Dumb things being crowdfunded.
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@accalia And yet, as someone who backed Mighty Number 9 for $30, I feel like I got what I paid for from what is considered to be one of the largest Kickstarter failures of all time.
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@magus said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
I feel like I got what I paid for
That's what's important
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@hungrier said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
Music played through the earphones was supposed to change in pace and volume as the user’s heart raced during a workout.
Volume I can understand, but pace? Like it would speed up your music? Is this something anyone would want?
I'd like the ability for music to match my step rate seamlessly. I think it would be neat.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
I'd like the ability for music to match my step rate seamlessly. I think it would be neat.
Why not change your step rate to match your music?
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@dkf said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
@tsaukpaetra said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
I'd like the ability for music to match my step rate seamlessly. I think it would be neat.
Why not change your step rate to match your music?
Do you have any idea how hard it is to walk at 142 steps per minute??!?!?
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@dkf said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
Why not change your step rate to match your music?
Why not change your music to match your step rate? I keep meaning to make a "running late" playlist of all my fastest tunes, for when I need to walk somewhere quickly.
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@carrievs I think it'd be really, really hard for a set of earphones to naively try to digitally alter a stream of music to make it "faster", without making it sound like crap.
If the MP3 player is playing at 1x, the earphones can only play faster than that for so long before they run out of buffer space and have to wait. And trying to fill in gaps by finding loopable sections of music in order to burn time and wait for the stream to refill the buffer would be... really difficult, I'd think.
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@anotherusername said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
I think it'd be really, really hard for a set of earphones to naively try to digitally alter a stream of music to make it "faster", without making it sound like crap.
No I mean... pick a tune that's as fast as you want to go.
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@carrievs I know... and that'd be much easier than trying to digitally alter one that isn't.
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@anotherusername yeah... that's my point. You sound like you're trying to disagree but you're saying exactly the same thing, so I'm confused.
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@carrievs said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
I'm confused
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@anotherusername said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
@carrievs I know... and that'd be much easier than trying to digitally alter one that isn't.
But still far beyond the capabilities of bluetooth headphones.
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@carrievs said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
@anotherusername yeah... that's my point. You sound like you're trying to disagree but you're saying exactly the same thing, so I'm confused.
I'm trying to agree by saying very nearly the same thing, but not exactly.
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@hungrier said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
@anotherusername said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
@carrievs I know... and that'd be much easier than trying to digitally alter one that isn't.
But still far beyond the capabilities of bluetooth headphones.
I Dunno, from the weird pitch changes and awkward 280 ms delay it seems half the technology is already there...
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@hungrier said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
@anotherusername said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
@carrievs I know... and that'd be much easier than trying to digitally alter one that isn't.
But still far beyond the capabilities of bluetooth headphones.
Eh... not impossible, I think. IIRC, Bluetooth audio devices can get the track title, and can tell the player to skip to the next track. If they've never seen the track before, they could determine fairly easily how quick its tempo was after playing a little bit of it, and decide whether to skip it; after playing a track once, they could recognize it the next time it played, and could skip it before you'd even hear it start playing.
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@anotherusername I guess you could do something like that, but then the headphones would need to do that audio analysis and store the result, which would mean adding a significant amount of memory and processing capability, and greatly increasing power consumption. And all that just to do this hacky version that would kinda-sorta work by doing a linear search (and fail for e.g. free Spotify which limits the number of skips you can do)
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@hungrier also, why would you want the headphones to do this? This is what the player should be doing before it gets to the headphones.
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@anotherusername said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
@carrievs I think it'd be really, really hard for a set of earphones to naively try to digitally alter a stream of music to make it "faster", without making it sound like crap.
If the MP3 player is playing at 1x, the earphones can only play faster than that for so long before they run out of buffer space and have to wait. And trying to fill in gaps by finding loopable sections of music in order to burn time and wait for the stream to refill the buffer would be... really difficult, I'd think.
Yeah, like I said, generic music would be the way to go. Like, they'd need to make their own music to make this work as advertised.
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@boomzilla Slow news day, I take it?
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Coming soon:
I made the dadbag because I’m desperate to have dad bod but I’m also very concerned about the health risks associated with it. The solution is quite simple, a bumbag with a proper dad belly printed on it. Now I can put on a dad bod whenever I feel like it and even store my valuables in it.The Dadbag is currently not available to buy, but I’m on the lookout for partners and manufacturers to hopefully go into mass production soon.
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@polygeekery said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
but I’m also very concerned about the health risks associated with it.
HEALTH AT ANY SIZE *waves pitchfork*
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Not dumb so much as insanely over-priced, and it was already successfully crowdfunded, but:
https://www.ikawacoffee.com/ (warning, website not safe for slow network feeds or older CPUs)
Now, some time back (2014, when I was still employed and could pretend I was a something other than a piece of human detritus clogging up the Intarwebs - pretend being the operative word, but whatev') I looked into buying a coffee roaster. There were a lot of different models, ranging in price from $10 US for what was basically a covered frying pan, to $3000+ for a machine the size of a largish microwave oven. Most of the ones I focused on were around $150-250 on Amazon, and they were mostly pretty good sounding based on the reviews.
From time to time, I peek at the current prices and models, wistfully, knowing I will probably never be able to afford one.
Today, I happened across a video on YouTube about hot new coffee gadgets. It was from 2015, around the time the Ikawa was on Kickstarter, and it was one of the featured items.
https://youtu.be/hqDlwhFYm1g?t=2m44s
Looks nice. Features are comparable to the ones I liked previously. Good, solid industrial design, if a bit too en vogue not to come across as pandering. All in all, it sounds decent. I wonder if it got funded?
Ah, yes it did! So, what's the price?
clicky Sweet Lady Eris, this site is a fucking pig... how long does a fucking SPA advertising one product take to load? And... is that my fan turning on?
Finally, let me see...
£1200. That's what, $1600 US these days?
No. Fucking. Way. I've seen comparable roasters for a tenth of that price from established, reputable companies. Fuck No.
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https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/olly-the-first-home-robot-with-personality-innovation#/
OMG WTF no stop it stop it stop it!
A plastic circle with lights and a speaker do not a robot make!
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@tsaukpaetra said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/olly-the-first-home-robot-with-personality-innovation#/
OMG WTF no stop it stop it stop it!
A plastic circle with lights and a speaker do not a robot make!
Does it have a pain in all the diodes down its left side?
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@scholrlea said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
@tsaukpaetra said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/olly-the-first-home-robot-with-personality-innovation#/
OMG WTF no stop it stop it stop it!
A plastic circle with lights and a speaker do not a robot make!
Does it have a pain in all the diodes down its left side?
That looks like much more of an Eddie than a Marvin.
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@scholrlea said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
£1200. That's what, $1600 US these days?
No. Fucking. Way.The Juicero Thread is
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@tsaukpaetra ...why would anyone, outside of a developer, want to do such a thing?
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@polygeekery said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
@tsaukpaetra ...why would anyone, outside of a developer, want to do such a thing?
So your mom could slow down your porn watching so you blueball harder longer?
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@tsaukpaetra that's...fucking disturbing.
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@polygeekery said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
@tsaukpaetra that's...fucking disturbing.
I've read some weird shit, lemme tell you...
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@tsaukpaetra #no-fap
Filed Under: And if you believe that..
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@scholrlea said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
clicky Sweet Lady Eris, this site is a fucking pig... how long does a fucking SPA advertising one product take to load? And... is that my fan turning on?
Yup.
(the "finish" value is misleading: the site never actually finishes loading, so the value just indicates how long you've had it open)
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@polygeekery said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
@tsaukpaetra ...why would anyone, outside of a developer, want to do such a thing?
It's an interesting art project.
I don't think it's meant to be a functional product.
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@anonymous234 well, he certainly seems to be trying to sell it as a functional product.
If it could be produced cheaply I think it would be an interesting novelty to have something (it could even be a browser plugin or something) that would restrict the internet to 56K. Just to see temporarily what it is like without broadband.
Or you could live in @ben_lubar's neighborhood...
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@polygeekery said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
to have something (it could even be a browser plugin or something) that would restrict the internet to 56K. Just to see temporarily what it is like without broadband.
???
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@tsaukpaetra I hadn't thought of that when I posted.
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@polygeekery said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
@tsaukpaetra I hadn't thought of that when I posted.
Granted, it's in a advanced window not typically seen by most people in the wild unless they're intentionally looking for it, but it would be interesting to see if the functionality was available even if the developer window is closed...
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@tsaukpaetra I've never programmed a browser plugin. I wonder if you could just tie in to that functionality?
Add in some imagemagick to make all the photos grainy and pixelated and overlay some cheesy banner ads and you could duplicate NetZero also.
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@polygeekery said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
Add in some imagemagick to make all the photos grainy and pixelated and overlay some cheesy banner ads and you could duplicate NetZero also.
Hmm, now that should definitely be possible, actually!
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@tsaukpaetra really though, to make it seem like dial-up you would have to lazy load everything, with a delay and process each image and then stream each one in over 3-10 seconds.
You want to recreate the experience. Not just the bandwidth.
I have no idea how one would make money with such a thing, but I could see it going viral...for about a week.
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@djls45 said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
If global warming heats West Africa too much to grow cacao trees,
then places that were previously too cold would have become warm enough to support themno great loss.Sturgeon's Law applies to cacao, too, and that's where the 90% comes from.
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@polygeekery said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
@tsaukpaetra really though, to make it seem like dial-up you would have to lazy load everything, with a delay and process each image and then stream each one in over 3-10 seconds.
You want to recreate the experience. Not just the bandwidth.
I have no idea how one would make money with such a thing, but I could see it going viral...for about a week.
Make it a website. 800x600 iframe containing content proxied through your server and throttled at 56k6. Fill the rest of the page with ads.
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@hardwaregeek said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
@djls45 said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
If global warming heats West Africa too much to grow cacao trees,
then places that were previously too cold would have become warm enough to support themno great loss.Sturgeon's Law applies to cacao, too, and that's where the 90% comes from.
I assume you're joking, because seriously, that would be a massive misunderstanding of fault distribution and Sturgeon's Law itself if you really think that. Or is there a reason to think that West African cacao is generally inferior to, say, that from Mexico or Guatemala (which admittedly are where it is originally from)?
Also, if you think a piddly little thing like the quality of the beans matters, well, when was the last time you tried (for example) store-brand chocolate milk powder from a downscale grocery? The demand is high enough that all but the very worst cacao beans get used. Often in the same factories as some of the better ones, they just separate out the low-quality ones to be redirected to the off-brands.
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@scholrlea said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
Or is there a reason to think that West African cacao is generally inferior
https://www.amazon.com/Chocolate-Bittersweet-Saga-Dark-Light/dp/0865477302
The world's largest supplier is Côte d'Ivoire. There is a little good cacao that comes from there, but tons and tons of dreck, including, yes, beans that are literally rotten and moldy, and yes, they get used. (Chocolate Santa, anyone?)
The world's best, BTW, comes from a single village in Venezuela (whose name, sadly, escapes me; it's been something like a decade since I read the book) and the entire supply used to go to Valrhona, until some Italian upstart (Amadei) came along and either crassly outbid them or worked with the villagers, gave them development aid, and developed friendships with them, depending on whose version of the story you believe.
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@hardwaregeek Fair enough, I didn't know that. Still, if 90% of the cacao went away, even if the best were still around - no, especially if what was left was the best - the main result would be that real cacao would be more expensive than gold and most people would never see so much as a wafer thin mint with actual chocolate in it.
INB4: "So just like now, right?" Which is BS. Good-but-not-great quality chocolate isn't cheap, but there's enough that most people can afford it if they wanted to badly enough. "Most people", however, still think that Cadbury's is upscale, and have other priorities than candy, so they don't think to shell out for something more even when they can.
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Re-posting it here because this is the thread for it:
@zmaster said in Internet of shit:
Not IoT but still ridiculous...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/968338840/spooni-the-fan-operated-cooling-spoon
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@zmaster said in Internet of shit:
Not IoT but still ridiculous...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/968338840/spooni-the-fan-operated-cooling-spoonCan we stop the bacteria hysteria already?
(Of course we can't)
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