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I saw plenty in corporate environments but I think people mostly wanted to use a larger and better screen than what was available on a laptop at the time.

What I never saw in the wild but which was neat was the Powerbook Duo dock that pulled in the laptop like a front loading VCR tape, peak Sculley-period pointless complexity. It totally enclosed the laptop in a closed configuration, the idea being that you would put a monitor on top of the dock.


I had a dock for my Thinkpad X200. It was a chunk of plastic the same size as the laptop but it also had a bay for a disc drive (since the laptop didn't have one) and also had a pop-out connector for charging a second battery. Since it was the same footprint, it didn't take up any extra desk space and still allowed you to use the laptop's own ports too (except for power), it just made the laptop thicker. And you could even take the dock on the go if you really needed the extra I/O and disc drive. Pretty innovative design when docks at the time were just a big box at the rear of the assembly.

> I saw plenty in corporate environments but I think people mostly wanted to use a larger and better screen than what was available on a laptop at the time.

Certainly with some of the older Thinkpads (going back 10+ years or more) it was only possible to connect two external monitors via one of these docks. (Then USB-A monitor adapters started to appear...)


The Gervais Principle is fascinating and a bit too inflexibly nihilistic in my mind.

A transcendent theory past both is Komoroske's "Coordination Headwinds"

https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/


"Organization headwinds" diagrams are helpful, thanks for the interesting read.

> Many of these scientific file formats (HDF5, netCDF, TIFF/COG, FITS, GRIB, JPEG and more) are essentially just contiguous multidimensional array(/"tensor") chunks

Yeah, a recurring thought is that these should condense into Apache Arrow queried by DuckDB but there must be some reason for this not to have already happened.


And they announced the next version of the Lightning last month. People don't like that it isn't purely BEV, but I don't see the big deal.

  Unlike a traditional hybrid, the F-150 Lightning EREV is propelled 100 
  percent by electric motors. This ensures owners get the pure EV driving 
  experience they love — including rapid acceleration and quiet operation — 
  while eliminating the need to stop and charge during long-distance towing. 
https://www.fromtheroad.ford.com/us/en/articles/2025/next-ge...

Wow, what a way to celebrate the birthday of a certain tech CEO by crashing-out in a similar way. This is very disappointing.

What are the impacts if any to the Stemma QT and Quiic ecosystems?

> sexual images are only a problem if they are gratuitous or off-topic

Well if someone was working on something like a medical device there might be some documentation that could be interpreted as sexual but that documenting it was not gratuitous.


> We have put the remaining stock on sale.

Looks like the prices of Teensy boards on adafruit.com are the same as before. Maybe the statement means they will continue to sell them instead of "on sale" in the sense of applying a discount.


Yes, seeing this product's very angular non-3d-printed yet-prototype design brought back memories of the days when the default portable hardware interface didn't always include a pointing device and thus there were these clip-on trackballs, like below.

Maybe some of the weirdest were things that looked like small mice that were linked and position-sensed by a bar linkage to the laptop. I can't find a reference to one tho, so maybe I'm mis-remembering?

http://xahlee.info/kbd/logitech_trackman_portable_trackball....


You are thinking of the HP Omnibook.

https://youtu.be/xlXr37mggUE?t=4m50s


Many thanks! Seeing that mouse-like thing pop out with the "mouse eject button" was very satisfactory.

Having not seen that hardware interface today while reviewing Wikipedia entries for pointer devices left me questioning my memory like the Fruit of the Loom cornucopia or "Berenstein Bears".



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