Back the mid 90s at secondary school, a friend came back from holiday with a Casio CMD-40 TV remote control watch. It was like magic, no one had never seen anything like it before.

We pranked our history teacher so badly, changing the channels, volume and turning the TV off while we were supposed to be watching some video on Henry VIII or something (no idea, too busy PMSL).

We'd pass the watch round the class to keep em guessing.

In the end, school replaced ALL the TVs and were seriously pissed off, to this day I believe they had no idea it was us!

Dad handed over this beast to me
Casio PB-100
RAM: 1KB
ROM: 10KB
CPU: 455KHz
Display: 12 characters Monochrome

It's hard to believe that someone used this to code back in those days. Suppose to have been one of the first personal handheld computers. And people here complain about having 32gb RAM with 8 cores shame on you all

Rant about a german problem in english

I think we as the people should just sue the german government for neglect of progress and neglect of the education system. If your not familiar with the state of german IT we have worse internetspeeds than uganda or the notoriously shitty australia, our neighbourstates look at us in disbelief while laughing in optic fibre. Our school system seperates all students after 4th grade in 3 tiers, the lowest one gives you the future perspective as a social security case. The second and highest tier require masses of useless knowledge, so called "competences"(Kompetenzen) which are totally useless skills with no real world application because they are derived from real skills, a median ground between all possible applications of that skill. And while doing that they terribly insist on doing everything the "proper" way, meaning handwritten. Most people you would expect to have basic computer literacy, meaning age 40 and below, are incapable of using basic functions of a non-smartphone computer and do not understand the slightest of what they are actually doing or supposed to do. And I mean nothing technical. Germans are the reasons they still put word as a job requirement for devjobs because this disqualifies half of our population. This leads to many people having the archaeic "we versus the machines" mentality, thinking that if they ever let the computer do parts of the job, they will then lose all of it to the machines. Thats why you never strive past basic mathematical principles in mathematics, which is a big misnomer because you never do actual mathematics, only calculating and basic calculus and statics. If you get to use your calculator, its some basic casio with no actual functionality then standard operations. And even using that is shunned upon. How is this country ever supposed to become something more than it was in the 90's, if we teach people nothing of use and kill all progress in its root.

Step 1: Run to the store to buy a USB card reader because all of a sudden you have a need to use a 16Mb CF card that was tossed in a junk drawer for 20 years (hoping it still works, of course), but that was the easy part...

Step 2: Realize that the apps - your own - you want to run on your new (old) Casio E-125 PocketPC (to re-live "glory" days) are compiled in ARM format, not MIPS, which is the CPU this device uses, and the installer packages you have FOR YOUR OWN APPS don't include MIPS, only ARM (WHY DID I DO THAT?!), so, the saga REALLY begins...

Step 3: Get a 20-year old OS to install in a Hyper-V VM... find out that basic things like networking don't work by default because the OS is so damn old, so spend hours solving that and other issues to get it to basically run well enough to...

Step 4: Get that OS updated so that it's at least kind/sorta/maybe (but between you and me, not really!) safe online, all without a browser that will work on ANY modern site (oh, and good luck finding a version of Firefox that runs on it - that all took a few hours)...

Step 5: Okay, OS is ready to go, now get 20-year old dev tools that you haven't even seen in that many years working. Oh, do this with a missing CD key and ISO's that weren't archived in a format that's usable today, plus a bunch of missing dependencies because the OS is, again, SO old (a few MORE hours)...

Step 6: Get 20-year old code written in a language you haven't used in probably almost that long to compile, dealing with pathing issues, missing libs, and several other issues, all the while trying to dust off long-dormant knowledge somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of your brain... surprisingly, it all came back to me, more or less, in under an hour, which lead to...

Step 7: FINALLY get it all to work, FINALLY get the code to compile, FINALLY get it transferred to the device (which has no network capabilities, by the way, which is where the card reader and CF card came into play) and re-live the glory of your old, crappy PocketPC apps and games running on the real thing! WOO-HOO!

Step 8: Realize it's 3:30am by the time that's all done and be VERY thankful that you're on vacation this week or work tomorrow would SSUUCCKK!!!!

Step 9. Get called into work the next day for a production issue despite being tired from the night before and an afternoon of errands, lose basically a whole day of vacation (7 hours spent on it) and not actually resolve it by after midnight when you finally say that's enough :(

Talk about your highs and your lows.

I confess that I know how to manage memory on assembly language, but I never knew how to use the memory button of my Casio calculator :'v Should I be ashamed?

developing add-ons for Casio calculators is definitely the best experience. No syntax or error highlighting. Average failed builds between successful builds: 12 🤔
I won't mention the default font for the code editors in there is Arial...

!rant
My mother got me a programmagle calculator this year for christmas, a Casio fx9750gII. Needless to say I'm already hooked. Casio BASIC might not be the best language I've ever used, and working with string is pretty much impossible but I'm actually having real fun. Hopefully I'll finish my snake code by this week (will update with pics :P).

Customer is not always right :(

What on earth are some developers thinking. Was just browsing the Casio website, using Chrome and noticed the following message. How hard is it to display a message when actually needed, instead of all the time. Good watches, poor development :/

!!!rant

Having lost my watch recently (a small swatch thingy), I'm in the market for a new one. While I can get by without a watch perfectly well by simply checking my phone for the time, I was thinking of getting a smartwatch at some point. Is it worth getting a smartwatch just yet, or should I wait and get a cheap Casio until better smartwatches are available? (I have a Moto G.) If it's worth it, clearly this weekend is a good time to buy, as some pebbles are half price and the Moto 360 is slightly reduced.