I have 2 of these (their campaign manager payment service was confusing, and I accidentally bought a second one).
For me, it is very disappointing.
The screen is _very_ small and most people won't be able to read this from a shelf. The only place this is appropriate is next to you on your work desk, but personally, I prefer a desk free from decoration.
It takes a lot of effort to read a quote, and they're usually disappointing.
The quotes are banal without context. It is a thrill when you recognize a quote from a book you know, but it rarely happens.
The wood is thin and plasticky, the brass knob is too sharp-edged and feels unfinished. There's a gap all around the bezel. It runs out of charge quickly, the interface is much slower than is comfortable.
I'm really sad to say, I can't think of anything good about it. I accidentally bought two, and decided not to cancel the second so I could offer it as a prize in my club. But now I won't inflict that disappointment on someone else, and it is still in the box.
To be honest, the wood feels plasticky and the knob feels unfinished. There's also a significant gap between the wood and the bezel. The screen is too small, and battery life is poor. It looks like a premium product, but it doesn't feel like one. I have one, and if it broke I wouldn't pay more than $20 for a replacement.
That's sad. I haven't seen on in real life, just the pics on their website (although I did find out yesterday a friend bought one in their original kickstarter, so I'll be able to hold one soon.)
I do have a bid in on a spare Kindle and plan to make my own though. I really like the _idea_ of it.
Nowadays, I think the opposite. I feel a pang of jealousy and regret when I load a page from before CSS Zen Garden that uses tables for layouts. It still exists and works perfectly. I love how I can automatically date it in my mind, like period furniture or buildings. Unlike the thousands of pages that I made at the time, which are either gone or broken. I yearn for the html files that I lovingly handcrafted as unique pages. I destroyed them myself so that they could use a one-size-fits-all CSS solution. And they could in turn destroy each other with each new site redesign. If I ever get back on the indieweb, I'll be creating each page as a single file and allowing them to age gracefully.
I used to do web dev during the tables-as-layout days. I don’t miss them a little bit. For one, Netscape wouldn’t render anything if the table tag wasn’t closed, and still nothing regardless until it did hit the end tag. And that’s to say nothing of the dodgy layout quirks they had. No thanks.
They work now though. Do you remember all the CSS hacks? All those pages are broken today.
I'm not saying it's better, I'm just saying that I have a lot of regrets about jumping too hard on the bandwagon with a lack of critical thinking, and if I'm honest, evangelism.
I think, in structural engineering terms, it refers to old natural stone wall [0] construction methods. Some bridges around me are made like this, and they're over a thousand years old.
But I agree that it's not a good adjective because I had the exact same first thought. Both "natural" and "stonewall" would be better, and they're not great names either.
I associate masonry with the old ages, since this is one of the technologies you research in Civ games and back then I think people did have stones in non-standardized shapes and were just trying to fit things together. I'm not native English speaker, so I first heard this term from the games.
There's no gravity here, so the comparison makes no sense. In walls masonry construction produces sheer lines horizontally, an axis gravity is not bearing upon. This feels like taking the metaphor just a tad too literally.
I didn't think so, of you look at old stone walls, there's an absence of continuous horizontal or vertical patterns. (However the discussion was a fork, about wall building, so it was quite literal)
"Dry stack" is another term for that, a stone wall without mortar.
In my opinion, thinking of this as a grid is misguided. It's barely different than flex columns. I would want to be able to have some objects take up more width than one column, or not have clean columns at all. Like "space filling" and "mosaic".
From what I understand of Svelte, it was built by a working data journalist with the dream of enabling these type of rich media articles. So yeah, 'emergent' and 'uncontrived' are in the DNA of this article and the tech beneath it.
It's not a career, it's more like being in a band. Everyone who is visible doing it, looks like a success. We don't see the 1000 failures.
My advice with all creative pursuits is: don't. Put it to one side and create the next one. If it keeps nagging at you despite your attempts to leave it behind, then you can give it some attention. Only go all-in when you're left with no other choice.
I saw Tim Schafer at Double-Fine express similar thoughts about their Amnesia Fortnight game jams. Even if an idea seems great; don't force yourself to pursue it, take a step back and see if it pursues you.
