I had forgotten Pebble used Tintin-themed code names (which I assume was the inspiration for the Snowy assistant app's name?)...
Tangentially & coincidentally related: the Tintin & Snowy[0] characters entered the/a Public Domain[1] at the beginning of this year!
Which means your lawyer might advise that you might now actually be able to use an actual original Snowy illustration[2] for the app logo...
I mention this primarily because I am currently (in theory) developing a Tintin-themed game for an annual Public Domain game jam[3]. In reality, I've spent more time trying to locate scans of Tintin-related documents/illustrations[4] that actually fall under the constraints necessary for even US Public Domain[5].
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[0] Milou.
[1] Well, actually[1a], maybe only in the US for 2025? And 2034 in Berne-associated countries? And 2054 in Belgium? Or any year if you're an AI, seemingly? Okay, perhaps it's better to not use an original illustration. Such are the joys of actually trying to interact with the Public Domain in good faith[1b].
[1b] It just now occurs to me to wonder whether or not Milou can actually be referred to as "Snowy" given Tintin wasn't translated into English until the 1950s (late 1950s for the use of the name "Snowy" rather "Milou") (and as late as 1989 for the first title "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets"), given translations are AIUI new works?
[4] Pretty interesting finding different variants on archive.org, e.g. [4a][4b][4c]. (After all, "entering the Public Domain" is not of much value if the related material isn't accessible or the status is unclear. (Which is why recent trends in FLOSS project copyright year ranges statements bug me...))
An excellent one at that. It boggles my mind that others didn't follow suit.
I've got a Bangle.js 2 at the moment and while I mostly like it, the screen is nowhere near as nice. Transflective is still very obviously what I want in a watch though, even the best oleds don't even come close in visibility.
> It boggles my mind that others didn't follow suit.
Most fitness smartwatches (Garmin, Coros, Wahoo) used the same display technology for years, called it MIP displays. Nowadays they are switching to OLEDs.
The vast majority I've seen are black and white, with a color layer on top that is disabled when in "low power / sunlight readable" modes. And many of the smartwatch-focused devices (rather than Garmin's super pricey and gigantic "hiking for days without a phone so it solar charges and has gps and..." watches) only use OLED, even if the brand has MIP screens in some other product lines.
I haven't seen anything even close to what pebble's color watches did. Banglejs is by far the closest, with 6 colors and a much more muted screen in general.
> [...] some of the announcements today have thrown us for a loop so plans are still being discussed.
Feel free not to answer, but: does this imply Rebbele were aware of an impending Pebble OS source release but not... the other thing?
If so, that seems... "unfortunate". :/
Also, btw, I really like the use of the phrase "user-respectful technology" in the Rebble post.
And, rather unsurprisingly given one of my other recent comments[0], I am supportive of the fact that the Foundation's missions includes these aspects in particular:
* "educating people about why these [little oasis of user-respectful technology] are important"
* "using them as a platform to teach embedded systems"
*insert additional supportive statement & well wishes here* :)
Funny that the L in ldap stands for lightweight, and yet clearly there is interest in a lightweight version of what has become a somewhat bloated protocol.
It was simple enough that back in 2002, I could implement a whole client+server LDAP protocol framework from scratch in ~11k lines of Python. That's not horrible.
ASN.1 gets a lot of (imho deserved) crap but it's roughly just a bunch of nested TLV (type, length, value) messages, just smeared with a bunch of legacy and a weird definition language. It's not all that different from e.g. Protocol Buffers. Outside of figuring out what context you're in and thus what message type an integer refers to, there's not much that would be "a hard problem" about it.
Culturally impossible as well, in the sense thar x.500 expected that every country's national telecom operator would take on the task of handling identity and certs for the population of that country.
That said, the US DoD had a pretty good stab at it, and even today in corners of the defense industrial base you can find companies like Isode that still service that niche. To be fair, x.400 messaging and x.500 directory looked pretty smart back in the day when smtp and passwd were the alternatives. It's just that smtp grew up incredibly fast and quickly outstripped the alternative.
I got my start in that era and they only looked smart if you didn't look deeply. Too many options, too many areas where they created a problem and then passed it off to someone else to fix.
Wow! I wasn't expecting this at all. Thanks for the cozy hug of death :) Also, thanks for posting the archive link! I'll try to make it more resilient for the future.
We'd love to offer something like that, but there's all kind of considerations around liability with repairs. Plus we're entirely run by volunteers, and watch repairs take a lot of time.
That being said, a store for refurbed Pebbles might be doable, but it would be a big time and cost overhead.
That's fair - I hadn't realized Rebble were volunteers. I'd hoped the subscriber money might stretch to also compensating people involved. I certainly wouldn't expect volunteers to be working on repairs out of the goodness of their hearts.
I guess my dream is for Rebble to be like a cross between Framework & iFixIt - somewhere you can buy all your spare parts (and accessories?), maybe find repair guides... and then to continue the Pebble mission by making new models that can run Pebble software on modern designs. I guess it's just a dream. But if there's only about 2k of us Rebble subscribers, I'm proud to be one of those 2k!
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