Category: General Tech

David Pierce, with some news that is going to make some folks very excited. Here he is, writing about Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky:

He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d thought about starting a Pebble-like product from scratch, figuring it’d be easier to do the same thing again a second time. “But then I was like, what if I just asked Google to open-source the operating system?” he says. It felt like a long shot, but he knew the code was just sitting dormant inside Mountain View somewhere. So he asked. A few times.

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Colin and Samir host some very interesting interviews on their YouTube channel. They each lost their homes in the L.A. fires and their video talking about it is really tough, but puts a real human voice to the tragedy so many people are facing right now. As expected, a good bit of the 28 minutes is the pair talking about how they want to use their platform to help others.

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After years of waiting, AT&T Fiber finally became available on my side of the street,¹ giving me access to sweet, sweet gigabit speed both to and from the Internet. This became the impetus for me to replace most of my home network.

I was using a set of pretty old eero base stations, back from when they were a Relay sponsor years ago. They were great, but I had a recurring issue with the entire network would drop to 100 MBps, despite my switches being gigabit-capable. This was annoying on my previous Comcast connection, but simply not tenable on fiber. After talking to several friends, I opted to dive into the UniFi universe.

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I haven’t thought about AOL in a long time, but it is still around, apparently:

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I double checked; today is not April 1.

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I was recently moving some files around and came across a column I wrote for my college newspaper. I was on the design side of the paper¹ and didn’t get to write that much. In the fall of 2006, I was given a short-lived column covering the tech news, and this entry is from October 25.

This week, the geek world was all about one word.

iPod.

Monday marked the fifth anniversary of Apple’s beloved music player. On Oct. 23, 2001, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, stood on a stage in California and introduced the world to a 5GB, $399 device that would play music back faster and easier than a Walkman.

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It looks like a tiny Casio, and I can’t tell if I love it or hate it.

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Holy moly.

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Ryan Smith, with some very sad news:

It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication.

For better or worse, we’ve reached the end of a long journey – one that started with a review of an AMD processor, and has ended with the review of an AMD processor. It’s fittingly poetic, but it is also a testament to the fact that we’ve spent the last 27 years doing what we love, covering the chips that are the lifeblood of the computing industry.

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Earlier this week, it was announced that Aqara was shipping its new smart lock, the U200.

For a while, I’ve been thinking about a product like this for the door to my studio, so I jumped on it, ordering the $269 lock from Amazon.¹ I got that scar on my thumb running Ethernet cable through my old house like 12 hours ago. Be careful with knives!

I don’t have much experience with products in this category, but I do have a bunch of Aqara water sensors stashed around the house, under sinks and in the pan for our hot water heater. I’m also a fan of their smart home switches for triggering HomeKit scenes easily.

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Back in 2021, Ernie Smith wrote about the curious world of CD caddies:

The first time I ever saw a CD-ROM, I had never seen a regular CD before, and I thought that it came in a giant plastic case. To be fair to me, I was in middle school, and I had little experience with them. It was in a library, and the screen did not display anything related to multimedia, but general reference information—stuff like databases, for example. A couple of years later, I got a home computer, along with an audio CD player, and soon enough, a CD-ROM. But I always thought about that caddy, which I never saw on any of the computer equipment I owned. Why did it exist? And why, when CD-ROMs trickled down to my home, wasn’t there one?

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Matt Evans’ most recent project gave me more “wow, computers have gotten fast!” vibes than I’ve felt in a long, long time. Here is Evans:

This all started from a conversation about the RP2040 MCU, and building a simple desktop/GUI for it. I’d made a comment along the lines of “or, just run some old OS”, and it got me thinking about the original Macintosh.

The original Macintosh was released 40.5 years before this post, and is a pretty cool machine especially considering that the hardware is very simple. Insanely Great and folklore.org are fun reads, and give a glimpse into the Macintosh’s development. Memory was a squeeze; the original 128KB version was underpowered and only sold for a few months before being replaced by the Macintosh 512K, arguably a more appropriate amount of memory.

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