Happy belated May the 4th day! Norm, Jeremy, and Kishore check out some of the festivities celebrating the occasion online, recap Microsoft’s Surface laptop announcement event, and dive into the practicalities of boring tunnels for self-driving cars. Plus, an important moment of science!
One Day Builds
Adam embarks on one of his most ambitious builds yet: fulfil…
Show And Tell
Adam recently completed a build of the royal St. Edwards cro…
Making
Viewers often ask to see Adam working in real-time, so this …
One Day Builds
Adam and Norm assemble a beautifully machined replica prop k…
One Day Builds
One of the ways Adam has been getting through lockdown has b…
Making
Adam unboxes and performs a quick test of this novel new hel…
Making
When Adam visited Weta Workshop early last year, he stopped …
One Day Builds
Adam tackles a shop shelf build that he's been putting off f…
Show And Tell
Time for a model kit build! This steampunk-inspired mechanic…
One Day Builds
Adam reveals his surprise Christmas present for his wife--a …
yew
The Windows-S thing also seems like another 40 year milestone to me…. the end of the “PC Revolution” which began with the idea that anyone should be able to own and program their own computer and share their code with others.
Software producers did not have to pay fees, nor seek approval, to the platform-maker to produce and distribute software. Everything we have, including all the current big software companies, emerged out of this ecosystem. This feels like the end of that.
Anyone who wants to distribute apps for Windows S will now have to pay a 100$+ fee and jump through approval hoops to get their software out to people. If this had been the case in 1995, Microsoft would never have allowed Mosaic or Netscape (the first web browsers) into the App Store because they competed with MSN (Microsoft’s dialup service). Open Source could not exist and so linux, freebsd, etc, could not exist to run sites like Netflix or Amazon. There would be no python, no django, and no Tested. We literally would not have the world wide web.
Man, that’s a grim perspective! Thankfully standard Windows still exists, so not exactly the end of the open platform.
Paused this vid to watch/listen to the whole Star Wars/Beatles mashup. Holy cow that’s perfect. Really made my day. I think it helps that I know Sgt. Peppers by heart, some of the details are pretty subtle.
It’s technically feasible for a developer to create their own storefront for Windows 10. I’ve yet to see anyone do it, but as far as I know this is still the case.
So, say for example EA wanted to make Origin a UWP app and their put their games in there from now on, they would continue to get 100% of the profits (which is (part of?) why EA left Steam). Or, if a company wanted to have their internal software made on UWP, they could make what is essentially an internal portal for downloading their apps.
And of course it’s possible to side-load apps, if you enable it. So if you’re a small dev and just want to give a link out to people, you can do that too.
Episode 400 – Finish the Mame cabinet
Episode 400 should kick off a new Octoberkast! That, or you should play Space Rocks during the podcast!
Also, should April 21st be Death Star Stormtrooper Memorial Day, to commemorate all those poor troopers blown up at the end of A New Hope?
Well, I’m still enjoying my smart watch, anyway. To me it’s a great fitness tracker with a great display and super accurate time. I also use it to check on the weather and set short timers, plus occasional notifications.
An astronaut photographed a solar eclipse from Mir: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110102.html
I also think you’ve got a misunderstanding about the difference between a New Moon and a solar eclipse…
Shownotes are up – forgot to post here: http://bit.ly/TiOaTShownotes
Can you see a solar eclipse from a plane? Yes. Video proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxBoVH0GQWw
Width of Solar Eclipse path is 114.7 km.
More details: https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/solar.html
Also, I should note, my kids informed me today is “Revenge of the Fifth.” I thought that was pretty funny.
You’re right, I was confused — I thought a new moon was a lunar eclipse. 5 minutes on YouTube solved that one.
i fear much of that battle has been lost in the minds already. i probably related that sometime before, but i was sitting in a filled lecture hall at university, all attendands for a computer science-related degree. prof talked about the history of the home computer, and then asked who had ever seen the insides of a computer. not tinkered with, not even seen in person. one third raised their hands.
i asked my sister what she thought about that, and she was like ‘that’s all they know from smartphones first, laptops second.’
people from the same degree, beginners’ tutorium: rando dude makes a serious case for using word (‘it’s easier!’ ‘it comes with the computer!’ ‘it’s the standard!’) for academic writing, calling division of content and presentation ‘made-up advantages.’ his argument swallowed up 20 minutes or so, because he was adamant and wouldn’t stop. guy was fundamentally opposed to anything not WYSIWYG.
i guess the whole development is in a way inevitable, and the exception is really out generation, who lived through home computers achievable enough to realistically have at home, but not yet streamlined enough as a product that tinkering and going off the vendor-installed path wasn’t an intrinsic part of it.
oooh, that’s a neat pun indeed.
the guys left out the real story re black bolt: his name is blackagar boltagon. i kid you not.
Friend of mine did a talk on some of the recent developments in satellite tech if anyone is interested –
https://youtu.be/YDedVZ04aqk
yes i realize i have literally become one of those old men complaining about how “you cant work on cars anymore like in the 1950s”. now we cant work on mainstream consumer level computers anymore. not without an approval key from Microsoft, which requires sending a scan of your drivers license to a certificate authority and paying a bunch of money to prove you aren’t a malware creator.
but there will always be those niches, like raspberry pi, arduino, linux…
Hmmm… Tunnels underground. All I think of is the Big Dig that happened in Boston. That solved nothing. Driving in boston still sucks.
i absolutely agree – that level of access and freedom is inevitable for all kinds of businesses, research, for-fun tinkering, etc.
but as inevitable as it is, it’s really disheartening to see it being driven out of common home usage computing like that.