About 5 years ago or so I was able to collect my Dad's C64 collection from my Mom's house, buy some new cables and an official C64 monitor off of eBay, and gift him his old computer back for Christmas.
I can't speak to cassettes, we had only cartridges and floppies. My Dad was a prolific pirate, so cases and cases of floppies. I'd say roughly 3 out of 5 worked, and we were able to boot the old game up. Karateka, 4th and Inches, Hat Trick, Bubble Bobble, Impossible Mission...
I was surprised the C64 worked, honestly. It had been stored for nearly a decade in an old Barn next to decrepit plow/cattle equipment from the early 1900's, not protected from the environment at all, just an old cardboard box literally busting at the seams. At least it wasn't on the ground.
I used to budget the bulk of my yearly tax refund for a PC upgrade of some kind. A bit over $1k every year. Something was always due for a replacement in an endless treadmill of avoiding total system obsolescence.
Now, shit just lasts forever. I upgraded from a 1st gen i7 920 _this year_ into some mid-range Ryzen 5. I'm still using the 2070 RTX I bought over 5 years ago to power the HTC Vive and a 1440p monitor; with this new CPU the gfx card is finally getting a workout and has become the bottleneck while also giving me a massively better experience.
I'm tempted by the 9070 graphics cards but honestly, I just don't need it. I can tweak settings on any AAA game and get ~50fps of real frames and I'm just fine with that. I probably won't upgrade the graphics card until I pick up a dramatically better display device that requires it. Maybe the Frame will push the issue, maybe it won't.
I take the pants that have insufficient pockets to a tailor, and ask them to extend the depth of the phone pocket. You can even ask them to do the extension in phone size if you want to restrict its movement in your pocket. On average I've needed about a 3" extension which both restricts lateral phone movement, and also carries it low enough on my thigh that the phone doesn't pinch into my hip when I sit down.
$30 or so later you'll have an integrated Pholster and don't have to carry another thing around with you. For $200 you should be able to update all the pants you have that lack a proper pocket. This is also an incredibly easy thing to sew yourself, by hand, while you watch TV. $30 for a tailor to do the first pair to give you a template to follow, $50 at a craft store will get you some decent scissors, needle, thread, and a yard of whatever material you like. You'll butcher the first pair of pants, but the second, will be better and the third will be perfect.
We need mandatory licensing. It worked for Radio, it can work for Streaming.
There's no reason Netflix and Hulu couldn't both have ALL media available. Then they could actually compete on features and capabilities, not on media catalog.
I'm a big fan of tasteful remakes/remasters/updates. I don't mind paying again. I liked the Monkey Island update, System Shock, Myst, and Oblivion. They hit the right balance of QOL changes to take advantage of modern control schemes and polishing up the gfx to match my rose-colored memories. Oblivion on my HDTV looks so much like how I remember it looking on my 15" Compaq my nostalgia bones vibrate.
> About 60 percent thought 5-8 years is the ideal amount of time between versions. Only 11 percent thought 10 years or more was preferable.
This I don't understand. 5-8 years old is the ideal age to remaster? So Skyrim should have had a full-blown remaster by now, if not 2?
I want to see 20 year old stuff get this treatment. Homeworld 1, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, Zork: Grand Inquisitor, Max Payne, Mech Warrior.
Emoji, Emoticon, Smiley, to the average user these are all the exact same thing. They mean "fun inline image in my text". Technical people dismissing the Robber or Seahorse emoji as a Mandala Effect is actually a great example of not diagnosing the root problem, aka _not listening to the customer_.
I had massive, massive packs of custom icons installed into my Trillian client going all the way back to the early 00's. So did my friends, and we all knew it. Anyone new to the friend group was installing packs right away too so they could get all the fun jokes that were only applicable if you had the right emoticons installed. Here's [1] an example of a phpBB board distributing their custom icons as Trillian emoticons, so their members can keep the vibe going no matter how they are chatting.
The whole world did not fantasize a Robber emoji. We sent robber smileys. We sent and received gun emoticons, seahorses, aliens, etc. What changes is how those symbols are communicated. The feature shifted from being a local-only token-to-img replacement operation to being encoded in the character set that is delivered, and in that version rev of the "Fun images in text" concept, commonly used pictographs were left behind.
Apple doesn't advertise this as the intent, but until the Air I felt that the Phone+Case combo is the complete phone, as it is intended to be used. Add any of Apple's official cases, leather, silicone, whatever, and that's the official "thickness" of the phone. The cameras are recessed, the front display is recessed, the whole phone is wrapped in leather and further customized to your style.
Now the Air has a bump that is so big no case can hide it without also being unreasonably thicc, breaking the trend. I wonder what a case mfg could stuff into the awkward space on the peninsula where the camera is missing so the case provides a uniform surface when laying flat, even if that means a bigger bump on the top when cased. The phone would have a natural angle towards the user, that's kinda nice. Maybe a little bluetooth speaker setup so owners of the Air can more efficiently irritate their fellow passengers.
For work I use Logseq, but I treat it like a .txt file. 90% of my use is the daily journal pages, adding NOW and LATER todos, notes, whatever. The ability to link nodes to other pages or nodes is just good enough to beat out a .txt.
For my personal life I use Things 4. I bought the Mac and iOS versions. Despite the steep price for the Mac version, I think it's worth it. I appreciate how the app is organized. I like that the "Inbox" dumping ground is totally separate from the "Today" queue, that it pulls in calendar events to the Today queue, and the differentiation of Anytime vs Someday. I would forget to check it too, if I hadn't placed a large widget right on my Home Screen. It's the first thing I see any time I unlock my phone, it helps a lot.
I am also an avid user of post-it notes. I like to keep a stack of them on my desk. These are for things I need to complete _today_, if not _up next_. This is how I stay focused when I'm in deep work. "add test for new sort fn", "better name for site/tenant var", "need new fixture for sortables", that kind of thing. When I leave my desk I should have no sticky notes on it, whatever left ends up in Logseq.
No, they did not. Reagan very much wanted to spread that lie, but no infrastructure was held hostage. The laborers who held the skills needed to run that infrastructure declined to work when their compensation negotiations were declined.
Reagan's actions have had a profoundly disturbing effect on the American middle class that is still being felt today.
I can't speak to cassettes, we had only cartridges and floppies. My Dad was a prolific pirate, so cases and cases of floppies. I'd say roughly 3 out of 5 worked, and we were able to boot the old game up. Karateka, 4th and Inches, Hat Trick, Bubble Bobble, Impossible Mission...
I was surprised the C64 worked, honestly. It had been stored for nearly a decade in an old Barn next to decrepit plow/cattle equipment from the early 1900's, not protected from the environment at all, just an old cardboard box literally busting at the seams. At least it wasn't on the ground.