I Kickstarted “Pressy: The Almighty Android Button”
It’s a tiny button that fits in an Android phone’s headset jack, with a companion app that can be programmed for various actions. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Toggle the flashlight, take a photo, whatever.
At least on the G2 phone I had at the time, it had a delay of about two seconds, and drained the already abysmal battery life. I gave up on it in less than two days.
In the 90s I bought my first laptop, a Packard-Bell, from Circuit City. (Yes, double the chances for failure and disappointment there.) It had a monochrome LCD display, but after 6 days something went “SNAP!” and it had a red line permanently burned across the screen and wouldn’t boot again.
To exchange it for another, I had to drive 90 minutes to another Circuit City location. That one did not survive an entire day before the same thing happened. I returned it for a refund and bought a Toshiba elsewhere, which was flawless (except like every computer in the 90s, it was painfully obsolete in 6 months).
I liked the “J-key” mouse on the P-B though. Instead of a thumb stick like IBM laptops had, you just slid the J key around by a tiny amount and it moved the cursor. It looked like mind control and almost felt like it too. Unlike the rest of the computer, that part worked wonderfully and it never, for instance, slid the cursor around while typing a “J”.
MrsTobinL had a similar studio model not quite that pricey but her issue was the left hinge kept breaking. After I replaced the whole back cover for the screen twice and was going to have to do it a 3rd time I punted and got another laptop. Vista had driver issues and it kept blue screening too. When she was offered win7 from a old coworker at microsoft I told her 2 copies and that actually worked better than Vista.
Myself since I really like a big screen I always have a pricey laptop which ends up being more of a desktop I can carry around every now and then. But oooh 17" screen.
If you can find a local place like these guys shop there. The business grade machines are built quite nicely and will last way longer than the corporate replacement cycle. This is where the kid and MrsTobinL got their current machines and I will probably give in and get a smaller screen from them when my current beast dies.
Joking, of course. The most expensive custom I managed to come up with in the website was $3199, which is not as bad as I though. I’m pretty sure I paid more than that some three years ago on a video editing workhorse build with 16GB ram. Still going strong. Not taking it to coffee shops either.
At PAX prime, my streaming group had a party, and one of our members has an in with Razer, so we got to play with the Razer Blade Pro. Those machines start at $2700 and are surprisingly portable for 17" monitors. They only weighed maybe 10lbs. Back in 2007 I had a custom gaming laptop with a 17" display that weighed about 25lbs, and was a full 2.5" thick closed. It was monstrous, and I ended up literally melting a hole in the case on a hot summer day after forgetting that I’d overclocked it the night before and hadn’t reset the BIOS settings.
It wasn’t a disappointing tech purchase, it just died in a very disappointing way.
I bought it because I mainly wanted a chipper, but I also wanted to be able to suck up leaves and not have to rake them. Mine came with a great big 8 horsepower Honda engine, not the B&S you see in the pic. Turn this thing on and its suction made the lawn indent into a shallow crater like a gravity well.
I had a huge pile of twigs from some pruning that I needed to shred. So I started feeding them in. This thing ate up 3" branches like a dog sucking down treats. Hand over fist it sucked in branches, leaves, anything woody I could feed it, spewing out a fine spray of fresh mulch with the bag off. Amazing. I was halfway into my stick pile when I heard a loud noise and then the sound of metal scraping, with a shower of sparks! Then oil squirting out! WTF!!! I killed the motor.
I looked down, inside the chute. The nub end of the drive shaft was glowing white hot like Chernobyl’s guts. It had melted itself. It had melted its own flywheel off the shaft. What’s more, the shaft the flywheel was attached to is the camshaft the pistons are attached to inside the engine. I had melted the camshaft beyond repair. I had melted the housing and bearings around the camshaft, so much so they exposed oil from the engine, which leaked out all over my yard and into the grass. And I had half a pile of sticks still unshredded.
