I wrote mobile apps from 2005 to 2019, first on WinCE/Windows Mobile and then iOS. Briefly in 2010 I wrote a TV Guide-type app for Blackberry. Up to that point I had had nothing but contempt for Blackberry but that experience really changed my mind almost instantly. The keyboards on those devices were just so incredibly good, and even though the screens were tiny, the trackball was a fantastic pointing device that allowed pinpoint precision even on that tiny screen (cleaning the trackball was definitely disgusting but you didn’t have to do it all that often). Under the hood those devices were really impressive as well; I don’t think anybody appreciated how much memory they actually had and how fast the processors really were.

A minor weakness was that RIM chose 16-bit color for the displays early on, which gave a crappy look especially for videos (which were really too tiny to watch anyway). Halving your video RAM requirements maybe made sense in 2000 but it was a terrible decision just 18 months later (according to Moore, anyway). The major weakness, though, was the shitty development environment. The built-in controls provided by the framework were terrible, but the worst part was that any time you attempted to compile your app, each module incorporated into it had to be independently signed by RIM’s servers. On a good day, the signing process would take 10-15 minutes, while on a slow day it would take upwards of an hour or maybe never happen at all. And this was even if you’d made a one-line change to your code.

RIP RIM, but I’d like to see the keyboards coming back. Also the trackwheels.

That was like the third-smartest thing about Einstein. Second-smartest was the Theory of Relativity, and First-Smartest was leaving Germany in 1933.

a and o are on opposite end of the keyboard

Maybe the author has a Dvorak keyboard layout (a and o are next to each other there).

We need to go back to the good old days. When we invaded foreign countries for bananas.

I bought a house two years ago and had a plumber come out to install a new water heater. He asked me where the water meter was and I had to say “fuck if I know”. He said lots of people just let their water account lapse and then remove the meter and tap directly into the water line in the street and get free water. He assumed that the previous owner of my house had done this; I was pondering whether this was a bad thing or not when he found the actual water meter out in the yard under a metal cover. Good news? Probably not – it turns out my house water is supplied by a very cheap independent local water authority, but they had to go into bankruptcy along with the city and apparently some Saudis are planning to buy it to provide water to grow alfalfa for their racehorses.

The bus is not my main residence. I live in a place (Philly area) where residence in a motorhome is not really a legal option. I embarked on the skoolie journey without a realistic plan for actually living in it and so far it’s been nothing but a gigantic time and money sink. But it has been fun and I’ve developed a lot of skills (mainly metalworking like welding and riveting) that I didn’t have before. You may enjoy my build thread.

I do hope to someday be able to live in it for a few years at least. We’ll see if that’s possible.

My sister-in-law had a victorian-era sofa in their house for a few years. Incredibly well-built piece of furniture and quite beautiful, but truly uncomfortable. Also heavy as fuck – I’d rather move a piano.

I own a skoolie (a used school bus converted to a motorhome). I acquired two sections of one of those giant sectional sofas from a woman on Craigslist who was giving them away for free. She paid $4000 for the entire thing and when I deconstructed my sections to build them into the bus I was astonished at what incredibly poor quality the things were. The framing (such as it was) was unbelievably cheap wood that looked like it was cut by a beaver, and the ends were made from OSB scraps - not even cheap plywood. The backs underneath the cushions were entirely made from nylon lawn chair straps haphazardly stapled down.

The cushions and fabric were decent enough, but the thought of paying $4000 for furniture that shitty underneath is pretty hard to imagine.

DON’T DOXX ME

I like electric space heaters, but: I bought a cheap Chinese one a few years ago that somehow rewired itself. Like, the “off” setting became “low heat”, “high heat” became “fan” etc. I took it apart to see how the fuck that could possibly happen. The dial switch included a little roller contact that moved over a printed circuit board sort of thing to determine the setting; if the heater got too hot (imagine that!) the switch solder would melt and then re-flow into a different pattern, causing the switch to work completely differently. Just unimaginably hazardous.

You could take artificial diamonds back to the time before there were such things as artificial diamonds.

This cartoon is basically my programming career. Initially I thought that everything had to be planned out to the most exacting degree (panel 1). Then I learned that nothing ever goes as planned so you have to be able to adapt on the fly to changing circumstances; eventually I realized that adaptation is so much more important that you really don’t need much of a plan at all, especially when you’re basically writing the same software over and over again (panel 2).

Eventually I realized that nobody ever used the software I was writing so there wasn’t much point in doing anything at all (panel 3). Then I was laid off and now I drive a school bus (panel 4).

Þufferin’ þuccotash!

iOS

At my last job we had a stretch where we were maintaining four different iOS versions of our software: different versions for iPhones and iPads, and for each of those one version in Objective-C and one in Swift. If anyone thinks “wow, that was totally unnecessary”, that should have been the name of my company.

“When you think about having the taskbar on the right or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to have a wonderful experience in those environments is just huge.”

This is such utter fucking nonsense. They already have to deal with the concept of a “client area” that encompasses variable-sized screens and (worse) the multiple-monitor situation. Movable task bar is trivial.

A red traffic light only means stop sometimes, but sometimes you can go if you’re turning right.

It always means stop. You can turn right on red (in most places) but only after you stop first and you must yield to crossing traffic. Unfortunately, not everyone knows this - I’ve met many people who think “right on red” means you can treat it like a green light as long as you’re turning right.

What really gets me pissed is the signs that say “right turn on red after complete stop” which implies that isn’t the case fucking everywhere, when it is the case.

They should ditch Microsoft 365 due to lack of not sucking balls.

Ah, I was thinking Portuguese-esque.

Microsoft’s business model has always been getting businesses who are even stupider than them to give them tons of money. Nothing is ever going to change that calculus.

forgejo

How is this generally pronounced? I feel like “for-GAY-hoe” would be the only workable pronunciation.