Re: Welcome back!

John <john@building-m.simplistic-anti-spam-measure.net> writes:

Nice! I'm going to take partial credit for this, as I had emailed the
Big-8 MB some time back about finding a new moderator. Glad we got you
back, instead!

Oh, you definitely get credit! You are presumably the person they
mentioned when they reached out to me.

There was an episode of Scientific American Frontiers years back which
showed Steve Mann's students using their wearables (wired Twiddlers,
hacked camcorder viewfinders) and it made an impression on my youthful
brain, but it's only recently that all the right tech has been available
off the shelf.

Yeah, it was a pain to do any of this back in the day. Reading data
sheets without much context, ordering things, waiting, hoping you could
get them to work the way you wanted … all of those steps seem at least
way faster now.

I've been fiddling on and off over the last year or so with a very
traditional wearable computer: head-mounted monocular display, Twiddler
3 chording keyset, Raspberry Pi 4 running on battery power. The whole
thing is woven through a cheap vest, with the battery in one pocket, Pi
in another pocket, cables run through the lining, etc.

I haven’t had a non-mass-produced wearable in forever. I would love to
put one together again … and yeah, a Raspberry Pi would be much nicer to carry
than the PC/104 half-cube I used to have.

In this time I've seen a big surge in wearables *without* a display
component. Cameras and voice commands are the big thing
now.

Something discussed in the heyday of this group was single motor-unit
input devices. E.g., training conscious control of say a dozen
individual motor neurons, and then using surface electrodes to read them
as a hands- and voice-free input device. I explored that path a bit, but
kept hoping some company would just get around to it. AFAIK, it never happened.

Glad to see you here, John, and sorry it took me so long to reply … I
had a minor PGP configuration issue that prevented me from posting and
just took a while for that to get to the top of my stack.