Fantastic! Load the Altair Z80. At the CP/M prompt type: 'DIR' to see your files. Try out: 'MBASIC STARTREK' - be patient while it loads and then go save the galaxy! Just like old times :)
As someone who purchased their first M-series Mac this year (M4 pro), I've been thrilled to discover how well it does with local genAI tasks to produce text, code and images. For example openai/gpt-oss-20b runs locally quite well with 24GB memory. If I knew beforehand how performant the Mac would be for these kinds of tasks, I probably would have purchased more RAM in order to load larger models. Performance for genAI is a function of GPU, # of GPU cores, and memory bandwidth. I think your biggest gains are going from a base chip to a pro/max/ultra version with the greater gpu cores and greater bandwidth.
That's pretty much how all laser particle counters work... except the good ones use a fan and a chamber. Guess we'll have to wait and see how this compares to the reference sensors.
A website in the US doesn't deliver anything to the UK, it hands off some packets to a router in the US. Why is the website responsible for what all the interconnecting routers do? If a person from the UK were to visit an adult bookstore in the US, the bookstore owner isn't at fault if the customer decides to move certain material across national boundaries.
Even non-physical numbers are problematic to signal 'invalid'. I had a customer use -999 as a placeholder for 'invalid' data. Years later somebody made a higher level data product that averaged and combined that data with other products, without knowing to first remove those 'invalid' values. The resulting values were all now within physical limits, but very very wrong. The best solution is to use IEEE NaN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaN so that your code blows up if you don't explicitly check for it.
Yes, push to toggle microphone is another great use for these!
I was using the Kinesis Programmable Foot Switch 26 years ago with ps/2 connectors (later they switched to USB). You would get 3 foot switches in each unit and chain them together along with your keyboard so they only used one host port. The most similar thing I see now would be https://www.amazon.com/X-keys-Foot-Pedal-Playback-Control/dp...
It's frustrating that I can't reprogram my old foot switches since the manufacturer stopped supporting them. If buying today, I'd look for something based on open source QMK firmware like my keyboard uses. This project looks cool: https://github.com/christrotter/qmk_firmware/tree/arcboard-s...
I did experiment with using a trackball taped to the floor. It's hard to get precise positioning moving your foot. I think using the tongue along the roof of your mouth would be more precise and less fatiguing. What was more useful was a set of 9 foot switches that could be programmed to send arbitrary keystrokes. I could off load from my hands the most common keypresses I do all day, for example: pageup, pagedown, tab, enter, backspace, mouse click, passwords... along with speech recognition software you can get at least non-coding tasks done without using your hands too much.
I can imagine this helping anyone that has struggled with computer-related overuse injuries. I had a bad case of tendinitis that made using a mouse or trackpad very painful. I would have loved to have this kind of device as another option.