What Caught my Eye – Week Ending July 23, 2022

Each week I read through a crazy amount of content. Who knows what will catch my eye. Some times I may devote an entire post to something, other times it may just be little mind worms that either inspire me, make me mad or even laugh. You never know what I may put here. I have an eclectic collection of interests in life. Items are posted in no particular order, and I will provide the full link to the articles in case anyone is interested in checking them out.

TL;DR? This week we cover a quick set of links covering :

  1. Under the Scope: Intel’s new Graphics cards and architecture
  2. Mental Health Hotline: 988
  3. Byte me – I miss the curated conversations and focus
  4. Motobuild Delivered: A Curious George Hotrod
  5. What is Samsung Up to? A watch? A new phone? probably. But I like the puzzle more

Under the Scope: Intel’s new Graphics card and architecture

Tech was good, the Tech Talk was stellar.

Steve at Gamers Nexus had a great interview and deep engineering video on the new Intel Graphics cards and architecture this week. The show featured Intel Graphics Engineer (previously Nvidia) Tom Petersen. Some who follow Gamer’s Nexus may remember some previous interviews when Tom was at NVIDIA. The video is first rate not only on their new products but my favorite part was the real engineering discourse in the video. Usually companies embargo the crap out of their engineers and this open approach was fantastic. It was real. It was challenging. It was great. It definitely has me curious about the new ARC 700 series stuff.

Mental Health Hotline: 988

No links to click on for this one. I just wanted to bring attention to the new 988 hotline launched here in the United States this week. Similar to 911 or 999 Emergency dial numbers, this number is an emergency line for mental health issues. I truly believe that the mental health crisis is truly at the root of many of our societal issues, challenges, and problems. More parochially here in the United States it is viewed with such negativity that people just suffer in silence until they cannot take it any more and lash out. Either at themselves or others. I just wanted to bring attention to it here in the hopes that maybe someday, someone, even if just one person sees it and takes the first step for self-help.

Byte me – I miss the curated conversations and focus

In my internet explorations I came across this golden online nugget. The August 1980 edition of Byte magazine. I am not going to lie. I spent a good bit of time reading through the magazine with the eyes of someone more mature in their career. Back then, I would read these magazines cover to cover. I probably only understood about 10% of the topics to be honest, but it was aspirational for me back then. I then reflected on curated nature of a lot of these topics. There were other go-to’s for me as well. Like Dr. Dobbs Journal and others. These kinds of curated experiences were great to learn from. Nothing against the Stack Overflow, and more tactically focused solutions of today – but these formats (even the advertising) opened my mind to what was truly out there from a technology perspective. I would read each magazine for weeks. Taking it slow. It still took me quite a bit of time to read through this throw-back as well. More like lost in my memories.

MotoBuild Delivered: A curious George hotrod

I had gotten quite a few direct messages about the Motobuild that I did for my nephew. Happy to inform everyone that it was delivered this past weekend to the little guy. It did not take long for him to master the machine. Despite loading some good age-appropriate games the number one use case was watching Curious George videos online. And as is the nature of those of that age, they did so in an almost infinite amount of back to back plays. Still – he was stoked about the computer and according to my sister he has been on it every morning since. Thankfully she has the good motherly-sense to kick him off the device and tell him to go play outside. Everything in Balance.

What is Samsung Up to? A new phone? A watch? Probably. But I liked the puzzle more.

I have no idea what Samsung is up to but I have loved following along with the little puzzle game they have been playing. I wont send you to all of the guerilla posts, but The Verge had a good post summarizing the clever little marketing scheme. I really like stuff like this. A few years ago this kind of thing was done for everything from product announcements to hiring and identifying the right kind of candidates. This is the kind of stuff that makes me smile. My favorite was one involved solving a Sudoku puzzle, then a crossword puzzle to derive a cypher which was then used to figure out the coding embedded in the Sudoku. Just a clever little time waster – or as I call them – Plane puzzles. Puzzles on Planes to solve. Much better than Snakes on a plane.

3 thoughts on “What Caught my Eye – Week Ending July 23, 2022

  1. Mike,

    Thank you for posting info about 988. It is such an important and under discussed topic. I do believe that remote work, especially for recent graduates, has contributed to isolation and mental health issues. Can’t fix something that you don’t talk about! Thanks for highlighting this.

    1. Hallie – I forgot to take a picture of the little guy on his new computer. You can see pics of the ‘hot rod’ in my previous post about the MotoBuild. 🙂

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