Everything Else

Around mid december I sold my thinkpad (for more than I bought it for, so win!!)

Let me back up a bit. I replaced my worn out, battered, slow, macbook air whos battery maybe lasted for two or three hours, with the thinkpad last June because I was excited about many of the new features coming in windows 10. Since I haven't really used windows since the xp/vista days, I forgot microsoft was full of shit and many of the new features wouldn't work at all and in reality my 2.5ghz core i7 thinkpad ran less than half as fast as a 1.4ghz c2d macbook from 2010. Especially when booting up. And the screen sucked. And the touchpad sucked. And it had to update itself ALL the time. Especially when trying to use it. And the battery life sucked. So I sold it.

I figured I would replace it with a new macbook, the little one in gold (I borrowed one for a bit and really liked it) or even an ipad. But when I realized if I can do it on an ipad I can do it on my phone, so I didn't buy anything and have no computer-shaped machine to my name.

I have a macbook pro at work (standard issue although I have seen a few airs without retina...) and if I have to work on a weekend I might bring it home on friday rather than going into the office. Tends to only happen once a month or so.

So... No 'computer' for me. My wife has a vaio (I am not allowed to touch it!) but even she is so smitten by the screen on her galaxy she only uses it for writing and other things where having a keyboard/larger screen comes in handy.

Also thought about getting an apple watch but I realized the nike sportband is still king of the wrist. Maybe next years apple watch?

I've started reading books again. Kickass tends to be better than tpb for books. And I need to be at work to use the real computer for that, or have my wife download a book and email it to me. Which I guess is the one big shortcoming with iphone, lack of torrents. Spotify replaced itunes everywhere for me, and the need to torrent music. Ditto for netflix and movies. Once in a great while I will buy/borrow a paper book if I find something interesting. Or art/picture books.

Is anybody else here living in a "post-PC" world? PeeCees have never been better and I can't shake the feeling that... nobody cares

I like computers. I just prefer the old ones.

ClassicHasClass wrote: I like computers. I just prefer the old ones.

me too, e.g. I'd rather use my PowerBook-G3 (hacked, it has became G4)
and about programming, I simply do not like the modern stuff, too many complexity

Still liking PCs here, but I do agree about the faults of many of the newer ones. The touchpads on recent Thinkpads are awful, I hate that almost all laptops these days have nasty 16:9 screens on them, and I'm not a fan of Windows 10 either. Hence, my laptop is an old X201 Thinkpad (16:10 screen, and a touchpad with proper buttons, Windows 7).

However for most my Windows stuff, I just use my main PC. It's also a few years old, but with a proper mechanical keyboard and a 28" 16:10 monitor, it's actually pleasant to use. And it has a decent graphics card for pushing around Fallout 4 and the likes

Oddly enough, I've never got into tablets at all. If I want to look up something quickly, I'll use my phone. If the phone is too small/restrictive, I'd rather use a laptop or PC than a tablet, but maybe that's just me.

IBM ?

Aaaahhh before I had the MBA I had an X40, it was great. I wore that thing out .

Almost forgot, I took my old mac pro to work. It is a time machine and fileserver for everybody else now. I guess it's still technically mine..

just when i was thinking of asking the ‘channers about those embedded, mini-whatever you call them kits (like the raspberry pi, bandana-split or doo-wap-de-l’arte). not sure if they count as post pc though.

guardian452 wrote: Is anybody else here living in a "post-PC" world? PeeCees have never been better and I can't shake the feeling that... nobody cares

moi? i'm probably the one to blame for starting such discussions here. they all suck, they all steal your time, fifty trillion gigaflops on your smartphone and they still fuck up when you need them. fucking pop-sci-fi of the 80s

we’ve had a similar discussion back when i was testing hallucinating on carrying an iPad only, iirc sky was testing them too and kept them as synths in his studio. i ended up ditching them as a sole daily thing to carry around. they’re ok for doing the couch potato but typing a lot on these things makes you look like volunteering for a handicap you’ve never had.

the air was great for me (gotta love its weight) but its fixed ram made me sell it (couldn’t run aperture/fcp/something else properly) and for the last 3 years this old macbook cuts everything i do. i maxed-out the ram to 16gigs, replaced the stock hd w/ an ssd and that was it.

guardian452 wrote: I've started reading books again...Once in a great while I will buy/borrow a paper book if I find something interesting. Or art/picture books.

yup, nothing like a walk around town, hunting second-hand bookstores on a cool sunday



oh and kinda delayed but, happy new year guys!

No thanks, I don't use computers that try to prevent me from running any software I goddamn please, because I have at least some tiny shreds of integrity and dignity left and don't need to be herded around by the Appointed Overseers with the rest of the tablet sheep.

Harsh, man. I may not have much dignity but at least mine doesn't come from a machine.

I built a small end of line tester program (@work) for iphone that connects to a ble can adapter. I suppose it would run on ipads as well...

I should learn swift (one of these days!) but I don't see obj-c and xcode as a big hinderance from the Appointed Overseers, but, I've also never submitted anything to the app store...

fu wrote: just when i was thinking of asking the ‘channers about those embedded, mini-whatever you call them kits (like the raspberry pi, bandana-split or doo-wap-de-l’arte). not sure if they count as post pc though.

I grew up with avrs, 8051s, msp430s, etc, so whenever I think I have an excuse to buy a rpi I pull a $3 mcu out of the cookie jar and use that instead. I thought about using it as a telematics device but the lack of a built in gsm modem, and lack of decent software both OS and application level for what I wanted to do kinda scared me off. Not to mention any security holes I wound up using the STW TC3G and could not be happier with the results. STW makes our ECU as well which I also develop for in my spare time. I'm the only engineer at work so I do not have a whole lot of time to devote to software development. It's all in C and Codesys (IEC 61131-3 IDE). There are also 3 PCBs in the vehicle which I designed and programmed the avrs for.

So, long story short, no. I still do everything with AVRs that most normal* people would use an RPi for. Even my crazy RGB under cabinet kitchen lights (I converted every incandescent bulb and the double-t8 light, never did the cfl thing, in my house to Hyperikon and Ikea LEDs last summer) with remote control 'app' is... AVR

*I say 'normal' loosely because a really 'normal' person thinks a raspberry pie is a dessert!

I think there is a rpi derivative out there that has a built in canbus. Not that a mcp2515/2561 is all that pricy buuuuuuut...

If you had an RPi and actually used it as a desktop, like with kb and mouse, I would still call it a PC. It's probably better than the $70 "windows with bing ads" laptops that walmart sells. I don't know any rpis that are used like that, tho. All embedded gee-whiz stuff. Like your toaster can text you when it's on fire, etc.

guardian452 wrote: If you had an RPi and actually used it as a desktop, like with kb and mouse, I would still call it a PC

no no, absolutely no,I would not call it peeceeee
if it's not heavy and big, it gets no trust from me
going to convert my Woody Box into VT100

Well, by using the Duck test, i agree with Guardian452 about the Raspberry Pi being a PC, since it has all the usual qualities assorted with a PC.
It is of course possible to deploy a RPi by other means, like a remote Wifi spot, or a network device or even a USB to serial device. But then, a PC can similarly be deployed. It just needs more current

On topic, i still use PC's since i develop and test scientific software on a regular basis. Although a lot of HPC jobs can be performed on a cluster, its high speed, large memory capacity and big+fast storage options is still essential in doing my work. I do like laptops to work everywhere i please, but they tend to be less comfortable as a PC. Moreover i tend to not go for expensive models since they are subject to a dangerous environment, i.e. kids with glasses of lemonade and the occasional impact test from a table.

I am going to develop the above ram disk

it will be plugged into my 68060 board
it comes with 8Mbyte non volatile static ram, asynchronous bus, PLL burst, 32bit data bus
each chip is 8 bit data path, they work in parallel, and say @ ~12Mbyte/sec

oh, the CPLD implements the FSM bus driver, and a funny mount mechanism (which looks like flash unlock)
the ram-disk bootstraps in read-only mode, if you want to write on it, you have to unlock the protection









ADS-100 Unigraphics Standalone Workstation (circa 1982)


would you call it "PC" ? try if you dare

I made a RAM disk* with a bandsaw and a Prime computer board. Just cut out the size of array I needed, sanded the power plane burrs, and wired it up to a simple bread boarded controller. Of course that was back in the early 80's when stuff was expensive, unless it was scrapped, and scrapped only meant some idiot couldn't fix it. That was all to augment a Radio Shack COCO III at the time.

*-essentially a page space for OS9, since it had no virtual memory at the time.