You might enjoy Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, although it's pretty shallow in most areas, you can configure the position and composition of your army's units and then watch the battle play out in real-time.
For threads you could implement something like Telegram's "Reply" feature. E.g. long press or swipe on a prior entry when typing a message, then when it's sent it has a clickable link to the prior message embedded above it.
Either way I'm definitely going to be checking this out as it's very similar to how I already use the Notes app for journaling type entries.
This tends to happen at a smaller scale with gaming consoles. Towards the end of a generation, the games coming out usually perform/look a lot better than the ones at the beginning of the generation. I'm assuming due to a lot more careful optimizations due to not being able to change the hardware.
I've always been curious about how far we could really push modern computers if somebody wanted to spend the time going to the lengths in the original post when creating practical software. Of course it's usually not worth the tradeoff, but it's interesting to think about.
> (I did wish I had more control at the wall; I only had on/off switches and would have liked to have a dimmer and a button to toggle different programs.)
For what it's worth this is possible now with their Smart Button
These always miss my favorite hidden feature of mspaint: Control + Scrolling should be able to increase/decrease the size of the brush to sizes much larger than you can normally select. Instead, this just zooms the browser but maybe it could be changed to alt + scroll or something.
I agree that the camera software should just let you pick any shutter speed, but you can get a pretty cheap remote button or intervalometer for <$30, or even DIY one for cheaper. What does the $160 canon button give you that a cheaper version doesn't?
I had a similar experience about 8 years ago in Intro to Linear Algebra. I had been attending lectures at my school but I ended up missing a day so I decided to find the corresponding lecture from MIT. It turns out, I was able to watch a lecture from the author of the textbook we were using. Even crazier, the lecture I watched online ended with him working through an example problem but he did not finish.
When I went to the next class in person, our professor was finishing up the exact same example problem from the lecture video. It could have just been coincidence that that exact lecture lined up the way it did, but it kind of opened my eyes to how silly it was to have professors repeating the same thing year after year.
Oh man, compiz-fusion is what got me interested in Linux. I remember seeing videos circa 2007-8 of people's desktops with all sorts of crazy stuff. Cube desktops, wobbly windows, fire trails, etc. I spent forever figuring out how to dual boot Ubuntu 8.04 and Windows and learned a ton so I could setup these effects. Fast forward 12 years and now I only use Linux on servers without a desktop interface at all.
While this stuff may seem silly and pointless, you'll never know who it'll inspire to dive in to a whole new world. I'm glad it's being maintained still
I've been using the OTP Auth[1] app on iOS as it has support for encrypted backups with a passphrase. It also offers iCloud backup but I have that disabled as I'd rather manage the backups myself. No affiliation, just a happy user.