I've actually never been, but saw it featured in a CanCon movie, waydowntown, where a group of office workers wage a month's salary as to who can stay inside the longest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waydowntown
Fellow Calgarian here. I like how the term "plus 15" refers to any elevated path in Calgary. For example, the link between the new cancer centre and Foothills Hospital is often referred to as the Plus 15.
My issue with corporate laptops isn't so much the PC's hardware but the antimalware. I'm not even sure what the antimalware does, and I think, at one time or another, I've probably had all the major ones installed, and they've all managed to slow down my PC down to frustratingly slow speeds.
In high school, I worked at a local PC store in Ottawa - Dantek Computers, 1994-1996. Prior to leaving for University in August 1996, I built myself a Pentium 120, with the Asus P55T2P4 motherboard mentioned in the article.
The way our store worked, every PC was built to order - we had inexpensive cases with sharp edges, we had higher end ones as well. I assembled a TON of PCs over those two years. We had a PC configuration app the owner had built in QBasic - it was very much like pcpartpicker.com , with all the parts we had available.
We played with a bunch of hardware and were familiar with it, we'd walk customers through the decisions - the impact of increasing cache, the differences in video cards. I believed it at the time, and in retrospect, still believe that it was an awesome shop - I can remember, by policy, we would sell customers printers if they really wanted one, but always recommended they buy one at the big box shop down the street, as we couldn't match their pricing. I loved that job.
I don't think it was so much the business practices, but the market that shifted - I think it was a viable business for most of the 90s - there were a lot of these shops, but most have disappeared. It made sense to build for a use case to save on parts, but now, the most basic PCs handle most computing tasks with ease.
Purchasing decisions in business and government were more ad-hoc - I can remember selling and servicing a small number of PCs to embassies, even federal government offices buying 1-5 units. Now they'd buy standard off the shelf boxes in huge quantities.
I just can't imagine now, a foreign embassy calling in to their local PC shop for service, and having a local 17 year old walk in to service a diplomat's PC.
The birth of the ATX format made it so anyone could order parts online (with a little bit of knowledge) and it would fit. Would it be the best? Maybe not. But it fit.
Nothing sucked more than buying RAM in the wrong DIMM pin size. Was it 72, or 30 pin? Crap, let’s count them… This AGP card requires its own AGP slot, what? And IDE cables that couldn’t daisy chain. Man, those were the days. Cathode ray tube radiation straight to the retinas.
Not really. I remember the AT to ATX transition in 1995, and it definitely didn't fix the parts issue. Your motherboard and power supply would fit. Anything else could still be a problem.
You still had pick the right CPU, memory, and expansion cards. Early ATX motherboards had ISA, PCI, AGP. It did nothing to fix most of the parts issues. I build PCs both with older AT and ATX standards. ATX did fix the "IO card" problem, but it wasn't a panacea for all PC building.
I was reading some of the Amiga 1000 material that was surfacing earlier this summer for the 40th anniversary - the Infoworld review ( https://books.google.ca/books?id=cC8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA42&redir_... ) had the following highlight:
"Connecting printers is equally easy, since the Amiga uses standard plugs and cabling schemes used by the IBM PC; you can actually unplug an Epson dot-matrix printer from an IBM PC, plug it into an Amiga, and expect it to work without rewiring the cable"
I love that this was worth mentioning in 1985.
Similar story, a bit later - my parents had a TeleVideo 1603 system that ran CP/M - I remember my father making a custom cable to connect a Daisywriter letter quality printer to it.
My great grandmother, who lived into my 20s, wrote a 10 page memoir about growing up - life stories, people, places etc... And I found it super interesting - I built a vacation around the places last summer.
I asked her daughter/my grandmother to do the same, but she wasn't interested. And then I've thought about the exercise myself - it's hard to think of things in my life that a future great-grandchild might find interesting. And it's not clear if my great-grandmother's story I find interesting, in contrast with financial hardships I did not face? How do you pick out the interesting from the mundane? What is most interesting about today 100 years from now?
And I can see the potential for core interview questions to help draw it out.
I have an iPhone that I believe was damaged in this way.
So you’d probably want a purpose built bike computer, an older phone that you don’t care about the camera, or perhaps there are fancy vibration dampening mounts that could work.
Another way would be a CarPlay/AndroidAuto screen. These are available for cheap from e.g. AliExpress and can run off a power bank. This way, the phone does all the processing but can stay safely in a bag or pocket as all the display and control is done via the CarPlay/AA screen.
Yep, there are models specifically made to be permanently mounted on a motorcycle. I’d hazard a guess that they’ll work just as fine on the handlebar of a bicycle. You’ll just have to waterproof the power source then, e.g. wrap the powerbank in a ziploc bag or tupperware container.
I love reading about projects where someone has taken a combination of used bicycles, bicycle parts, metal tubing, sometimes batteries & electric motors, aerodynamic skins, and built something new: a bike for transport, a recumbent, something aerodynamic, something light, something electric.
I wish I had the project space, the skills (welding, mechanical), and the tools to build human and electric powered bikes.
General feedback:
- I want something like this
- I have built crude air quality monitors (sensors + micro-controller) but would prefer something I can buy
- I love the openness
- I love the form factor. I would like the ability to carry it around, the loop on this is great. eg: what is this meeting room like after 45 minutes?
- Would like to see PM2.5 - the AirGradient is probably closer to what I want
Patrick McKenzie has an interesting perspective on this:
I think this is underappreciated by almost all writers. You should be doing something very differently with your life if you assume that as opposed to a generation earlier or even five years ago, most of the direct effects of writing will be by people who actually read what you wrote.
And you have the opportunity, a near certainty that most "people" who read what you write in the future are not going to be humans. But humans will interact with what you write with an indirection layer in the middle.
10 miles/16 km.
I've actually never been, but saw it featured in a CanCon movie, waydowntown, where a group of office workers wage a month's salary as to who can stay inside the longest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waydowntown