I still mourn the loss of Aperture. IMO the best pro software Apple ever made. Lightroom was always a distant second for RAW photo workflows, and Photos is still a far cry.
If you want to refresh an old memory, it actually stands for "Personal Computer Memory Card International Association" but nobody knew that. And it was later called 'PC Card'... then there was the faster ExpressCard that wasn't backwards compatible.
It was fun being able to expand your computer's IO capabilities by adding on a network card, modem, USB, FireWire, etc. with these modules. It's similar to Framework's little USB-C-based modules, though those modules are just too small for a lot of circuits without a very creative design.
That's also not a perfect recollection, but is what my recollection was until I was looking up this history in the past week and found this nugget and posted it elsewhere. Quoting myself:
>So we know these were originally called PCMCIA cards, then later PC Cards, right? Well, I think I might have found the first mention of PCMCIA in PC Magazine. It is in a Dec 1991 column by Dvorak where he "introduces" the "PCMCIA PC-Card". Here's a quote, "In fact, the card should be referred to as the PCMCIA PC-Card, or the PC-Card for short. PCMCIA is the Personal Computer Computer Memory Card International Association (Sunnyvale, Calif., 408-720-0107), and it's the governing body that has standardized the specifications for this card worldwide. JEIDA works with the PCMCIA; it's specifications are identical."
>So at least according this Dvorak column, these were ALWAYS properly called "PC-Cards" (he used a hyphen), but early on people definitely were calling them PCMCIA cards and I remember the shift to everyone later (much later than this 1991 column) calling them PC Cards.
Neat, definitely a part of history that I'm not familiar enough with myself since I was only ~6 or so around then when the article was published.
It definitely seems to reinforce the joke backronym of "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms" for the whole thing given how badly it was all refered to. It's a lot like the whole Clippit/Clippy situation with the Microsoft Office assistants. Originally it was only named Clippit but Clippy got coined by everyone else and even Microsoft ended up giving in and using it in marketing materials not too long after the fact.
I was able to see the development card in person at VCF Midwest last year; it's a very neat project! The version he had at VCFMW was in a transparent plastic case[1], which looks even better than the IBM-inspired design of the one on this page.
I'm always reminded how much simpler typography is on the Mac using the Option key when I'm on Windows and have to look up how to type [almost any special character].
Instead of modifier plus keypress, it's modifier, and a 4 digit combination that I'll never remember.
PowerToys has a wonderful QuickAccent feature. The dashes and hyphens are on hyphen-KEY and some other characters are on comma-KEY, and many symbols are on the key that they resemble, like ¶ is on P-KEY where KEY is the follower key you want to use. I turned off using SPACE because it conflicted with some other software, but right arrow works great for me.
Yep... but RISC-V large and performant implementations won't access the latest silicon process for a good while... better to push for native support to help.
Note that here DIY means designing the chassis, the drive loader mechanism, PCBs for backplate, power distribution (including crimping dozens of power cables), modding PCIe cards to fit.
It's not a boring "I bought a Chia mining server and inserted lots of hard drives" build.
Maybe not SOTA but the HA Voice Preview Edition [1] in tandem with a Pi 5 or some similar low-power host for the Piper / Whisper pipeline is pretty good. I don't use it but was able to get an Alexa/Google Home-like experience going with minimal effort.
I was only using it for local Home Assistant tasks, didn't try anything further like retrieving sports scores, managing TODO lists, or anything like that.
> Forgive me if this is overly blunt, but this is such a novice/junior mindset.
Unfortunately the reality is there are far more applications written (not just today but for many years now) by developer teams that will include a dozen dependencies with zero code review because feature XYZ will get done in a few days instead of a few weeks.
And yes, that often comes back to bite the team (mostly in terms of maintenance burden down the road, leading to another full rebuild), but it usually doesn't affect the programmers who are making the decisions, or the project managers who ship the first version.
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