I’ve been knocking around and getting various false starts on three ideas for a while…
- a videogame. I've got a pretty killer idea in an open niche, but the indie market is so massively oversaturated that it feels impossible to get eyeballs.
- a next-generation post-RSS newsreader. But news is so depressing these days. I think most of the world wants to ostrich and I don't blame them.
- a reboot of Svpply, my own shuttered startup. I'd love to just make (another) thing that's about excellent clothes and shoes and artisanal pocketknives, but the way the economy is going, this feels grotesque. I was lucky to make it the first time when luxury goods were attainable _and_ normal people could pay for necessities; that window has closed.
I actually doubt that. Irwin was a philanthropist and a scientist, with a decent sense of humor. This is a basically profitless project for public good. I think if the founder has bona-fides, Irwin’s estate would jump at it.
Hmmm we've never approached the Irwin estate, even though all our work is about stingray sting prevention and treatment. We do need to make profit to stay in business, so it's not entirely charity. Maybe we should see how they feel though. I also worry about the optics of advertising so directly on somebody's death. Especially because none of our products would have prevented / helped in his scenario.
Love this, I'll keep an eye on it. I'd happily use it with my apartment building's clothes washers, which are connected to the internet via a painful UI.
Amazon used to have a thing for books that didn't have Kindle editions, "Click here to tell the publisher you'd like to read this on Kindle." You should develop in public (X/Bluesky/Mastodon), and have a prominent form for wonks like us to forward "I want Aivi" to various manufacturers.
It was a lot of micro-USB and some Lightning. CAT5E and lower. HDMI 1.4 and lower. All still useable cables for many people. It went to my local hackerspace.
Several of his “lieutenants” are following, actually.
His successor Stephen Lemay has exactly the kind of pedigree a person who cares about UI could ask for. There's a lot to be optimistic about. https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
Not me. It’s wildly unusual for Apple to raise their prices on basically anything… in fact I'm not sure if its ever happened. *
It’s been pointed out by others that price is part of Apple's marketing strategy. You can see that in the trash can Mac Pro, which logically should have gotten cheaper over the ridiculous six years it was on sale with near-unchanged specs. But the marketing message was, "we're selling a $3000 computer."
Those fat margins leave them with a nice buffer. Competing products will get more expensive; Apple's will sit still and look even better by comparison.
We are fortunate that Apple picked last year to make 16gb the new floor, though! And I don't think we're going to see base SSDs get any more generous for a very, very long time.
* okay I do remember that Macbook Airs could be had for $999 for a few years, that disappeared for a while, then came back
RSS is actually one of my favourite uses for the tablet; I built a little service that builds a pdf "newspaper" twice daily and sends it to Google Drive. Very nice to read my feeds on the rM2 instead of a glowing screen
Its development kinda stalled, with several PRs stuck at 90% completion.
I'm using reMarkable 2 as an e-book reader, using KoReader. It's almost perfect for me, the only thing that I'm missing is Bluetooth. And its WiFi is sometimes a bit flakey.
Netsurf isn't fun on many websites but it should be enough for rendering HTML content from RSS, no? Terminal emulators and lynx/elinks/links/w3c work, too. And terminal RSS readers. HTML rendering is also possible with KOreader which runs well on rM2, come to think about it.
Speaking of Apple platforms, yeah, this was my big problem with Interface Builder. I couldn’t get anywhere with serious Apple platforms development until SwiftUI came along.
- a videogame. I've got a pretty killer idea in an open niche, but the indie market is so massively oversaturated that it feels impossible to get eyeballs.
- a next-generation post-RSS newsreader. But news is so depressing these days. I think most of the world wants to ostrich and I don't blame them.
- a reboot of Svpply, my own shuttered startup. I'd love to just make (another) thing that's about excellent clothes and shoes and artisanal pocketknives, but the way the economy is going, this feels grotesque. I was lucky to make it the first time when luxury goods were attainable _and_ normal people could pay for necessities; that window has closed.
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