Rachel Brindle

Ok, so initial impressions:

1. There's so much whimsy in this. Deleting a note has a cute animation where the note is crumpled up and put into a trash can. Accompanied with a sound effect of crumpling paper.
2. I forgot how much resistive touchscreens suck. It takes an unreasonable amount of pressure for a touch to be recognized. Similar to when you're trying to use a ballpoint pen that's nearly out of ink.
3. The handwriting recognition is surprisingly good for the mid-90s. That said, it's still objectively bad. It's easy to forget that we didn't get good handwriting recognition until relatively recently. That said, Eat Up Martha is definitely still a thing, even though Simpsons was making fun of the original MessagePad. I'm going to keep trying, but it is frustrating.
4. The built in screen cover is so useful. Shame that the modern equivalent (an iPad) has the cover as a separate accessory.
5. The device itself is pleasantly chunky. They definitely did their best with then-current technology to make this as thin as possible, and I'm so glad the technology just wasn't there to make this thinner.
6. Turning on the backlight is non-obvious. You hold the power button for a bit until it turns off. Same deal to turn it off. Thanks NewtonFAQ for that (https://newtonfaq.com/newton-faq-hardware.html#IIC6c)
7. This thing is SO delightfully 90s.

#AppleNewton

lol. Starlink is very popular for general aviation. Today, they announced they were lowering the max speeds for their “roam” plans to 100 mph/87 kts/161 km/h, and added a new $250/mo “aviation” plan that caps you at 20gb/mo. (There’s also a second aviation plan meant for those in jets, for $1000/mo). The current “roam” plan is $50/mo for a 100gb/mo limit, or $165/mo for unlimited data.

This will affect basically everyone flying anything faster than a piper cub (cruise speed 75 mph/65 kts/121 km/h). And even then, with a strong-enough tailwind, it’ll affect people in cubs.

So, obviously, the general aviation influencers are pissed about this. I have a few friends who will balk at this because this is a 5x price increase, for 1/5 the data cap.

I’m team “fuck starlink” because I like looking at and taking photos of the stars. Also the whole “Elon is a nazi” thing, but even if Elon wasn’t in the picture, I’d still be anti-starlink.

Still, this is pretty funny because it’ll basically kill the starlink-for-aviation market.

Edit: The folks at avbrief have covered this a bit better. There was a "local priority" tier that offered 50GB for $65/mo, making this new plan only ~9.6x lower value instead 25x lower value, but most people could still get away with the previous "roam" plan. https://avbrief.com/starlinks-restructured-pricing-disappoints/

#aviation #avgeek #starlink

New #tdov, new #selfie! #TransDayOfVisibility

This year marks 14 years living my absolute best life.

Closed on our new house today! We’re Californians again!

I've only been running iocaine for a week, and I'm already at over 4 million markov-chain pages served to bots.

Drink up slop bots, drink deeply from my poisoned well.

Really quickly this morning, I pulled out some swift async helpers I've been using in some personal apps into a separate repo, mostly to make it easier to keep them all in sync. I published it at https://forge.younata.com/you/AsyncExtensions

Probably the most interesting thing there is AsyncMultiChannel. Which is like https://github.com/apple/swift-async-algorithms/blob/main/Sources/AsyncAlgorithms/AsyncAlgorithms.docc/Guides/Channel.md, but it supports multiple subscribers. I should rename it, because it's intended to be used in more of a pub-sub architecture than as 1-1 communication.

#SwiftLang #SwiftConcurrency

Modding disc-based console to let you play games stored on solid state memory:

Pros:
- Much faster loading times.
- Can carry your entire library with you.
- Built-in backup of your game library in case of disc rot or something.
- Overall much better experience

Cons:
- There's a certain... feeling to knowing that the console is actually physically reading a disc to let you play. Like you're playing the game the way it was "meant" to be played. e.g., on the psp, I still think UMD is really cool despite the fact that severely hampered the experience of the PSP compared to the cartridge-based DS. It's kind cool hearing the UMD drive spin & move the laser while playing. However, I do not play UMD games on it. Instead, I dump the disc to the sd card and then play from there.

SwiftUI still doesn’t have an equivalent for UITableView/CollectionViewDataSourcePrefetching? Really?

Not to mention the lack of a flow layout - literally, the default collection view layout.

#SwiftUI #UIKit

Just had a thought of the most useful thing about gas/electric hybrid aircraft motors: if (for piston aircraft: when) the gas engine dies, you at least have partial power until you run out of battery. Potentially enough to get you to a safe(r) landing spot.

That changes the calculus more in favor of hybrid-electric. Probably still not worth the weight, complexity, and financial penalties you’ll be taking on with that. Like, I still wouldn’t do this for my rv-9.

#ElectricAviation

Bullied my reps again. Which I really don’t do nearly as often as I should be. At the very least, this should be a weekly thing instead of just sporadically.

@b@cloudyday.club liveatc.net has live feeds of most transmissions. When I’m in an airliner on the ground, I frequently pull up the feed for ground & tower at that airport.

@b@cloudyday.club literally same.