The real project is the sense of accomplishment we gained along the way, or something like that.

But anyway, there are institutions like the Craftsmanship Museum <https://craftsmanshipmuseum.com/> that exist to present this kind of passion project to the interested public. That one in particular came out of and is still very centered on the hobby machinist and model steam engine community... if there's not already something similar for electronics and computing type projects, it definitely seems like maybe there could/should be.

Telemetry was included in what was open sourced, e.g. <https://github.com/google/pebble/blob/3b927684809fba173ee540...>

My read of that caveat from Google is that the code that was removed was third party code that Pebble had a proprietary license to use, thus it was not Google's to release.

It was based on FreeRTOS, but FreeRTOS at the time was extremely bare bones and only provided a preemptive scheduler, task management, and synchronization primitives. Everything else (memory management, I/O, ...) had to come either from whatever libc implementation was in use, or be built from scratch.

Thanks, does that mean early FreeRTOS is a good beginner project for OS study?

In my opinion it's not always the most readable codebase, due to some idiosyncratic style choices, but it definitely has the advantages of being small and focused.

Thank you!

I have been happy with my pepper mill with a Crushgrind mechanism.

(The mill happens to be from Normann Copenhagen but Crushgrind supplies mechanisms to a number of pepper mill manufacturers as well as selling their own.)

Flash as an animation tool and applet platform was already on the downswing when the iPhone happened, though.

The consumer demand for Flash on mobile seemed to be mostly about video streaming, because at the time Flash was experiencing sort of a second life as the least-bad way to do streaming video on the web. In that context Apple's point of view of "as an industry let's finally fix browser-native video streaming, rather than being stuck with Flash forever" seems pretty reasonable.

Yes, I also think around 2008 or so the most widespread use of Flash might already have been newgrounds et al. I don't remember really ever caring for Flash on Linux though.

I do remember writing CMS backends for Flash websites in 2001, but that was the early time I think, before AS3 and really cool stuff.

Ben Rich, and yes: he was the 2nd director of the Lockheed Skunk Works.

I think the book may have been out of print for a while but it's easily available now.

Thanks, for some reason I got downvoted... Just for asking an author. HN is indeed surprising.

If you apply a constant current to a capacitor, the voltage across the capacitor will increase linearly as the capacitor stores energy in the electric field.

If you apply a constant voltage to an inductor, the current through the inductor will increase linearly as the inductor stores energy in the magnetic field.

Perhaps part of why the intuition can break down is that in real life, inductors tend to be much "leakier" energy storage devices than capacitors. If you store some energy in an inductor and then change the voltage across it to zero (practically: short its terminals together), in theory a perfect inductor will maintain a constant current forever and the energy stored does not change. In practice inductors (with an exception for things like superconducting magnets) are made from wire that has a resistance, and so the current in a real shorted inductor will eventually decay to zero. This means that in practical terms inductors are mostly only useful for short term energy storage. On the other hand, real-life insulating materials (like air, vacuum, or Teflon) can can be pretty close to perfect insulators allowing real capacitors to store energy more or less indefinitely... certainly on timescales of years.

> Honestly, eating cereal just isn't appealing anymore.

All cereal grains or are you just referring to breakfast cereal here?

The meme started as eating paste, back when that meant wheatpaste (made from flour and water). In that context it's less surprising that kids might try to eat it!

I wonder if there's been a bit of a conflation with the other meme, about sniffing glue, which has also lost much of its context considering that rubber cement and other similar types of glue which contain volatile solvents are also less widely used than they once were.