Everybody's touting round corners like it's something people want. Cinnamon 6.1 features round corners! who cares?
I encountered a weird thing in my BIOS. I've got a graphics card and a CPU with integrated graphics, I could save power and free up some system RAM by turning the iGPU off. The option in the BIOS says "dGPU Only Mode" and you Enable it to turn the iGPU off.
dGPU Only Mode, turns the iGPU off. It makes more sense the less you think about it.
A further complaint: There's a setting in the BIOS called "Game Mode" and what that does is turn SMT and some other TLA off. SMT is AMD's name for hyperthreading. Learned this when I noticed KDE system monitor reporting 8 processor threads instead of 16. Apparently that is to increase single core performance on high end chips to wring a few more FPS out of single-threaded games, but meh.
Toggles are strange, now that I think about them. They're one of the few things that have skewed more skeuomorphic over time. Or, In the Win95 era were we thinking about paper, with documents in folders on the desktop, and a check box you'd check with a pen makes sense there, where now we think of the computer as a device with switches to flip?
Either way, this is the aviator in me speaking but an on/off toggle switch should be longitudinal or vertical, with forward or up ALWAYS being ON. Toggles in UIs are pretty much always horizontal with right being ON.
There's a game for the SNES called Act Raiser, I think it was by Quintet or Taito or Square, one of those. You play Actual God taking back the world from Probably Satan, you do this partly in a side scrolling platforming combat style, and partially in an overhead city building style. Surprisingly good soundtrack for a game as weird as it is.
Profoundly, hilariously slow.
Amazon sold me a defective planer that had sawdust in it. Ibwas apparently the second to return it under warranty.
Mostly I have this distinct memory of badly communicating with a Verizon employee when I got my first smart phone, an LG Ally.
I remember asking "Is this a Droid?" Meaning "is the make and model of this handset a Motorola Droid?" And the reply was "They're all droids." meaning they all run the Android operating system. I miss LG phones, or at least the state of my personal life back when I had LG phones.
was it Verizon or Motorola?
They keep re-implementing things.
Just the Start menu. You can see how 95 evolved into 98 evolved into ME, then they changed it for XP, and they never stopped making big pointless changes. In many cases, those big pointless changes have been lengthening the process of going from the bare desktop to the thing you need by adding pointless screens and dialogs. Or, like the Start menu, they just drastically redesigned it such that a user used to Win XP tries to use 7 and they just...stare at it because it's not what they were expecting. Windows 7's Start menu might even be objectively better, Microsoft's software engineers could very well produce good research documentation about UI design based on observing or polling users about what features they wanted and then they made the thing people seemed to want, but to people who got used to how it already worked the new thing was bad because it's different.
I could be convinced Windows 8.1 is a mental unwellness simulator. In Sierra's FMV horror game Phantasmagoria 2, the player character goes insane at work, and this is simulated by the paperwork he's working on flashing scarier words for a split second. You're reading this document and then near the bottom of the page an ordinary word like "recommended" turns to "murdered" for a few frames. Win 8.1's animated tiles reminded me of that. Plus the whole "The desktop and all normal Windows apps therein is itself just an app that can be run in split screen next to special phone-like single tasking apps which pretty much only we will develop for and we won't include desktop versions of so you have to deal with this." I hate Windows 8.1.
What's real fun is you can tell when they abandoned work on a project by which drastically different UI it's encrusted with. The modem dialer looks like Windows XP, the fax program looks like Vista, some things have the flat purple stank of 8, some things have the dark glass look of early 10.
I use Syncthing for this; it syncs directories on my phone and computer, so to put something on my computer from my phone I just put it in that directory. I share my camera roll so my pictures are synced with my computer.
If you just want a "send this file" application, warpinator might do that.
There is no goddamn reason to continue to use magneto ignition in aircraft engines. I've been a Rotax authorized service technician for 13 years, I have never seen the digital CDI installed on a Rotax 900 series engine fail in any way, and you've still got two. Honestly I believe a CDI module is more reliable and less prone to failure than a mechanical magneto. The only reason why we're still using pre-WWII technology in modern production aircraft engines is societal rot.
Sometimes gravity pulls her wrong.
Believe it or not the first production smart phone was released by IBM in 1989, it was the bastard lovechild of a DOS PC and a car phone; it could do fax and modem over the phone. Blackberry put out a device you'd call a smart phone (runs an extensible OS with an app ecosystem, multimedia capable, mobile data as we know it today) in 2002. But yes the iPhone arrived in 2007 much to the unhealth of society.
The original iPhone did not have an app store.