Was a surprisingly fun way to tank my productivity on Monday.

Honestly, the fact that you mentioned it having a definite end was a huge factor in making me click on that link.

I actually disagree there. Might be showing why I don’t work in high end product design lol, but I think as a pro model you can go a little crazy on the weight. You can probably save some thickness from under the camera bump somehow if you redistribute whatever can be displaced from under there, which would be easier in a thicker phone. Like any PCB that doesn’t need to be directly under the optoelectronics could be redesigned to go around some of the camera stuff, which would eat into the battery. But that wouldn’t be a problem when the whole thing is a mm or two thicker. 220g is probably not crazy. 250g would be pushing it. 300g would be unreasonable unless they have some real high tech stuff in there to show for it, like some kind of force touch or possibly a 3.5mm headphone connector.

The thing is heavy. I have a heavy case on it as well, go figure. I must admit though, in the past I used to drop my phone on my face. Now I make the split second effort to dodge if I drop it. But the weight makes it feel premium. Sure, the dad test is psychological, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

I think switching the back from all-glass to something else would help drop the weight slightly, but at this rate it’s just that there’s so much in these phones. Between the battery, the slabs of glass, the complicated cameras, you’d think fitting a headphone connector wouldn’t be so hard.

You’re telling me you don’t like putting on on your most ridiculously offensive Yeehaw Hollywood American accent when asking your phone to set a timer?

Alternative way to think about it: 10% of people are insufferable assholes. Do you want them to be happy with what you say?

The guy’s name was David. In the game, you’re chasing after an inventor who crossed different parts of the world, building giant pinball games on fields. You’re following in his footsteps, fixing the pinball games that have fallen into disarray using the lessons you learned.

Googling a little, it seems like that was a different game called Pinball Science, also by David Macaulay. So I definitely had both, probably got them both around the same time. I vaguely remember the setting for TNWTW being an island with different buildings with different themes of things to discover.

Those disks were super hard to get where I was, too. I live in Lebanon. My parents moved heaven and earth to get me quality entertainment, and the older I get the more I realize how much effort they put into making me a cultured kid.

Now I really need to spin up a VM! I also want to waltz around Beaumaris Castle in Encarta, and check out all the stuff in Encarta that I didn’t know to appreciate when I was a kid.

Oh yeah. I remember this. You learn lessons and then apply them to build a pinball system, at least in the sequel, creatively named The New Way Things Work. I spent years on all kinds of edutainment software made by these guys.

I genuinely believe that our generation got some kind of golden age for interactive educational stuff. DK/GSK were releasing banger after banger, I believe I’d still enjoy these as an adult! The virtual museums just speak to me, conceptually. I don’t know what similar stuff came after, but all the software I see young kids interacting with now is ad riddled digital nonsense sludge. Even the stuff that should be more than just entertainment.

All those old DK CDs should be available on the Internet Archive, by the way. Just need to finally get around to setting up a damn Windows XP VM and I’ll be looking through a lot of these with fresh adult eyes.

“Guys I know the instructions say I can use any odorless cooking oil, but is there anything wrong with just buying the $89 Apple oil? I want to have a matching set”

Not an amateur producer at all, but a few years ago I was listening to a lot of YouTube mixes while working. Lofi stuff might be cookie cutter elevator music to you, but I loved some mixes over others. I got attached to some of them, and discovered a ton of artists that way. These were single, long videos with many tracks each.

My heart sank when I started finding some of them turn into broken links. I figured out YouTube-DL and got to archiving. I found some reuploads of playlists I liked such as the wonderful Morning Coffee by the amazing SoulSearchAndDestroy (the lead song, damn fine coffee by mtbrd, is one of my favorite lofi tracks ever). Other playlists have been lost to time.

Sometimes I skim through my archived playlists to find a song I can remember in my head, and sometimes I don’t find the song, and it’s possible that I will never find it again. Again, silly for this to happen with lofi of all things (one of the most dispassionate and almost disposable genres of music).

I still think YouTube is unmatched for music discovery. Yes, you’re clicking on songs for “bad” reasons such as the thumbnail or recognizing the curator’s channel, but it worked pretty damn well for me.

Are there any plans at all for a traditional app? I understand that there is an appeal to keeping things completely free from any App Store shenanigans, a certain freedom that comes with web apps over native apps.