Ads are the best thing about old computer magazines. These are from the August 1979 issue of the BYTE magazine about LISP.

At the time those computers were considered powerful, or at least capable, and now, 40 years later, we buy chips with similar specs wholesale for $1 or $2 to power some kind of IoT device, and they’re considered severely underpowered for any real embedded work. Our WiZ Wi-Fi connected lamps use a chip with similar specs, an ESP8266, made popular because of a free RTOS and low price, but even that has 96 KB RAM, a 50% increase.

High end servers have RAM in the terabytes, a hundred million percent increase from these 1978 chips.

What I wonder, looking at the present-day magazine ads, praising laptops to be thin, light, and powerful, is just how peddling, thick and underpowered they will seem in forty years’ time. Even more suprising is that we do feel they are genuinely light (just under one kilo!) and thin (just 9 mm thick!), exactly the same as we felt about laptops of ten years ago, which have been twice as thick and twice as heavy.

The only constant thing about consumer computers is that a good one always costs $2000.

It’s a faux pas to write on your blog about how long you haven’t written on the blog. I wonder who taught me manners.

Last time when I stopped publishing for a while was when I took on a new job at Ungert Design. This time it’s a new job too, and the break stretched for a year and a half.

Work hasn’t become boring, on the contrary, working on WiZ brings some challenges that are worth spending time to solve. It’s just time to write again.

I have much to share, I haven’t been not writing all this time, it was just not public.

One of the things I practise often is writing down app ideas. If you have your eyes open, there are a lot of them. And I wrote down a lot of them too, the list is now more than a hundred. I have a separate list for apps, but I also write down more general product ideas. Some projects aren’t worth a second look, some keep me thinking for months.

I thought that I could share the ideas on the blog as I’m having them, and some of the better ones from the backlog.

The first one is posted, and more will follow under the tag Product Ideas.

Sometimes, when you’re on the go, you just want a smaller photo. Your cell signal isn’t very strong, you want to snap and share something unimportant and delete the photo afterwards, or you don’t want people on the internet to read notes scattered on your table that you shared on your social network of choice, or maybe you’re abroad and want to conserve bandwidth on your tourist SIM card.

iOS will let you resize a photo only when you’re sending an email, but don’t we share photos on messengers much more often? You can also start an editor, load the photo in it and resize manually to a specific size, then save it to the Camera Roll, go back to Photos.app and share it from there. Sounds a bit tedious.

Low Res Photo is an app with just four buttons: Snap, Select, Save, Share. Yes, “choose” is better, but I want my extra S!

Snap a photo or Select it from the library. Save the smaller version of the selected image or Share its resized version.

There are no size or ratio or scale controls. The image is resized to be 800 px on its largest size, or not resized if it’s smaller than that.