Thought I’d share a little story from today:
I was on a Zoom call with a few others, and suddenly the husband of this elderly couple proclaims that their computer ‘stopped working’.
There was, however, some evidence to suggest the contrary as they were still in the call with us.
After a while we realize what has gone wrong: The husband accidentally disabled Bluetooth. The keyboard and mouse were both connected via Bluetooth.
Was it a laptop, so he could use the built-in trackpad temporarily to enable Bluetooth? Nope.
Did they have a USB mouse around to use? Also no.
So now they literally have to go into town to get a USB mouse. We had a good laugh about that.
But it did make me wonder: The button to disable Bluetooth is easily accessibly in macOS on this iMac, and honestly this could have happened to anyone including myself.
So why doesn’t macOS warn the user before you disconnect all your peripherals?
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
I ran BeOS for a bit, and a fun feature was its CPU activity monitor app, which let you click a processor to remove or re-add it to the scheduler. It would let you turn off the last remaining processor, no problem - and instantly freeze the system.
BeOS was fun. Shame it didn’t survive long enough to make an impact.
Haiku is a modern clone/successor to BeOS and it’s still pretty fun and surprisingly usable for everyday tasks.