4.10:

You may not monetize built-in capabilities provided by the hardware or operating system, such as Push Notifications, the camera, or the gyroscope; or Apple services and technologies, such as Apple Music access, iCloud storage, or Screen Time APIs.

I have a spare e-ink display and my next weekend project to follow onto this is to wire it up so it shows some faux "woodcut" images of birds detected, or something like that.

iPhones have it worldwide, so a visitor to Japan can use Apple Pay to stand up a card and fund it.

Applied Biosystems Sanger capillary machines (the 37XX series) had polymers that were injected into the capillaries to reflow between runs (the polymer took the place of the physical slab of gel). The capillaries themselves were also consumable and would wear out after so many runs. They were extremely expensive even 20-30 years ago when these were state of the art. You also need the dideoxy dye terminators you read about in the article. The patents on BigDye are expired now (the patents were ABI's principal moat on the Sanger tech and they aggressively used it against competitors like MegaBACE) but it's not like that's a growth market for a vendor trying to make a generic replacement.

Similar with the 454 -- the process would fragment up the DNA into lots of tiny shards, and bind the fragments to microscopic beads. There was a physical flow cell chip that you would flow the beads onto. The chip had microscopic "beehive" cells to hold the beads such that you had a vast array of miniature test tubes running reactions in parallel while the machine imaged the result. These chips were one and done after every sequencer run, and were precision manufactured. They were manufactured by fusing together a bundle of fiber optics and then slicing it like bread, such that you had a glass chip and the space between the fibers became the cells. You'd need the beads, the chips, and the reagents to produce the reactions the machine is looking for.

Without all the reagents and physical necessities these machines are just some really fancy cameras with onboard lasers.

Long story short it's fun to think about getting one of these machines, but unless you use it as a cool looking coffee table that appeals to graying molecular biologists, you're going to be disappointed.

I came upon a spare Touch ID keyboard. I just got Command strips and adhered the whole keyboard to the underside of my desk. USB cable is clipped to the desk and goes to my dock. I've got the fingerprint reader right next to my standing desk controls so it's really convenient, and I still get to use my Keychron as my keyboard. The low profile of the Apple keyboard means it doesn't get in the way.

Also every time I need to unlock my Mac or sudo I get to feel like I'm tripping the silent alarm at the bank.

The rest of our shop was Solaris on SPARC/x86 and we had our own custom tool chain that crunched the data, but the sequencer itself was run by a Mac.

From 1999 or so forward the next generation of machines were Windows.

Earlier this spring we put a bird feeder outside the front door and it dawned on me I could be piping the doorbell cam into BirdNET to classify the bird calls. With an RTSP stream there's no need to mount a microphone anywhere, that comes for free from the doorbell.

My wife is the bird person in the house more so than I am, but it was still really fun to set up and watch the identifications come across.

This was also before ewaste regulations came in and some engineering school departments would just throw decommissioned hardware out on the loading dock for people to pick over. One day a pile of SPARCstations showed up and my roommates and I grabbed them all.

We put together two working SS-5s by picking and pulling parts from about eight of them. Had our own mini Sun lab in our living room so we didn't have to go out in the snow and try to stake out an open machine in the engineering computing center.

I similarly had my mind blown reading an article last week, about how sports & game card collectors are now having their packs CT scanned so they can identify what cards are inside (and the value of the pack) while keeping them sealed.

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5987857/2024/12/12/trading-...

I built a Prusa MK4 this spring; it calibrated itself and printed a great looking piece right from the get-go. The difference is night and day.

We'd discovered dry ice bombs alongside internet plans for potato cannons, and in our infinite wisdom we tried to build a dry ice bomb powered potato cannon. In our mind the sudden increase of air pressure would've sent the payload going ridiculously far.

Thankfully when we went to use it the first time, we were smart enough to run as far as we could before it went off. It was far far more pressure than the pipe could handle and it sent little bits of PVC shrapnel flying everywhere.