The linked source about blowing cartridges proves that connectors would eventually accumulate damage if blown, not that blowing did not help making them work in the short term. One thing does not exclude the other - as the original “source of the source of the source” actually says. Burning a log will not preserve the log, but will make you warm tonight.
nobody ever expected that tilting a controller would help in any way, it was just an instinctive eye-hand coordination gesture to optimize your own movements. Which is why it eventually ended up in controllers, once it was doable and cheap enough: it just instinctively makes sense as interaction paradigm.
I know how development works, shutting down programs on iOS helps programs reset and simplify their state. It’s not about “speeding up” kernel operations or memory management (which is what Apple is talking about when it says we should trust iOS to do the right thing), it’s about reducing variables, terminating rogue threads, closing handles and so on. iOS could be wonderful and totally bugfree, and programs would still fuck themselves up because they are not bugfree, losing track of what they were doing a second ago and running in circles like amnesiac puppies. That is why they need a periodic kick in the balls.
In conclusion, yeah yeah cargo-cult bla bla, but most of the examples listed are actually wrong and irrelevant, so: poor post.
Which actually makes a certain amount of sense: on most modern smartphones(likely any that would tell you to do that) you have a magnetometer and a multi-axis accelerometer onboard, often in a single package; but definitely at a known orientation with respect to the body of the handset.
Going through that series of motions, while silly looking, allows all three axes of the accelerometer to experience the (approximately constant, your crust density may vary) force of gravity and puts the magnetometer in a variety of positions relative to magnetic north.
Hardly perfect; but if you are trying to identify and compensate for unknown errors/variations without telling the user to go call NIST, running the device against the constants that are readily available is your best option.
Yeah, it’s certainly doable in software. The “Mystifiy” screen saver that Windows has shipped with since before the Trilobite wars(I’m pretty sure I remember it in 3.1, no idea when it was first added) looks reasonably similar; and back when Winamp really whipped the llama’s ass I’m sure that there were visualization plugins that did more or less exactly the same thing.
I’m just a lousy enough programmer that I don’t feel any magic in the results I get there; while the “loudspeaker coils and CRT control yokes are both just electromagnets of modest impedance; Kraftwerk shall steer the electron beam now!” process was loads of fun.
