> there is that CO2 on the air that we actually want to get rid of
For this reason I have long been slightly baffled that development of compostable/biodegradable bio-based plastics is such a priority in materials research. Sure, it's interesting in the very long run, but for the foreseeable future, converting atmospheric CO2 (via plants as an initial step) into a long lived, inert material that can just be buried after an initial use seems like a benefit.
Many of those big bells in other cultures are on fixed mountings (in a carillon, for instance). The idea of mounting the bell on a rotating wheel - which imposes limits on what music can be played due to the rotational inertia of the wheel, therefore leading to a unique style of composition - is distinctively English.
More likely a hall effect sensor, which is solid state and a lot smaller. And yes, older MacBooks had something like that, as evidenced by the fact you could put them to sleep by holding a magnet in the right place (just to the left of the trackpad IIRC in the models I'm familiar with)
Non-spill fluid quick disconnects are established tech in industries like medical, chemical processing, beverage dispensing, and hydraulic power, so there are plenty of design concepts to draw on.
A fairly intellectual audience, in the 50s and 60s when the space race was big news and von Braun's Nazi past was recent history? I'd guess a majority.
> My family had a small B&W CRT that fascinated me with its image quality, in that it always reminded me more of a b&w photo than color CRTs reminded me of color photos.
The problem of a finite dot pitch interfering with image quality, especially on small displays where the dots were necessarily larger relative to the image size, is what motivated Tektronix to develop field-sequential color CRTs which they used in their digital oscilloscopes in the 80s and 90s. JVC also used the technology in some professional broadcast video monitors. Basically it was a B&W CRT with a changeable (liquid crystal) color filter in front of it. The R, G, and B channels would be shown one after another with the corresponding filter activated, in a similar manner to a color wheel DLP projector.
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.
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.
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.
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.