Fans of the band Wilco will recognize one of the Conet Project's recordings as the source of the woman repeating "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" in the song "Poor Places" from the eponymous album. Wilco failed to license the sample and the resulting lawsuit gave the Conet Project a portion of Wilco's royalties on that track.
And I remember going to Radio Shack at the mall as a kid and wanting that Armatron robot so badly! Being able to get these things now for pretty cheap and fixing them and playing with them with my kids has been such a treat.
You can get some of these (like the smaller TOMY robots) for pretty cheap on eBay. They're usually broken, but the innards of these robots are so interesting, just taking them apart is a learning experience. TOMY was brilliant at making seemingly sophisticated toys that were actually run by a single DC motor; all the movements, sounds, sensing etc. were implemented using gears and cam shafts and other mechanisms. A great way to learn about simple machines, and a bonus if you (or your kid) can repair them and bring a 40-year-old robot back to life.
I miss Pine too. I could read/file/delete scores of plaintext emails in seconds using single keystrokes.
Every email client I've used since Pine has been better at dealing with all the stuff we've bolted on to email (HTML, attachments, calendar invites...) but none of them have been as efficient at the core tasks of email as Pine was.
A side note: I think there's an unmet need for algorithms that can convert photos of these random patterns into text (or something similar) that can be stored in a database and searched quickly for matching patterns. I've tried image similarity algorithms like the ones used by e.g. Google Reverse Image Search, but they seem poorly suited for this task. I ended up writing my own crude algorithm in the paper above that converts a pattern into a set of strings, and it works OK, but surely there are better ways to do this.
Can anyone recommend a backup strategy for iCloud? Specifically, my Macs' hard drives aren't big enough for any one computer to store everything locally, so some documents end up living only in iCloud which is clearly asking for trouble. My ideal solution would be to regularly mirror iCloud's contents on my NAS (which is big enough to store everything locally) but I've never seen anyone implement something like that.
I had the same thought. BTW, the movie is titled "The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!" in the UK (same as the book it's based on). The studio changed the title for Americans [1], perhaps assuming we'd be less interested in a movie with scientists, shudder...