hi! At the time Rob and I were talking about rewiring the receipt printer so that it can retract and reprint, which would let you see the line you're currently typing and avoid using a screen. We never got around to it, but it might not be hard to do. I'm still thinking about the operating system aspect. Beyond speed and stuttering, maybe it has something to do with authenticity? It's an issue at all levels: even the arduino environment has hidden interrupts that have made my programs stutter. Dany On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 2:27 PM, Robert Ochshorn <****************> wrote: > +danyq [hi dany!] > > On Feb 17, 2016, at 12:55 AM, Toby Schachman <****************> wrote: > > Also, the "Slack in the World" idea is a mashup of two of RMO's projects: > the one where he put receipt printers on all the desks, and the Burning Man > one where he hooked the keyboard directly to the receipt printers. We > decided that one of the reasons the receipt printers on all the desks didn't > catch on was due to the screen interface to create new messages. Bret thinks > just having keyboards hooked up directly would work better. > > > Agreed! The typewriters were a big hit. Everyone wanted to type on them. > > Last night, I met with a very dear friend who was passing through Berlin. > He’s a postdoc researcher at the University of Cambridge, and wrote a full > TLS implementation in OCaml in a unikernel called MirageOS. Yesterday, he > told me that Mirage was now running on embedded devices, specifically, on a > thing I hadn’t heard of yet called the Cubieboard. It all sounds very > exciting: > > • The Desert Journalism typewriters were fun to program—Dany and I (mostly > Dany) had the euphoria of programming without an operating system. It feels > great! Things start up instantly and your program never stutters because > something else you don’t understand is happening. But: it also hugely limits > complexity. Unikernels seem to address this tradeoff very well. > > • Mirage is using the Cubieboard instead of the Raspberry Pi because the > former supports hardware virtualization interrupts. That’s fairly specific > reason, but it also looks like the Cubieboard supports OpenGL and lots more > things that the Pi doesn’t. I wonder what boot-times are for a unikernel on > the Cubieboard. > > I’d love to be in the loop re: room hardware investigations. > > -RMO