This is at least the 3rd version of this product idea that I’ve seen in the past decade. Certainly the nicest design! The first time I saw this was some friends of friends who were trying to make it into a startup. They quickly discovered that their users liked the idea of a busy light for the office, but didn’t like to update it on or off throughout the day. So after the first few days people just defaulted to leavi…
> Eventually people will realize the light is busy when the person isn’t really busy
Like the geniuses that block off their whole day everyday on their calendar or set their Teams status to unavailable all day.
I was going to say that $200 seemed awfully expensive for a programmable kitchen timer. I've had a project idea for a while that would require a bit more juice. In short, I want to make a music practice timer for ADHD kids that avoid actually playing music during practice time. I want it to be beefy enough to run some simple ML for detecting instruments being played, and I only want the timer to count down while the…
The adversarial child would be playing recordings into the timer within minutes no?
For the non-adversary who wants something similar in nature, that might help them practice, why not? Not everyone is trying to cheat.
This is at least the 3rd version of this product idea that I’ve seen in the past decade. Certainly the nicest design! The first time I saw this was some friends of friends who were trying to make it into a startup. They quickly discovered that their users liked the idea of a busy light for the office, but didn’t like to update it on or off throughout the day. So after the first few days people just defaulted to leavi…
Perhaps the real solution is to default to "busy" and only show "available" on a trigger, like web-browsing or staring into space.
This is at least the 3rd version of this product idea that I’ve seen in the past decade. Certainly the nicest design! The first time I saw this was some friends of friends who were trying to make it into a startup. They quickly discovered that their users liked the idea of a busy light for the office, but didn’t like to update it on or off throughout the day. So after the first few days people just defaulted to leavi…
Perhaps the real solution is to default to "busy" and only show "available" on a trigger, like web-browsing or staring into space.
You'd need to have it be host specific. Stack overflow? You're researching a problem and still might be elbows deep in a problem. Bluesky or FB? Not so much.
Put a CO2 + temp/humidity sensor in there and it's a no-brainer. The sensors could be nice to hack on too.
so now we're talking a $500 device? they're already asking ~$200 for a feature stop watch
Why stop at a $500 device?
I think it should also have NVMe and SFF-8644 for external disk shelves. At least 6x 10GbE, with 4 on SFPs and 2 on copper. A GPU with excellent hardware transcoding, and slotted VRAM for that local LLM fun. Plus an 8k projector for movie nights at the office.
And a pony; every single one of these fucking kitchen timers must also come with a pony.
It definitely looks to be made of a metal. To be fair, I'm just basing that off the texture and specular highlights in the photos. It's pretty similar looking to the iMac's case in one of their photos.
I would actually bet it’s plastic, having a hollow tube-like structure made from metal would be very wasteful because you would have to mill out the entire core (unless it’s cast metal?). Also, the texture looks much coarser than the iMac, there are large „bumps“ on the surface. If it’s really a milled aluminum case, I would at least understand the price, but I would be very surprised. My bet would be a simple inject…
Sheet metal can be wrapped around a mold (round, square, or other) and pressed together, though it's not common. I've got a couple diy electronics protected by "boxes" made of U-shaped steel or aluminum with holes cut for the controls. Alternatively, the technique used to create cardboard boxes also works with sheet metal, where you cut the correct shape out and fold the flaps at set locations; of the metal is thick enough you don't need flaps and it'll hold the shape on its own, and if you want to hide the seams better, use compression or notches.
This is at least the 3rd version of this product idea that I’ve seen in the past decade. Certainly the nicest design! The first time I saw this was some friends of friends who were trying to make it into a startup. They quickly discovered that their users liked the idea of a busy light for the office, but didn’t like to update it on or off throughout the day. So after the first few days people just defaulted to leavi…
But that will open up the market for a "Seriously Guys, I'm Actually Really" device that can be attached on the left-hand side, and activated when you really mean it.
so now we're talking a $500 device? they're already asking ~$200 for a feature stop watch
Why stop at a $500 device? I think it should also have NVMe and SFF-8644 for external disk shelves. At least 6x 10GbE, with 4 on SFPs and 2 on copper. A GPU with excellent hardware transcoding, and slotted VRAM for that local LLM fun. Plus an 8k projector for movie nights at the office. And a pony; every single one of these fucking kitchen timers must also come with a pony.
I think you're missing the obvious play to subsidize the price by making that LLM enabled with a mic and then selling all of that training data. The price could then come down to $19.99.
Why stop at a $500 device? I think it should also have NVMe and SFF-8644 for external disk shelves. At least 6x 10GbE, with 4 on SFPs and 2 on copper. A GPU with excellent hardware transcoding, and slotted VRAM for that local LLM fun. Plus an 8k projector for movie nights at the office. And a pony; every single one of these fucking kitchen timers must also come with a pony.
I think you're missing the obvious play to subsidize the price by making that LLM enabled with a mic and then selling all of that training data. The price could then come down to $19.99.
I forgot the phased 32-element microphone array! How silly of me.
It will listen in all directions at once, 24/7/365, and send the recordings home to mother.
If done right, that should keep the end-user price below $10.