I love this idea as I grew up with ancient dial up phones, and I miss actually holding a handset and dialing a number to make calls. However, gen alpha has grown up in completely digital era, and most interaction occurs on FaceTime (or other video chat), and I don't think we can ever go back even if we wanted to. My kids' grandparents WANT to see their precious little grandkids so we always use video calls, if it involves kids and grandparents.

I, on the other hand, want this to communicate with friends who want to do the same.

see TinCan phone mentioned in the comments, which does this. However, it means that all their friends need to buy the phone as well.

Ah - wonderful. I didn't know what that was. Sadly it's only US and Canada, but very cool to see someone's thinking about this.

Exercise "simulate the arduous tasks that were once necessary to make it through a life" makes sense, as most of our ancestors were blue-collar workers and farmers. I try to integrate more physical activity in my life, which seemed like labor before, but now feels like life-saving activity. For example, I am intentionally trying to fix/diy things with my house like painting my garage, mowing my lawn instead of hiring someone else to do it, and even learning woodworking and gardening. Even in the heat of the summer, I feel more invigorated working outdoor whenever I can, and helps offset the sluggishness I feel after a day of sitting, coding, and staring at the monitors at work.

The human body didn't evolve to do farm work, or mow lawns, or more generally to do "blue collar" work. Also, our ancestors weren't known for their exceptional lifespans.

30-60 minutes pushing a lawn mower is good low-impact exercise. Riding around on a lawn tractor with a beer, not so much.

Ah yes, the evolutionary pressure of being a blue-collar worker.

I'd probably run cmatrix for looks or maybe htop on the background. Also, Rick-rolled in the screenshot.

This is straight out of the movie "Her", when OS1 said something like this. And the voice and the intonation is eerily similar to Scarlett Johansson. As soon as I heard this clip, I knew it was meant to mimic that.

Wow, it can integrate with exiftool. I use exiftool to rename photo files, but I think f2 offers more flexible renaming features.

the website hasn't been tested on windows vista, sorry

I'm sad to see it end like this. About 20 years ago, I used to go to this Burbank Fry's after work whenever I could and spend hours just browsing. They had this cool 50's sci-fi alien/ufo movie theme inside. Another favorite is the Fry's in Anaheim where I got pc parts to build my first 486 PC in the early 90's. So many memories. I remember buying my first laptop ever, a monochrome thinkpad with personal check (as my credit card limit was too low) and having to call bank to verify my balance; also the day that I bought a Pentium CPU when it first came out, and the time when I got the boxed Windows 95 OS. Those were the days.

on top of the selection, the experience of going there is something that doesn't exist anymore: it was just packed with people. i remember more than once deciding to forego a purchase because of the line of people waiting to check out. all those fellow nerds, just wandering the aisles...

those were indeed the days.

Similar... spent hours and hours at the one in Canoga Park during the 90s. (Sometimes DAK too.) Believe it had an "alice in wonderland" theme. Can't even remember what I bought but even perused the magazine section while there.

Oh wait, I do remember buying a 20? foot long (several meter) orange crossover ethernet cable! Then I punched a hole thru the drywall in my apartment and connected my two PCs. One of which had dialup internet, so I could access it and my .mp3s from the other. Pre-wifi by about 5-10 years. :-D

Canoga Park was indeed Alice in Wonderland themed. That was my Fry's too. When the closed down they actioned off all of the Alice themed items inside.

I came this close to buying a 15ft tall Queen of Hearts.

Ha, always thought you were from up north.

Grew up in LA, came to Berkeley for college at 18, have been in the bay ever since!

I got Atari 5200 when I was a kid, and the disappointment was immense, considering the marketing and hype that went into it. The controller made playing games very difficult. And the games were pretty bad as well. Later, I got a Commodore 64 and then also NES, which just revolutionized home gaming in general.

I bought a PowerMac G3 (from ebay, about 15 years ago) and while it was not very powerful, the thing was just fun to work with. I ran Linux and had added all kinds of PCI cards like old analog TV tuner card and SATA RAID card to run it as NAS. And the case was very beautiful. I'm not sure how they did it, but Apple and Steve Jobs made plastic look very pleasing to the eyes. Afterward, I also saw someone's PowerMac G4 in person and that thing looked incredibly nice, especially the mirror finish. These macs looked better in real life than in photos. I never got the G4, and I wish I still had that G3.

Beige tower, desktop, or the blue and white tower? I always wanted a B&W G3, my friend('s parents) had one and it was a beautiful machine. I had the desktop "beige G3" and I ran it for a long time. Added a 433MHz G4 accelerator, overclocked the bus/memory, ran some software to allow me to use later versions of OS X, installed a radeon 9100 (I think it was) GPU that I flashed to make it run on mac hardware. It was my main machine in the early 2000s, up until I built a core duo machine to run linux. I have very fond memories of Macs of that era.