I'm surprised nobody caught this, but both the screenshot for Windows 8.1 is not Windows 8.1, it's Windows Threshold, the development phase of Windows 10.
The specific screenshot they show is the very first start menu they cobbled together for Threshold, which would later be redesigned again before shipping as Windows 10. The screenshot is also showing off early adaptations of Windows 8 apps running in movable windows -- before that, they could only run full- or split-screen!
I am not surprised, from memory I only know like 3 people who ever willingly used 8.x. The active user base must be tiny compared to Windows 7 and 10 users (if we just stick to that range).
I have personally not used it for more than an hour total (on anyone's PC combined) and I have (co-)owned and used at least one Windows PC continuously since 1995.
In some ways 8.1 was better than 10. You could still control the updates and uninstall the or block telemetry updates. Unfortunately, a lot of hardware makers abandoned making driver updates for it before it even went out of support (unlike Windows 7 where they often kept making minor updates even after it was out of support)
I never used it really myself. The original UI wasn't what I'd ever want out of a PC but the impending stench of the Windows Store was what drove me off of Windows at that point.
I have an 8.1 VM in my unraid server that only exists to run an older radeon driver that allows the GPU to turn off to near 0 watts idle when the hardware isn't in use. Windows 10 broke the subsystem that these drivers used and AMD never got this feature working on 10.
Windows 8 was fine if you used StartIsBack which just added the Windows 7 start menu back and you could happily ignore the big stupid fullscreen start menu that yanked you away from your desktop. But at that point, yeah no point in upgrading.
Interestingly whoever made StartIsBack is still developing a start menu replacement for Windows 11 (called StartAllBack for some reason), and it's made my usage far more tolerable. You can also get a normal file explorer again, with the normal native right click menu that doesn't hide a bunch of stuff behind a "more options" option
They actually backported this start menu to Windows RT which makes it even less sense considering Windows RT was mainly used on tablets and the start screen is better for these devices.
Because the brain is really weird, and tinnitus is often a completely internal neurological phenomenon.
The sound machine linked here was really helpful for me when I had some distressing tinnitus due to concerts several years ago. If I listened to this somewhat loudly for several minutes, I'd then get about 2-3 minutes of what felt like pure silence. And for a little while after that as the tinnitus came back, my brain interpreted it as a gentle white noise instead of a continuous high-frequency tone. Then it went back to the tone a little while later. So if I was having trouble sleeping due to hyperfocusing on the tone I'd first pop in some airpods and listen to this for a few mins.
Nowadays my tinnitus is much less bothersome. Probably a combination of objectively getting a little better, and me getting more acclimated to it. Plus I've been using good musician's ear plugs for all my concerts and raves since then which stopped it from getting worse.
I think the clear implication of the phrase "healthy aging" is a lower-than-average rate of deterioration with respect to increasing years on earth.
It's like, you actually can describe one of two burgers as "healthier" even though they're both unhealthy. One is just less harmful. It's a valid use of language.
Or the pure zsh version, which is superior, since it eliminates a ton of forking by eliminating calls to external tools (the original z script relies heavily on awk, sort, date, sed, mv, rm, and chown). There are also significant stability improvements to the database thanks to proper locking.
Oh man I forgot all about <frameset> and <frame> tags to create navigation. From the early days before we had dynamic sites or static site generators with templates, we had our browsers do our "templating" for us!
I had an original Kickstarter Pebble, a Pebble Time, and am probably ordering this new Pebble, but I have to say you have it the other way around. Apple Watch has 10x the functionality in this comparison, but they're both delightful devices and I'm excited to have a Pebble back in my rotation!
In early 2020 I used a Comma 2 on my Honda Civic for a few weeks.
It had one failure, but the way it failed was so alarming I'm hesitant to ever try them again. It not only failed while engaged, but it froze which meant it still showed the bright green outline indicating "I'm still engaged!" with no alert sounds, visual indication of disengagement, or automatic restart.
I only noticed something was off when my car started to drift outside the lanes during a curve, which took me longer to notice than necessary because it still looked engaged and it looked like a somewhat typical case of understeering until I started exiting the lane. It also never booted back on again, so something went seriously wrong during an otherwise routine drive.
Stock driver assistance systems (e.g. Rivian Driver+, Tesla Autopilot) have redundant computers it can fall back on if the primary fails. If Comma offered a self-contained device that was demonstrably redundant at a hardware level I'd be willing to give it another shot!
The specific screenshot they show is the very first start menu they cobbled together for Threshold, which would later be redesigned again before shipping as Windows 10. The screenshot is also showing off early adaptations of Windows 8 apps running in movable windows -- before that, they could only run full- or split-screen!
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