Electric Imp - fits the 'someone elses computer' definition pretty well.
Products build around their stack become useless locked up garbage after manufacturers stops paying bills(bankruptcy etc) https://hackaday.com/2019/10/08/teardown-quirky-egg-minder/#... TLDR: doorstop
Twilio Acquires Electric Imp
41–50 of 55 posts
Re: Twilio Acquires Electric Imp
#42Completely OT but these announcements for acquisitions, new releases etc: Why are they always excited ? We are really excited that Electric Imp is now part of the Twilio family. : Now that Twilio and Electric Imp have joined forces, we’re more excited than ever to see what you build. I get professional pride; it just always seems a bit overdone and insincere when it's phrased like that - though I'm sure in some cases…
For me is weirder... As a spanish and italian speaker the word "excited" always gets the "aroused" meaning... To be "exitado" (spanish) or "eccitato" (italian) means exactly to be aroused.
Re: Twilio Acquires Electric Imp
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its an American cultural norm- which often seems 'fake' or 'posing' to Europeans, S.Americans or Asians who are little more reserved and stingy expressing such levels of sentiment. It was a shock to me when I started interviewing for jobs- and an American friend told me, its very important in the US, when interviewing to say "I'm really excited (more than you really are) about the opportunity to work at XYZ." The tru…
(Brit here) It seems like being excited or happy isn't enough anymore, you have to be super excited or super happy.
To me it all boils down to demand and offer. If they had to get 3 people, and there were just 10 of them all over the world, they suddenly wouldn't give a damn about the applicant being super excited, mildly excited or boringly unexcited.
Re: Twilio Acquires Electric Imp
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its an American cultural norm- which often seems 'fake' or 'posing' to Europeans, S.Americans or Asians who are little more reserved and stingy expressing such levels of sentiment. It was a shock to me when I started interviewing for jobs- and an American friend told me, its very important in the US, when interviewing to say "I'm really excited (more than you really are) about the opportunity to work at XYZ." The tru…
OT, but as a non-American I have always wondered what are the origins of those "smiling, teeth slightly showing" corporate mugshots? And I've started to see these from other places as well (like in my own country), of late. An example (this stuck with me as I had seen it in an article years ago): https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjay-jha-a91240b9 Then, there's this aspect that creeps me out is when you pass someone and…
European here. I usually stay away from people who smile with their face but not their eyes; that's a sign they're not sincere.
I mean not the half smile put there just to avoid a neutral expression, but a smile that attempts to appear warm and deep while it's not. Especially at work, the more the people I met who were good at it, the more I did my best not to have to deal with them, because to be good at it they must have trained it, which to me spoke volumes about the person.
Re: Twilio Acquires Electric Imp
#45I guess I didn't realize Electric Imp was something people were still using for products. Does make sense for Twilio's API and service lineup though.
Same here. I remember hearing about their SD-form-factor product, like, 5 or 10 years ago. Then cheap wireless microcontrollers like the ESP8266 came onto the market and made them irrelevant.
They had that SD to WiFi card which was interesting to have say a non connected camera send directly photos to a server through an access point. An ESP8266 or ESP32 might probably accomplish the same by implementing SD card emulation on some of its GPIOs. But the form factor would be much less convenient.
Re: Twilio Acquires Electric Imp
#46Oh that was Hugo Fiennes' company! He wrote the definitive BBS software for Acorns, then designed the Empeg Linux MP3 player for cars (in like 99), and the iPhone 1 hardware.
applause
Re: Twilio Acquires Electric Imp
#47Completely OT but these announcements for acquisitions, new releases etc: Why are they always excited ? We are really excited that Electric Imp is now part of the Twilio family. : Now that Twilio and Electric Imp have joined forces, we’re more excited than ever to see what you build. I get professional pride; it just always seems a bit overdone and insincere when it's phrased like that - though I'm sure in some cases…
You have to feign excitement to deal with the terrifying hellscape that is American corporate culture.
Re: Twilio Acquires Electric Imp
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not the performing of pleasantries, but the level at which Americans perform them vs the norm in most of western Europe. The average level of American "OMG so excited to meet you" is usually reserved for actual celebrities in Europe. When you have seen them talk like that to everyone in the room , the conclusion for the European is that the American is lying about being excited to meet you, which is much more of…
> The average level of American "OMG so excited to meet you" is usually reserved for actual celebrities in Europe I've been an American all my life, and I've never seen anyone say they were excited to meet someone other than either an actual celebrity or someone who has been significantly talked up in advance to the level of being at a quasi-celebrity level in context (and even in the latter case, “I'm glad to finall…
Things are very different from one part of USA to another, and even from one social group to another. Though I haven't participated in any social situation where "OMG so excited..." is the norm, it is easy to imaging it exists.
Re: Twilio Acquires Electric Imp
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
OT, but as a non-American I have always wondered what are the origins of those "smiling, teeth slightly showing" corporate mugshots? And I've started to see these from other places as well (like in my own country), of late. An example (this stuck with me as I had seen it in an article years ago): https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjay-jha-a91240b9 Then, there's this aspect that creeps me out is when you pass someone and…
European here. I usually stay away from people who smile with their face but not their eyes ; that's a sign they're not sincere. I mean not the half smile put there just to avoid a neutral expression, but a smile that attempts to appear warm and deep while it's not. Especially at work, the more the people I met who were good at it, the more I did my best not to have to deal with them, because to be good at it they mu…
As an aside, if you want to make a genuinely warm smile but are not feeling it, this trick usually works for me. I think about my partner, or a beloved childhood memory, or something else along those lines. I just close my eyes for a second and focus on that, then let my face smile while I think about the happy memory.
Re: Twilio Acquires Electric Imp
#50Oh that was Hugo Fiennes' company! He wrote the definitive BBS software for Acorns, then designed the Empeg Linux MP3 player for cars (in like 99), and the iPhone 1 hardware. applause
Aww thanks!
There may be argument about the BBS software being "definitive", but it was certainly used to run some of the most popular Acorn BBSes - there were installs with 16 dial-in modems in Hong Kong, for example. It has also been decades since I wrote a terminal emulator... simpler times!
As with most things the empeg was a team effort as were all the iPhones I worked on at Apple (the first one through to the 4S) and the Nest... lots of amazing engineers doing incredible work, and I consider myself very lucky to have been able to work with them. Ditto for Electric Imp, which was a fresh look at the problem of exchanging data between the cloud and the real world.
I grew up in rural Somerset in the UK and never imagined I'd get to work at Apple and be wrangling power budgets with Wendell Sander. Almost everything in life revolves around being at the right place at the right time and being willing to take risks.