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Re: Welcome back!

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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.

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Welcome back! Greg Pfeil <greg@technomadic.org> - 2025-02-22 18:13 -0500
  Re: Welcome back! John <john@building-m.simplistic-anti-spam-measure.net> - 2025-02-24 16:44 -0500
    Re: Welcome back! Greg Pfeil <greg@technomadic.org> - 2025-06-12 15:55 -0400

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