That's it. And they didn't include the controller ports and other bits. For instance, I don't think it has Bluetooth or WiFi antennas, so it can't connect to Wiimotes or a network.
So if you wanted all of that back, it would be a little bigger. But not by much. Probably the size of the Game Boy Advance in the picture. If that.
But if all you wanted was Smash Bros on a keychain, here you go.
I always thought it was hilariously similar to how to old NES zapper worked - the sensor was in the gun, it decided what you ‘hit’ based on what the sensor saw when the tv flashed. I think it was an early instance of me recognizing an engineering ‘hack’ - instead of the target reporting whether it had been hit, it was the gun reporting whether it thought it had hit the target.
the "sensor" is actually in the remote. The bar is just two infrared leds seperated by a known distance, that the infrared camera in the remote uses to figure out it's position.
I play a bit of flightsim and our head tracking works the same way. Camera receives IR LED position for head movement axis, program does the interpretation of movement.
There's a homebrew head tracking demo [0] for the wii that has you put a sensor bar on your head, and a wiimote on top of your TV. I messed around with it over a decade ago and found it very convincing.
> I really wish more companies would go back to the old-style model where users can buy the current version of a software tool but would need to pay a discounted price to upgrade to a newer version of that tool
We can thank Apple for this! They refused to adopt upgrade pricing on the App Store (which developers have been asking for since the App Store launched!) and instead introduced Subscriptions.
I like Apple, overall, but they absolutely decimated their software market by forcing apps to either be free with ads or paid subscriptions.
It seems to me that Mastodon, tumblr, Wordpress, Threads, and any future platform's support of ActivityPub could theoretically make the entire internet "old Facebook".
Facebook is/was two things:
1) a microblog (your personal page)
2) an interface for following other's microblog posts
This sounds an awful lot like a following, say, a bunch of WordPress blogs in your Mastodon feed. We just need the interface over it all.
Heck, if Threads does what they say it will, Threads very well may become that interface for many folks.
I certainly hope Threads has no future in the internet of tomorrow. We need to move away from centralized systems.
ActivityPub is dangerous too! The protocol suffers from federated cabal censorship. Entire Mastodon instances will ban over the prettiest rationales, just like Reddit moderators and their little fiefdoms. It's quite fascist.
I'm hoping BlueSky's protocol of distributed opt-in filtering and extensions wins. I don't want anyone deciding things on my behalf. You're free to filter me out, you're free to subscribe to someone who filters me out, but I get angry when the means of communication and those chosen to rule over it do it without recourse. The reasoning, despite being mostly petty, shouldn't even matter - it's authoritarian and awful.
Who moderates the moderators has always been an issue.
Still, there is no way around it. If that community has toxic mods, you probably don't want to stick around there anyway : go to a different one or make a new one yourself ! This is still better than being in a situation where there are only giant platforms like Facebook/Reddit/Discord/Xitter and no hope of starting a community outside their walls.
I still don't understand the pro-Beeper argument here. They have absolutely no right to unauthorized access to Apple's servers or network, this seems fairly cut-and-dry, despite whatever "moral" argument people seem to want to make.
Many websites would also like to claim that you're not authorized to access them with an ad-blocker, and spammers would like to claim you're not authorized to use e-mail with spam filtering, and malware authors would like to claim you're not authorized to use antimalware software since all those countermeasures encroach on their respective business models.
Okay, but the concept of unauthorised access to a computer system isn't a new one, Kevin Mitnick and co were all convicted of it in the 90s. Maybe there was an argument before Apple released a statement, but it's pretty difficult to make one now.
A line has to clearly be drawn somewhere, otherwise as per my previous comment you could also consider that ad/malware blocking is unauthorized access to websites/malware developers' servers (since you download the ads/malware but then your security solution blocks them).
The typical cases of unauthorized access are quite different in the sense that a private system is being accessed and private data may be exposed. It doesn't really apply to iMessage though - alternative clients don't exceed their authorization (the use the same auth flow as a real device and are granted the exact same privileges) and no private data is being disclosed (just like a real device, the user only has access to their own Apple IDs/phone number's messages).
The only argument that could be made is that allowing non-iOS devices access effectively freeloads off Apple's server resources, but Beeper did offer to support payment of a reasonable fee and yet Apple never took them up on this offer nor ever raised this issue, which confirms the (expected) fact that server resource usage (which is minimal btw) is the least of their worries.
My version of this involved a Wii remote: freshmen-level CompSci class, and the group had to build a simple game in Python to be displayed at a showcase among the class. We wrote a space invaders clone. I found a Bluetooth driver that allowed your Wiimote to connect to your Mac as a game controller, so I set up a basic left/right tilt control using a Wiimote for our space invaders clone.
The Wiimote connection was the star of the show by a long shot :P
Ports and display alone make this worth it. I wouldn’t recommend someone get 8GB ram but it’s pretty impressive when you consider it has everything else the other MBPs have (minus 1 port).
Also I’m glad they finally discontinued that embarrassment of the last touchbar Mac.
iPhone 13 mini owner here. I love this phone. I've used large phones in the past, was a happy iPhone 7 Plus owner, and owned and used the 5.8-inch iPhones X and 11 Pro, but I'm just so much happier with a smaller phone that I can more easily hold. Part of this is due to my smaller hands, and a large part is the reduction in weight. I don't even care if I drain the battery scrolling TikTok, because the battery is so small I can fast charge back to 80% in no time.
It's weird. I spent my teenage years and early twenties as a yearly/bi-yearly iPhone upgrader, but it turns out that form factor, more so than display, cameras, or gimmicks is what wins me over today.
I proclaim in my everyday life that the phone that will replace my blue iPhone 1 mini will -- as of right now -- be a used/refurbished green iPhone 13 mini. :)
I did this back in 2016, with an iOS app I built/hacked away at while learning/self-teaching Swift and UIKit.
Easily over 1,000 hours (~2 hours ~5x day per week for ~2 years) invested in to the app. I learned so, so much, and fell in love with the Swift language, but that app never saw the light of day.
Instead, I developed skills that have made me a much better programmer. And, fast-forward to the current day, I could effectively re-write the entire app - from scratch - in a weekend, due to the evolution of Apple's platform dev tools and APIs over the last ~7 years + the mountains of Swift code and packages I've hacked and honed away at over the years.
This type of project should be celebrated. Programming is (can be) art. Art can be made just for you, as a creative outlet.
The more commitments you have in life, the more pressure there is to align your learning projects with money earning activities.
You can't justify to your family, kids and other "stakeholders" that you spent thousands of hours developing apps just for learning new subjects. In the least, you need some kind of successful activity to grow out of it.
Besides, some parts of a software development project do involve learning, but a huge portion is drudgery. Solving edge cases, doing customer support for repetitive issues, solving that last pixel that is not quite right.
Making apps is great, and it's a sign of maturity to have a concern for how well received it will be.
> You can't justify to your family, kids and other "stakeholders" that you spent thousands of hours developing apps just for learning new subjects. In the least, you need some kind of successful activity to grow out of it.
Congratulations, you have explained why we have declining fertility rates. Maybe it is a good thing. Who knows. All I know is I can't afford to have children. Having children who want to go to college / medical school should be a cause for celebration, not a scary thought for parents for one. I will tell anyone and everyone who will listen, don't have kids. It is not worth it. There is no law that requires people to have children. Let the idiots who don't understand this do all the child bearing and child rearing. After all, they lash out at the simplest idea that it takes a village to raise a child.
> solving that last pixel that is not quite right.
The great thing about a personal project like this is you can spend as much or as little time as you want to. This is the ultimate agile team where you are wearing all hats -- a true cross functional team which I believe the word agile prescribes.
> Making apps is great, and it's a sign of maturity to have a concern for how well received it will be.
As someone who puts the "pro" in procastination, I know a sure sign of procastination when I see one. This is not a sign of maturity at all. This is just laziness.
>I will tell anyone and everyone who will listen, don't have kids. It is not worth it. There is no law that requires people to have children. Let the idiots who don't understand this do all the child bearing and child rearing
You know you need those kids so you can retire, right? Idk, maybe you want to tap out code forever, but you're going to need farmers and cooks and doctors and plumbers and people to make your iPhone. I guess, everyone else can raise those people though right? Fuck them, they can pay and you can enjoy their children's labour, right?
You’re right it’s not a good reason for an individual to have kids. but it is a good reason why even childless people should be motivated to be part of a society that invests in people who do raise children.
You left out the last sentence in the paragraph.
I don't have children of my own.
I get that we are all supposed to be "rugged individualism" in this country
but that is just a myth just like the "self-made man".
I think we need fewer people to have children
so that we actually begin to value our children
not just my children, but also my neighbor's children.
Your children are your ward, not your property.
> Fuck them, they can pay and you can enjoy their children's labour, right?
Ah, labour.
OK sorry, I guess you are from England or something?
I am saying the opposite.
We have religious nutjobs in the United States who think that
if you cut off all government safety nets
and people have nowhere to go to but to the church
they will be doing "God's work".
They have joined forces with grifters and capitalists
who want to remove all government entitlements.
It costs tens of thousands of dollars to have a baby.
You already have NHS.
I understand it is not perfect
but we are still fighting for medicare for all here
and realistically, I will never see it in my lifetime.
I understand my conviction is controversial.
Given that the social safety net is crumbling in my country,
I cannot in good conscience have children or recommend anyone to have children.
Precisely because a lot of (loud) people think "Fuck them, they can pay" for their own children.
Great project, sorry about the unavailability of cheap price data for the consumer segment.
Professional data is expensive, and one-person companies are not on the radar of data vendors and exchanges, who try to make big contracts e.g. with national banks abd brokerages, who then make that data available to their customers via Web portals. The quality of financial data isn't very good even if you pay a lot.
If your project had been a startup, you would have had to check whether your assumptions apply ahead of building out your front-end and incorporating, ideally: "Can you build it for an acceptable price?" (factoring in the data licensing cost) & "Will they buy it for the price (+ your margin) that you can build it?"
