bofh23
Joined 6 years ago
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65
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45
Member since
Oct 13
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 2 years ago
I like multi-function displays (MFD) which were probably a necessity in aviation before touchscreen technology and also could be operated by a pilot with gloves on.
Multi-function display - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-function_display « a small-screen (CRT or LCD) surrounded by multiple soft keys (configurable buttons) that can be used to display information to the user in numerous configurable ways. »
I’d like a Thrustmaster Cougar MFD with USB interface on a flat panel screen, perhaps with both illuminated soft buttons and knobs with labels on screen. I wonder why they don’t sell one with a built in screen? There’s lots of DIY builds that add them.
Comment · 2 years ago
Wow, thanks for making this! I’m having lots of fun playing with it.
A quibble: Choosing between Draw|Erase|Toggle is awkward on mobile (Safari on iPhone). The old toggle between Draw|Erase was quick but the new pulldown list widget is in the upper left while the choices always pop open at the bottom of the screen.
Perhaps move the pulldown list to the bottom on mobile or make it two toggle buttons (Mode: Draw|Erase, Line type: Bounce|Toggle)?
Some enhancement ideas:
Add a mark where the dots drop from and perhaps a faint line to show the drop path.
Add an edit mode so existing lines could be selected then either erased, moved, lengthened, shortened, or have their type changed between Bounce|Toggle. Going further allow a point to be selected and move it or rotate a line around it.
Comment · 2 years ago
Amazing work. Thanks for sharing xwax with the world!
Are you aware of Rasteri’s SC1000? It uses a magnetic rotary sensor with a modified version of xwax instead of time-coded vinyl. I wonder if xwax has support for other DIY jog wheel controllers? I didn’t see anything in the docs.
GitHub - rasteri/SC1000: An open-source digital portable turntablist instrument https://github.com/rasteri/SC1000/ « the scratch wheel is handled by an Austria Microsystems AS5601 magnetic rotary sensor »
Comment · 2 years ago
James Mickens’s Monitorama 2014 presentation had me laughing to the point of tears. “Look a word cloud!”
Title: "Computers are a Sadness, I am the Cure" https://vimeo.com/95066828
Comment · 2 years ago
Critical article from Apr 2009:
on url shorteners -- joshua schachter's blog http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners
Print publishers might have a case for URL shorteners but they should own and maintain their own instead of a 3rd party service they can’t control or prevent from disappearing.
Plenty of articles in the Communications of the ACM magazine use 3rd party shortened URLs and it’s unacceptable. They should know better and should host their own link shortener via their digital library system.
Comment · 2 years ago
To mitigate link rot I always include a title along with the URL. This is especially important for URLs with opaque ids like on YouTube instead of slugs. If you visit a pulled YouTube video link you’re left not knowing the title to search for it elsewhere.
This doesn’t always work because many websites neglect page titles. I’ve always wanted to ask a wide range of web developers why they neglect titles. Why?
Comment · 2 years ago
It’s a wonderful resource but they neglect the pagetitle element which is set to “McMaster-Carr” on every page. Links opened in tabs/windows all get the same title and bookmark titles need to be manually edited to be useful.
Why do developers of otherwise great websites neglect page titles?
Comment · 2 years ago
There’s a similar device used to transmit the first recovered victim’s fingerprints from the funeral parlor to FBI field offices in Silence of the Lambs.
Comment · 4 years ago
Web publishing aside:
Why do sites like this totally neglect the page title and meta attributes for sharing in social media such as Open Graph?
At bare minimum, why not include <title>Blackmagic Design Announces DaVinci Resolve for iPad</title> in the <head> element?
I checked the page with Facebook’s Sharing Debugger and found:
og:title: Media | Blackmagic Design og:description: All items on this website are copyright […]
Comment · 4 years ago
> and things shift around on you for another 20 seconds after that, so when you go to tap a link you accidentally tap an ad that finally loaded under your finger.
Why don’t browsers mask out events during render of page regions or note their time and bounding boxes so click events reach the correct element?
Steps to reproduce this annoyance:
- visit Twitter mobile site: mobile.twitter.com in Safari on a slow iPhone (eg iPhone 6 stuck on iOS 12.X). - scroll and view tweets for a while soaking up memory. - visit a tweet - press tweet share icon - popup menu takes forever to render fully to include the Cancel button. - clicking Bookmark tweet menu item will trigger item after that, Copy Link to Tweet, when it finally loads and moves that menu item under your finger.
Comment · 4 years ago
Why did Apple remove the cursor keys that would appear in landscape aspect? There’s still plenty of unused space for them. Thankfully there’s the long press on spacebar gesture but I only recently learned about that.
The PlainText app would show cursor keys in its customer keyboard but that’s long gone from the app store so I’ll lose it at my overdue upgrade.
P.S. Restore the 3.5mm TRRS headset jack.
Comment · 4 years ago
I’m pretty sure Thunderbolt only has the equivalent of 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0 while GPU cards tend to be 16 lane.
Comment · 4 years ago
I think it was 3 to 6 VME-sized boards. There was 1 Display Generator board, 1 Geometry Engine board (12 x Intel i860 processors in the RealityEngine2), and 1, 2, or 4 Raster Manager boards (for framebuffer and texture memory). I’m not sure if the maximum configuration of 6 boards could fit in the deskside chassis. That might have required the full rack chassis which had space for several sets of cards for multi-pipe systems. As for cooling, I know the full rack chassis had a huge blower. I’m not sure if the deskside models had blowers or more traditional axial fans.
Comment · 4 years ago
Aside:
Why don’t folks give their web pages titles? There’s a title in the body but I mean actual page titles that show up in browser windows, tabs, and bookmarks.
<head>
<meta>
<title>Page Title</title>
</meta>
</head>
I tune in and leave it on in the background and it’s like having a window with an interesting view. It’s great ambient TV as noted in this article:
[2012-09-18] The Inadvertent Cinema: City Drive Live | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-inadvert...
The cameras are old, some are black & white, and often they’re over or underexposed with all the interesting video artifacts that entails.
Unlike the webcam access at https://webcams.nyctmc.org/ the cameras update at realtime rates (30 fps) though some are slower.
Sadly, they don’t make the realtime camera cycling available to live stream that I’m aware of. I wish they would for homesick NYers. They don’t even show channel 72 in the Live TV tab of the Spectrum app (perhaps it works when using Spectrum Internet access).