Eric Migicovsky:

We’re excited to announce two new smartwatches that run open source PebbleOS and are compatible with thousands of your beloved Pebble apps.

• Core 2 Duo has an ultra crisp black and white [e-Paper] display, polycarbonate frame, costs $149 and starts shipping in July.
• Core Time 2 has a larger 64-colour [e-Paper] display, metal frame, costs $225 and starts shipping in December.

I passed by the original Pebble watches, dismissing them as weak compared to the Apple Watch. However, in the years since I’ve come to have much more appreciation for hardware that affords its owner large amounts of customisability, especially when paired with open-source firmware. The new rePebble watches are both of these things, so I have pre-ordered a Core 2 Duo in white.

Eric also has a related post setting expectations for iOS users:

I want to set expectations accordingly. We will build a good app for iOS, but be prepared - there is no way for us to support all the functionality that Apple Watch has access to. It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things.

It’s things like this that help make my switch to Android last year feel worth it.

Neut is a functional programming language with static memory management.

Its key features include:

• Full λ-calculus support
• Predictable automatic memory management
• The absence of annotations to the type system when achieving both of the above

Neut doesn’t use GCs or regions. Instead, it takes a type-directed approach to handle resources.

This looks quite full-featured and complete with documentation, formatter, LSP server, and a handful of sample applications written in it. It’s good to see another language offering some of the benefits of Rust, but potentially easier to learn and write.

I haven’t been able to try it myself yet as I’m travelling with my Windows ARM laptop and there’s no Windows support at the moment. Also the pre-compiled binaries appear to need glibc, so it doesn’t run in my Chimera Linux WSL instance. It’s implemented in Haskell, but ghc hasn’t been packaged for Chimera, so can’t build from source either.

Peter Marheine:

I often find that imposed limitations make it easier to create things: it’s easy to aim for perfection if you can expend as much effort as you like on something and thus end up with nothing that you’ll ever call good enough to share. Over on Cemetech in the final months of 2023, we held a programming contest: write a screensaver, any kind of screensaver. I’m not often one to do any kind of competitive programming, but as a prompt for a constrained project this was a good one for me. As a result, I wrote a program I called WEB1999, that won second place.

Inspired heavily by the Realistic Internet Simulator (“Kill the Pop-ups”), WEB1999 invokes the spirit of pop-up advertising and Internet culture around the turn of the millennium in the form of a program that runs on Texas Instruments’ TI-84+ CE color-screen graphing calculators.

Some of the earliest programs I wrote were on my TI-83 in high school, so I have a soft spot for TI graphing calculators. In fact, my TI-89 from university still lives on my desk and sees regular use.

This WEB1999 project combines nostalgia for TI graphing calculators, and the early web, what’s not to love.

Ian Betteridge:

Most Mac users of a certain age remember Power Computing, the Mac cloner who undercut Apple with better machines back in the mid-90s. Apple ended up buying Power Computing out and putting an end to the clone market. Well if you can’t compete, use your financial muscle.

It’s often said that Apple bought the company – but it didn’t. Even Wikipedia gets this wrong, claiming that Power was an Apple subsidiary. In fact, what Apple bought was the Mac-related assets of Power, including the license to make Mac clones. Apple did not acquire the company.

It sure is a sad tale. The Wikipedia page is an interesting read too.

By the end of January 1998, Power was gone. Ironically, if the company had survived for longer, the $100m in Apple stock would have been worth a lot, lot more than Power itself ever was or could have been.

According to Stockulator That $100M of 1997 Apple stock would now be worth $122.33B, and would have paid $4.5B in dividends!

Igor Ljubuncic:

Quite often, I wonder how much nostalgia plays part in our perception of past events. Luckily, with software, you can go “back” and retest it, and so there’s no need for any illusions and misconceptions. To wit, I decided to reinstall and try Windows 7 again (as a virtual machine, but still), to see whether my impressions of the dross we call “modern” software today are justified.

If you’re wondering how I feel, I’ve said it before. Windows 10 is about the same as Windows 7. There aren’t any big differences, except more annoyances and more “online” nonsense that adds zero value to the actual user experience. For me, the leap from XP to 7 was a good one, mostly because the latter came with improved 64-bit support. But ever since? I left XP with three years remaining on its support clock. I left 7 with maybe a month left. With 10, I have absolute zero intentions of moving to the low-IQ Windows 11. Linux, it is, but if push comes to shove, Mac might also be an option. But I digress. Let’s check the last real desktop Windows.

Until Windows 10, the last Windows I used regularly was Windows 2000, so I never used Windows 7 myself. From the outside though, it does seem like it was peak mouse and keyboard desktop Windows. After Windows 7 there seems to be a series of experiments and annoyances that nobody actually wants.

So what do we have here? Looks? Yup, still nice, still relevant. And much better ergonomics, too. Thick, human scrollbars, good clarity and separation between foreground and background elements. None of that modern flatness crap. No touch-like crap, either, so everything is easy to use. Faster, more efficient, too.

You don’t get asked five million questions about camera and speech and Bluetooth and location and other pointless nonsense that have no place on the desktop. Smartphones, okay, but classic PCs, hell no. The software works as it should, and you don’t have to contend with low-IQ website wrappers pretending to be “apps”. The system is super fast and responsive, even as a virtual machine.

Oh the questions! Why on earth must I go through the same “first-run” questions every time there’s a major update to Windows 11¹. I still don’t want an Office trial. I still don’t want to use Edge. I still don’t want to use OneDrive. For goodness sake, just accept my initial responses and boot into the goddamn desktop.