Hi

[cjgone]

I rediscovered some of the old forums I used to visit when I programmed my calculator! Good memories.

[benryves]

Hello cjgone. Glad to hear you're still around! Have you been up to anything interesting recently?

[cjgone]

Hey Ben, glad to see that you're still around as well! Now I'm curious on who else still lurks around these forums.

While I no longer program my calculator, I started coding in my free time again after a long hiatus where I only programmed for work.

These days, I've been mostly interested in web development which I started learning about 3 years ago. I'm currently working on a simple project for myself that allows me to search through and annotate the sleep data from my fitness tracker (example: filter days where I slept less than 5 hours). Frontend is in Typescript + React, backend is in NodeJS + Typescript. It has been fun and I've learned a lot!

My interests are somewhat sporadic though: I've been very curious about low level electronics lately and I'm hoping to finally get some time to finish reading about electricity & magnetism and a book on basic electronics/circuits that I never got a chance to learn about. I wrote quite a bit of z80 assembly back in the day, but never thought much about the underlying hardware.

[benryves]

A few people still check in here from time to time but I'd say Cemetech seems to be about the most active calculator-adjacent website these days.

That does sound fun and a useful and interesting project you've been spending time on.

I find having programming for work rather saps my energy for it at home, but at least my personal projects tend to be very different to my work ones (I do web development for work, though it's mostly PHP and JavaScript, so a bit more old-school). I do also find working on tangible, physical projects quite rewarding so having a few electronics projects ticking over in the background keeps me sane! Do you think you'll build something?

[currahee]

I think it's pretty sad that the community has essentially died out. I wonder why though? Sure we've all grown old and aged out, but you'd think there would be fresh blood.

Perhaps smartphones have taken over, and before that, graphing calculators filled that mobile hardware itch..

Ahhh I still fondly remember the day that alienhead and maxcoderz merged...

[DJ_O]

Nice to see old faces again! Actually what happened at one point around the late 2000s/early 2010s is that the community started shifting from one group of websites to another for multiple reasons including staff moving on to other life things. There were even two large website splits in the 2010s. Nowadays the vast majority of TI community projects and releases are on Cemetech and TI-Planet, especially for the TI-84 Plus CE, but mobile gaming and the shift away from decentralized forums to Reddit/Facebook/Discord platforms (with Google shadowbanning every decentralized forum from their search results over concerns about the quality of "user-generated" content versus curated content) sure had their toll.

There seems to be more and more calculator collectors, though, with some people owning 300+ calcs. https://my.calcs.quest/collectors