If the market weren’t in decline, maybe. But to pipedream a little:
A standardized control board (imagine if it were something like an RPi), with modular carriage (available in several sizes, including capable of 11x17” or A3), with changeable print heads (CMYK, or just a massive black, or hell, pen plotter).
I think the bigger problem isn’t so much the traffic type as it is traffic destination. As long as there are only a few hosts or domains providing speed test services (and there always will be: upload speeds are expensive) ISPs will be able to whack-a-mole with their whitelists.
I’d say that this needs some sort of regulation, but as long as ISPs are the gatekeepers, they can cheese $Government all day long too. This word gets overused perhaps, but the closest I can come up with is a decentralized monitoring setup with random speed test hosts (especially hosted @home style). Care would have to be taken to avoid how-are-these-still-legal data caps though.
This might be slow, but what about using the lift gas in a fuel cell with atmospheric O2 for extra efficiency? You reduce the lift gas in the bags, and if you store the water aboard then you get extra ballast. You could even “unload” the extra electricity for use groundside.
The corollary pipe dream here is to line the entire interior of the envelope as a fuel cell membrane and use the airship as a portable battery.
Oh it does come from the network region/cells. In fact in the old days when the phones were the size of an actual brick they were probably powered by a proper multi-cell battery. (Did I miss a joke?)
The Optimus Maximus keyboard showed why OLED was a bad choice for the keyboard. Chyrosran22 did a review of a used one that had severe burn in on all the keys.
It would be interesting if someone could make a screen key cap that was compatible with Cherry MX or Alps switches. The problem is with communication and power delivery, though. Could NFC power a tiny E-Ink display?
AIUI a single tunnel doesn’t scale, sure, but part of the Boring Company’s mission is to make the tunnels super cheap, so scaling up the system consists of adding additional parallel tunnels.
I guess it’s like adding lanes to a highway, but instead of being limited to “make it wider” you can think in 3D and “bundle” tubes together with a honeycomb cross section.
Spitballing more, “reversing the polarity” of a single lane tunnel in such a bundle would be trivial to account for burst traffic (like they move the center divider on the Golden Gate Bridge).
April 10, 2025 is when the penny should cease, so we can commemorate it on nickel/dime/quarter day 05/10/25. And yes, it should be April 10 and not October 05 because this will be an American holiday dang it.
I haven’t looked much at Gemini, but what if Markdown was the format? The raw text is decent and renders to PDF/HTML nicely. More importantly, it’s a well-established format with plenty of libraries available.
Given the levels of hubbub I’m seeing about Unilever getting off Facebook/Twitter for the year, this is striking me as an absolutely brilliant PR and marketing coup.
Before today I didn’t know they were even a thing. Now I do. This is better than free advertising: they are getting headlines for NOT spending money.
I know you can’t exactly plan this sort of thing, but Unilever’s marketing department earned their pay this week.
A standardized control board (imagine if it were something like an RPi), with modular carriage (available in several sizes, including capable of 11x17” or A3), with changeable print heads (CMYK, or just a massive black, or hell, pen plotter).