Tinkerer’s Sunset
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Tinkerer’s Sunset
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Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset
#2[deleted]
Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset
#3This whole tinkering panic is ridiculous. Did tinkering end when Nintendo released the NES? Or more recently with the Wii? His dad could have bought a word processor instead of a ][e, would he have been able to tinker with that?
Some devices are more open than others. This is not a new phenomenon, nor did anything change on Wednesday.
Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset
#4One company that sold lots of easily-modified computers is now selling a harder-to-modify computer.
Could you get an Apple ][e Emulator through the App Store? And throw in all the tips, manuals, and cheat sheets Mark referenced?
Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset
#5This whole tinkering panic is ridiculous. Did tinkering end when Nintendo released the NES? Or more recently with the Wii? His dad could have bought a word processor instead of a ][e, would he have been able to tinker with that? Some devices are more open than others. This is not a new phenomenon, nor did anything change on Wednesday.
Seriously, you guys are making me sad. Use some imagination -- there is a lot more to tinker with for your dollar in 2010 than there was in the good old days. For the price of your dad's ][e you can now buy multiple linux boxes, a bucket of Arduinos or a NerdKit, robotic legos, and -- if you are so inclined -- an iPad with developer account on top of it.
At first I was wondering what the ulterior motive to all this drama was. I'm beginning to think it's just link-baiting.
Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset
#6This whole tinkering panic is ridiculous. Did tinkering end when Nintendo released the NES? Or more recently with the Wii? His dad could have bought a word processor instead of a ][e, would he have been able to tinker with that? Some devices are more open than others. This is not a new phenomenon, nor did anything change on Wednesday.
Seriously, you guys are making me sad. Use some imagination -- there is a lot more to tinker with for your dollar in 2010 than there was in the good old days. For the price of your dad's ][e you can now buy multiple linux boxes, a bucket of Arduinos or a NerdKit, robotic legos, and -- if you are so inclined -- an iPad with developer account on top of it. At first I was wondering what the ulterior motive to all this d…
I have a geothermal HVAC system, and it's not very well designed. If the loop temperatures drop below a certain point it becomes ineffective, and I need to manually switch to a secondary heat source.
In a single afternoon, I was able to hook some one-wire sensors into the loops, attach them to a widget that made the sensor data available via IP, write a daemon that monitors the temperature, and then automatically notifies the IP-enabled thermostat to flip over to secondary heat if the loops go below effective temperatures, and to flip back when they recover.
The next day, I made it so the loop temperatures were recorded and graphed, and that I receive an SMS alert if there's a complete HVAC failure (loops too cold + secondary heat failure).
That was some awesome tinkering.
Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset
#7This whole tinkering panic is ridiculous. Did tinkering end when Nintendo released the NES? Or more recently with the Wii? His dad could have bought a word processor instead of a ][e, would he have been able to tinker with that? Some devices are more open than others. This is not a new phenomenon, nor did anything change on Wednesday.
Seriously, you guys are making me sad. Use some imagination -- there is a lot more to tinker with for your dollar in 2010 than there was in the good old days. For the price of your dad's ][e you can now buy multiple linux boxes, a bucket of Arduinos or a NerdKit, robotic legos, and -- if you are so inclined -- an iPad with developer account on top of it. At first I was wondering what the ulterior motive to all this d…
I agree with you about opportunities to tinker/hack. Just check out Maker Faire, or Ramsey Electronics or Ardunio stuff.
But I think there is a valid concern about the trend to legislate against tinkering--restricting sales of radios that can hear on cell phone frequencies, DVDCSS, DRM, suppression of chemistry sets, evacuating a school due to misunderstanding of an electronics experiment.
Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset
#8This whole tinkering panic is ridiculous. Did tinkering end when Nintendo released the NES? Or more recently with the Wii? His dad could have bought a word processor instead of a ][e, would he have been able to tinker with that? Some devices are more open than others. This is not a new phenomenon, nor did anything change on Wednesday.
Seriously, you guys are making me sad. Use some imagination -- there is a lot more to tinker with for your dollar in 2010 than there was in the good old days. For the price of your dad's ][e you can now buy multiple linux boxes, a bucket of Arduinos or a NerdKit, robotic legos, and -- if you are so inclined -- an iPad with developer account on top of it. At first I was wondering what the ulterior motive to all this d…
The point of the argument is that in the old days you didn't have to buy anything extra; you could tinker with your main computer. This drew in some opportunistic hackers.
Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously, you guys are making me sad. Use some imagination -- there is a lot more to tinker with for your dollar in 2010 than there was in the good old days. For the price of your dad's ][e you can now buy multiple linux boxes, a bucket of Arduinos or a NerdKit, robotic legos, and -- if you are so inclined -- an iPad with developer account on top of it. At first I was wondering what the ulterior motive to all this d…
I have a geothermal HVAC system, and it's not very well designed. If the loop temperatures drop below a certain point it becomes ineffective, and I need to manually switch to a secondary heat source. In a single afternoon, I was able to hook some one-wire sensors into the loops, attach them to a widget that made the sensor data available via IP, write a daemon that monitors the temperature, and then automatically not…
Impressive.
It might be very interesting to chat.
I'd appreciate if you dropped me an email to dfong lightsailenergy.com :-)
Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset
#10If the iPad has a way to enable the Webkit Inspector, you’ve got your tinkerer’s playground right there! The equivalent of Ctrl-Reset is about:blank.
Unix OS : iPad : Browser :: MOS CPU : Apple II : BASIC
Having your code running persistently on a server (whether abstracted like App Engine and Heroku, or old-school like a VPS) where other people can interface with it is far more important to the youth of today than something that dies along with your battery and wireless connection.