Ah, this brings back memories from my childhood. The first programming language I ever used was Logo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language). This was sometime back in 2002-2003 when I was 7 or 8 years old. We had very basic PCs in my school, many of which were purely DOS based.
I remember the turtle game, as well as lego logo. It must have been something like 1991.
The teachers at my school were just completely clueless at teaching programming or anything to do with computers. We would just run through work sheets that told you what to type. Hardly anyone got any real instruction. It wasn't until DOOM came out that I got motivated to self-teach.
I remember when teaching a subset of LOGO that we wanted a cool input program for students. So I built reverse logo [1] to turn an image (black-and-white, contiguous) into a logo program that draws it.
One would think so! It was taught at our school (didn't take the course myself, about 15 years old at the time) and I only remember my classmates complaining, that it was boring. Some of them wanted to learn "real programming" instead. Drawing shapes with a turtle felt overly childish and pedagogic even then.
I think it's a good introduction but would be very boring to stay focused on for any length of time. But my first thought upon seeing this was if someone, especially a younger person wanted to go from 0 knowledge of programming to a little bit, just get the idea of what it's like so they can see it's not magic, this would be a great start.
Logo was I think the second language I learned after Commodore Basic but the on the C64. The third was probably Gary Kitchen's Game Maker scripting. This was all mid 80s. Logo though did feel transformative to me.
Same here. Logo was my first programming language at 9 or 10 back in 1989 in eastern Europe. Long live Logo. Kids nowadays ought to have a similar intro
Logo was such a common denominator when I was in primary. Two decades later I was sent a resume with Logo skills listed, it was an obvious inside joke, but picking up on it ensured we started off on the very right foot.
Yeah, I don't understand how there is still no simple smartwatch company without any fitness bs, with thin light >1 week always on screen. Years after Pebble did it. Does everyone but us really want and oled screen and heart rate monitor?
I'd don't understand where Casio is with cheap BT smartwatches that can just show texts/notifications.
Worked on the ecommerce and marketing teams at Pebble. I can tell you we tried to tell people about our strengths: 1 week+ battery life. Always on screen. Readable in sunlight. Water resistant up to X meters. But what gets people to buy isn't what gets people to stay.
I can tell you that by far, most people wanted the fitness angle with smartwatches. And all those features that you love about Pebble, while great, wasn't all that convincing for people after we ran out of die-hard fans like yourself.
I turned down a job at Pebble after a call with VP of Eng. and when we were discussing the product, I mentioned that health & fitness seemed like the next big hurdle for them. He seemed to agree, but was almost uncomfortable admitting it. As if, "yeah, we know...".
Anyways I turned them down and before May 2015 I started telling anyone who would listen that they were an amazing company full of smart people solving incredible problems that are completely unimportant to the world and FitBit would buy them sooner or later.
I imagined a more successful exit than they got, and I miss my Pebble dearly to this day. FitBit's products are garbage.
Here's the thing. I have a Garmin that also gets more than a week of battery life, with an always on display. It also does the fitness stuff very well. There wasn't an advantage to the Pebble angle.
But I don't/want need the bulk and the price of the fitness stuff. The last, cancelled generation of pebble had a black and white screen, many apps and was something like 125 euros for the watch.
I really loved the way I could control my Pebble (time steel), with just 4 buttons, so smooth.
But, ok, out of all brands, Garmin seems nicest to me and they have a payment solution as well.
The thing is that the heart rate monitor gives you an excuse to buy. As a notification device it can seem like a pointless luxury item. If it has a heart rate monitor you can tell yourself/parent/spouse that “this thing could save my life!”
Checkout the Amazfit Bip. Strange name, but it's inexpensive, has an always on display (think original game boy advance), and the battery lasts ~40 days on a single charge.
I second the Amazfit Bip. My battery lasts anywhere between 35-42 days on a single charge as well. (I take screenshots of the number of days every time it gets to 5%.)
Seconded. I don't know what I'm going to do when my Pebble Time gives up the ghost. I'll probably buy a dumb, mechanical watch for a change. There's still nothing on the market remotely comparable with Pebble.
Not quite the same, but I got a Withings Steel HR when my pebble died, and I love it! I charge it once a month, and it handles the most important notifications quite well. Far less hackable though.
It's sad how some great tech is killed just like that. Here I was, wearing my Pebble 2, being sad about how Pebble died, and then I read this. It is way more important for this kind of tech to live and improve.
Doesn't taking a picture of the whole page at once and then having it read to you after OCR dominate this in every way, from ease of input (from the page) to flexibility of output (to the human)?
I'm not blind, but that method probably doesn't let you skip around the page - including backwards - as easily.
It also sounds like the Optacon had some fancy capability to represent non-textual data like graphs and metadata like fonts:
> The Optacon offers capabilities that no other device offers including the ability to see a printed page or computer screen as it truly appears including drawings, typefaces, and specialized text layouts.
Yuck