I'm not willing to cede the point on hardware design for as long as their primary mouse product cannot be charged during use. It's such a simple and obvious mistake, like a throwback to the days of hockey-puck mice.
Not to mention its ergonomics issues. I held onto mine as long as possible because I loved the capacitive shell. Eventually I had to ditch it though to keep my wrist healthy.
The comic pokes fun at the ridiculously cruel babelfish puzzle. Which, I'm proud to say, I solved back in the day without assistance, after a full day's worth of effort, and requiring at one point to completely restart the game because of an apparently useless item I didn't pick up at the very beginning of the game (if you've solved it, you'll know the item I'm referring to).
But...while that was a nice achievement, I still got stuck later in the game, trying to fix the Nutrimatic.
I'm not aware of Invisiclues ever having been "installed." I'm only familiar with them as booklets with "invisible" ink. And, at least initially, they were created at least quasi-independently of Infocom by someone who later joined Infocom.
May have been re-releases. I had a lot of the original games with feelies and (effectively) anti-pirating code wheels and the like. I think I have one of the CD re-releases and I play for a bit now and then with a Z interpreter.
Yes rereleases as I stated above. ( or meant to ) I recall my father being quite excited when he saw them. Not sure what games he played first on the Commodore, if any.
They amused me for a time at 9-10, then later at maybe 14-15 or so I got into them again playing on a Palm VIIx with a folding Stowaway keyboard. I also read through HHGTTG on that same device.
I have fond memories of some z-machine interpreter on the Palm that I found easier to play with than anything on my desktop computer. There were lots of shortcut buttons and thanks to the stylus it was still easy to use those (vs a touchscreen using ony fingers where you need huge buttons to hit). You could also tap any word in the output to bring up a context menu of actions (e.g. to examine or pick up objects mentioned in room descriptions) and that list of actions was a combination of a configurable global list and a game-specific list you could add actions to. Could play through entire games and barely ever have to type anything. Had a folding keyboard, but no memory of using that for interactive fiction.
I left Slashdot for HN...but I didn't leave Slashdot because of HN. I was frustrated with Slashdot and was actively seeking alternatives. About 2 days after I discovered HN existed, I was done forever with Slashdot.
Among other frustrations (including some really vile comments), I felt like the world was bursting with interesting tech news, and Slashdot was just not keeping up. The publish rate was too slow (maybe 10-13 stories a day), and the %age of stories I found interesting had dropped considerably from a few years previous.
I wasn't a fan of the redesign, but it was content that drove me to seek alternatives.
Growing up in the 70s, among the things I sought out in our house to play with was an old manual typewriter. It was endlessly fascinating to me. I liked playing with all of the mechanical bits. Trying to jam keys, working the carriage return, scrolling paper through it, pressing the Shift key and looking to see how it moved the entire basket of typebars, overtyping to make new characters, watching how the ribbon advanced with each keystroke and rewinding it by hand, etc. One thing I had forgotten, which was mentioned in this article, was figuring out how to set tab stops, which allowed me to either stutter the carriage across, or make it fly free from one end to the other.
An alternative to securing or recreating the entire technology stack top to bottom would be to own one critical piece of the stack. If European interests owned a vital slice of the technology stack that was difficult to recreate and too cheap/convenient to not be used by international government/business/consumer interests, that could be a powerful deterrent. I.e., it sets up a "mutual assured destruction"-style defense.
The 1200XL was my first computer. My family purchased it at a department store at a fire sale price (IIRC Montgomery Ward's, $199) after Atari stopped manufacturing and began dumping its inventory to make way for the 600XL/800XL. I had been researching a computer to get for ages, but my family was very careful about how we spent money, and it was a big purchase. We had seriously considered getting a TI-99/4A when TI exited the business, but we were concerned that it was just going to be a dead end. But the chance for a cheaper entry into an established ecosystem was great (that and me begging my mother to finally, finally get a computer!).
Re compatibility, I never came across software that didn't run on it. I'd read in magazines that there were issues, but never once experienced it. One interesting software change, though (but true of other XL computers, too) was that the color "artifacting" worked differently on it than it did the 400/800. For example, Ultima III used color artifacting, and so playing it on my system produced some incorrect colors...most notably the sea was red.
I did come across one hardware issue...a cheap third-party parallel interface adapter that didn't work, and that we thought at the time was defective, but I now think it's likely to have been affected by the incorrect power wiring in the 1200XL's SIO adapter. It was cheap enough that we didn't lose too much money on it, and I ended up getting the far superior ICD P:R: Connection instead.
The Atari community was a super great community to be in. And in so many ways, Atari was doing things that wouldn't be seen again for years, if not decades. Atari's SIO port is famously a predecessor/inspiration of USB. The APX Exchange was basically a third-party app store decades before Apple popularized the concept. The machine was hackable and moddable (I bought a 256KB upgrade kit for mine). When I migrated to PC for college use, it hurt to have to fall back to CGA...even EGA was just ugly, compared to what my 1200XL was capable of (although the 80 column displays were nice compared to Atari's 40-column).
Solved, and it was fun! But...some of the colored lines were hard to see. Particularly the light yellow ones. I had one "alternate" solution that it was marking incorrect for reasons it took me over a minute to spot...and it was just a super light yellow line I missed without really scrunching up to my screen.
Improving the color choice might help, but slightly thicker lines I think would also be of significant help.
Also, it's common for sudoku solvers to allow you to press Shift+number to do a one-off toggle for the "note" checkmark.
I had hope at one point to set up a Kindle with large fonts on a treadmill, but that was just totally hopeless. I tried again with a music stand next to the treadmill, but it was too far away, badly angled, and touching the device to flip pages could still turn it off.
And it's not just the accidental power-off, it's also the accidental power-on. I slip the Kindle into a tight pocket in my backpack, and it sometimes turns on by itself. Further, inserting it into the pocket can sometimes reproduce the swipe motion, so it can be on and active (and sometimes randomly page-flipping) inside my backpack.
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