, because the type was photo perfect it could be put under a camera enlarger and blown up to over 96pt in the hands of a skilled operator.

More notable things, these machines couldn't set type on an angle so as you were composing you had to take into consideration giving the paste up artist enough dance room to work. Spell check? Nope.

The biggest one was it was all markup language and nobody really used visual rendering, you set it all in your head and sometimes you'd even get it right on the first try. There were visual rendering units but they were slow, inaccurate, and would _really_ slow you down in an industry where the faster you were the more money you made. This markup thinking made being creative with HTML tables a natural skill in '92 so it wasn't all for nothing.

The Mac finally got PageMaker, photo paper laser output became good enough, and the last Berthold machines I saw were Sun workstations where I got my first taste of Unix. Fancy expensive kit where the rendering was fast enough to be useful.

I turned this on as well and all I've had are a few false positives when running up stairs or similar. Good feature and id rather have to unlock occasionally than error the other way.

Like that there's no ads but it's a big no on the "data shared with third parties". Assuming this is how they make money? I'd rather wait 10 more mins for the bus I just missed.

Android here. Have you looked at the amount of data this shares with third parties? No ads but holy hell. No thanks.

Go easy on calling yourselves "QI", the hugely entertaining BBC TV show might have some qualms about this.

https://www.qi.com/

If it's any consolation you're really not missing much!

I had one of these and I think I bought it from Staples, Office Depot, or whatever the predecessor to this was. I can't remember the exact timing but I picked up an IBM Simon around the same time.

Both were half baked products that ended up in a drawer after a couple of weeks. The EO had lousy battery life and not as good as pen and paper for note taking which is why I wanted it.

I had various devices over that time frame which included the Palm Pilot, Sony Magic Link, all of the Newtons, a Sharp Zaurus, and so on. The one that really stuck was the Psion MX5 as I could actually touch type on it.

Prodigy, haven't thought about that in a lot of years, thanks for the memory tickle. Even with the painted-with-bricks interface.

GEnie was another that was kind of fun. And I still can remember my CompuServe number!

It's a little anecdotal as nobody was really writing history down at that point but it feels about the right timing.

The first time the FTP server I ran got broken into was about then, it was a shock as why would some a-hole want to do that? I wasn't aware until one of my users tipped me off a couple of days after the breach. They were sharing warez rather than porn at least, having the bandwidth to download even crappy postage stamp 8 bit color videos back then would take you hours.

When this happened I built the company's first router a few days later and put everything behind it. Before that all the machines that needed Internet access would turn on TCP/IP and we'd give them a static IP from the public IP range we'd secured. Our pipe was only 56k so if you needed it you had to have a really good reason. No firewall on the machines. Crazy, right?

Very different times for sure.

If you actually read the article all will be much clearer.

"Here a busy New Yorker *can book a 5 minute time slot*, pay for a hat, stand in a spot under my window for 3 seconds, have a hat put on their head, and get on with their extremely important, extemely busy day all within a single New York minute."

So if I type hunter2 you see ****?

Did you consider the Planet Computers' Gemini? Martin Riddiford who designed the keyboards for the Psion 3 and 5 series did the magic again.

https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/gemini-pda

Got mine in 2017 from their Indiegogo launch and as a previous 5mx user in the 90s how could I not?

Sadly they never updated the OS so it's not really much use now. The inability to make some android apps flip to landscape was also a little frustrating.

"But because juvenile convictions in Finland don’t count towards determining whether somebody is a first-time offender, Kivimäki will end up serving approximately half of his sentence."

It is, yes. You're moving (your) home, it's just what everybody says. Just as dropping 'on' from "let's meet Monday" equally baffles Brits.

Seems to be back up again, ~15 min outage.

Love reading the comments here and how these books changed lives.

For me it was dBASE III PLUS programmer's reference guide from 1987 and it imparted enough knowledge to start a programming career. Read that dog eared thing end to end and still have it in my book collection.

Thank you, Alan Simpson wherever you might be.

Redesigned the FDIC's online deposit insurance calculator to be 100% client side just before WAMU fell over and the crash that followed.

Before the three-step one pager it was a UX that only a mother could love on payday. The bigger problem was every time it would end up on somewhere like Yahoo finance (don't laugh, this was 2007 and earlier) it would fall over like this database. The key to scaling it seems pretty obvious today, write all the searchable data out to a single JSON file and have the browser poll that. It was doing multiple millions of user sessions a day I was told and couldn't have been deployed at a better time.

Some projects you get lucky with I suppose. I check it out every once in a while and the UX is basically still the same.

All those real-time features are antipatterns that do nothing but create anxiety and a false sense of urgency. We use Slack at work...

...and I use other apps to keep in touch with family in different time zones. For me knowing somebody is online in real time is quite comforting. Knowing they got my message and then that they read it, even if they don't reply, is also useful.

I see your point but there is valid usage outside of a corporate setting.

So many reasons not to use SMS: No indicators that the message was actually received (2023 and SMS is still flaky on deliveries), no read receipts, no presence notifications, no typing notifications, no encryption in transit or rest, no escaping group chat spam... that's just the high points.

duckduckgo.com/?q=siriusxmoffices and pick the first one.

You're going to love this:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=i+still+don%27t+care+about+cookies

You might like iVPN.net, been using them for years. A little more money but solid support and mission.

If you haven't done it recently it's not the nightmare that it was. These days you say you want to cancel, they'll ask you "would you pay $X?", you say no and you're out.

No argument on the crappy comms.

If I was in customer success at an enterprise vendor I doubt I'd be let anywhere near the tools to get this back up and running. These guys are generally in the way rather than helping in a situation like this.

Head of engineering or some product rather than customer support? That might be a different outcome.

I've been using their products since their first cam came out (was skeptical but hey, $20-odd bucks was low risk).

Now have multiple cams, bulbs, and so on. Getting the watch is a low dough no brainer.

Solid stuff for not a lot of money.