And optimize for repair when one of the thousands of actuators gets stuck or burns out…
Here’s a thought, though: you’ve seen the sand table + kinect projection mapping demo? What about that, plus a two-axis moving magnet sand mandala marble drawing table? The actuator could draw the path /sculpt the terrain, then release the marble and grab the figurines?
the trick it to be able to actuate the rods without placing a linear actuator on every one, but it's a complicated problem. Magnetism? hydraulic shafts fed and drained by a series of gates making a matrix? acoustic levitation?
I'm reminded of the old BERG London pixel track display that used a little cart with a vertical array of solenoids that would travel the length of the display flipping each individual pixel on an off physically. https://www.designboom.com/technology/pixel-track-berg-cloud... It's on my list of'next time i'm unemployed' projects to pick up and open source a design for.
Looking at teardown images of the launchpad pcb, it might be possible to shave down the ground plane on the two non-button sides enough that you could mate them up with no bezel interfering.
Re: illuminated tact’s: Old launchpads go for $25 - $30 on ebay, and you don’t have to purchase your own control and power components…
Rob Pike is responsible for many cool things, but Unix isn't one of them. Go is a wonderful hybrid (with its own faults) of the schools of Thompson and Wirth, with a huge amount of Pike.
If you'd said Plan 9 and UTF-8 I'd agree with you.
Rob Pike definitely wrote large chunks of Unix while at Bell Labs. It's wrong to say he wrote all of it like the GP did but it is also wrong to diminish his contributions.
Unix was created by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs (AT&T) in 1969. Thompson wrote the initial version, and Ritchie later contributed significantly, including developing the C programming language, which Unix was subsequently rewritten in.
> but was a contributor to it. He, with a team, unquestionably wrote it.
contribute < wrote.
His credits are huge, but I think saying he wrote Unix is misattribution.
Credits include: Plan 9 (successor to Unix), Unix Window System, UTF-8 (maybe his most universally impactful contribution), Unix Philosophy Articulation, strings/greps/other tools, regular expressions, C successor work that ultimately let him to Go.
Are you under the impression he was, like, a hands-off project manager or something? His involvement was in writing it. Not singlehandedly, but certainly as part of a team. He unquestionably wrote it. He did not envision it like he did the other projects you mention, but the original credit was only in the writing of.
Nobody seems to be questioning that he was involved in Unix. Given that he didn't write it, what did he do for the project? Quality assurance? Support? Marketing? Court jester?
The phone will still make sound if I launch a music app, why is a web page different?
And I hate web pages making sound! But the UX is confusing, and it’s changed over the years, seemingly without reason.
Iphones now have a software toggle as well, which may have coincided with the shift from “mute ringer” to “mute (almost) everything” that came with the multifunction button.
Web browsers on desktop operating systems initially allowed any website to play audio without any interaction required. Some websites would blast annoying audio ads as soon as you opened a page on their site. So effort was put into making it so that web browsers on desktops would only play sound after user interaction via mouse click. Later, some websites were exempted from that by some desktop web browsers, for example YouTube I think.
Even without ads, background noise that starts automatically as soon as you visit a page can be distracting and disruptive.
I’m perfectly happy that Safari on iOS does not play background audio when I have my phone in silent mode. Even when I have tapped on buttons on the page.
Silent mode is not entirely only for notifications anyway. The built-in keyboard is also silent in silent mode, whereas when silent mode is off it makes an annoying click sound for every button that you press. Likewise the builtin camera app on iOS makes a shutter sound when you take photos with silent mode off. With silent mode the camera app is silent. Same with taking screenshots. I take a lot of screenshots, and prefer that people around me don’t think I’m taking photos when I am taking a screenshot on the phone.
Meanwhile, if I open a music player app on my phone and hit play, I have made a very deliberate choice about playing sound.
All of the games on my phone I can think of are also silent in silent mode. Not sure if all games have to be silent in silent mode or not on iOS (i.e. if “can play sound in silent mode” is a special permission in iOS and if Apple disallows apps categorized as games in App Store from having that permission or not). But I like that the games I play on my phone are silent in silent mode.
There is some inconsistency indeed about what is silent or not, but I am happy with the way that it is as someone who prefers surprising silence over surprising noises from my phone when it’s in silent mode.
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