Thanks! My first thought was, y'know, funny video, but "how did they build a working keyboard that a 600 pound animal could stand on on a tourism video budget" was second.
I can confirm that the keyboard was fully functional except for keys not producing character output. RaspberryPi with short-to-ground sensor under each key (so the keyboard would work as a mat with the keys removed if the horses didn't like them [as referenced in the BTS video]), running on batteries, making this the world's largest wireless keyboard. Measured 5 by 1.8m with the smallest keys being a beefy 29 x 28cm.
Source: Wife's uncle did the electronics and software for it.
Go in summer if you want to ride, though. Ask me how I know that October will freeze your fingers off
I'd 100% recommend visiting Iceland in October in general. It's a lot less busy around attractions and the sea climate makes it not that cold (the main challenge usually is breaking the wind). Walking/driving around is absolutely no problem, and outdoors swimming is also fine because the pools are heated geothermally. Heck, glacier hiking wasn't a cold experience at all with fairly regular winter clothing (keep an optional rain layer in your backpack for the unpredictable weather though). There has been only one activity where the icey wind got the better of me despite adequate clothing (I don't know what more I could have put on, the only solution I see is electric heating or walking parts of the way to warm up).
If you go, take at least a full week excluding travel days and 'cheap campervans' was by far the best deal that I found for a vehicle (seemed almost too good to be true but everything was as advertised and the people super friendly).
The experience taught me a thing or two about weather at home as well. I don't like raincoat material so I never had rainproof clothes. Now it was kind of essential to prepare for that and I found there are more plasticy pants and jackets as well that are no problem. Layering and wind breaking is how one stays warm beyond staying dry. In the future I'm going to be enjoying the outdoors more during winters at home :)
If you can forgive the self-promotion, I wrote a "things I wish I'd known" post about visiting Iceland which might be of interest to anyone planning a trip there: https://blackshaw.substack.com/p/iceland
A correction to "Unless you have a 4x4 it’s illegal to drive on certain mountain roads":
Legally you can drive on whatever road you'd like in whatever vehicle you'd like, but coverage in case something goes wrong is probably not included in your rental company's coverage. The "4x4 only" signs you referred to are meant to discourage tourists who don't know any better.
Depending on the road, weather, your driving skills etc. you'll easily be able to traverse certain "4x4 only" roads even in a VW Golf. The trick is knowing which roads those are, and accounting for the tiny stream you passed on the way in potentially having turned into a river due to rains or snowmelt since you drove in.
> We booked a hostel in Reykjavik for the whole trip. This was, without a doubt, the biggest mistake we made. It would have been a much better idea to drive around the whole island staying in a different place each night. (Iceland’s main highway goes around the edge of the country in a loop.)
This is what my wife and I did a couple of years ago and I highly recommend it. It took us 5 days to circumnavigate the country.
Every once in a while I must succumb my natural aversion towards marketers and give a tip of the hat. This is definitely one of them. Absolutely brilliant and creative thinking!
Only now learned that FB has videos about the ‘metaverse’. I'm five minutes into FB's video, and it feels like a recreation of both late-80s' explainer infomercials and early-90s' pop hallucinations about the computerized future. I bet FB regret that they can't sell awkwardness directly, because they have tons of it.
I'll have to take breaks to watch the Icelandverse vid every ten minutes, to get through 1h17m of Zuck and kitsch 3D. “You can bring things from the physical world: photos, videos, art, music, movies, books, games” ooof man.
Although the article's content is way more fun, when I initially saw the title I thought the article was going to be about a phishing email somebody had received with bad spelling/grammar.
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by streaming from /dev/urandom, mapping to cardinal directions and simulating a random walk on the keyboard.
2. It doesn't actually replace an email autoresponder. Most people I know will put things like their return date in the auto-response.
3. It does not seem very "scalable" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but it seems that down the road this may require a lot of horses.
Your solution sounds good, but at which point do I integrate it with my FTP account? I have it mounted locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem
>it seems that down the road this may require a lot of horses.
And you apparently need to train every horse to actually write emails, so it also requires humans to train the horses. How many horses can an Icelandic horse trainer train in a month?
And do we know if all horses can even learn to write emails? What if it requires very smart horses? How many horses are there in Iceland and how many of them are email-grade horses?
> And do we know if all horses can even learn to write emails? What if it requires very smart horses? How many horses are there in Iceland and how many of them are email-grade horses?
Well...
A horse is a horse - of course, of course - and no one can talk to a horse of course. That is, of course, unless the horse is the famous Mr. Ed.
Someone was trying to knock cperciva down a peg or two as he was boasting about something higher up in the thread. The comment being something to the effect of, “have you won a Putnam? If not, stop talking.” The Putnam is an undergraduate mathematics competition. It’s prestigious to win.
Colin was a Putnam fellow (top 5 scorers) in 1999.
All in all, it was a pretty funny exchange at the time and quickly stopped the argument. Don’t assume that the person you’re talking with here is an idiot. It really demonstrates how HN users are varied with significant expertise in many areas.
I actually preferred MiniDisc through the portable music player era. I didn’t stop using my MiniDisc player until iPhone 4, as my phone storage was suddenly sufficient to carry a good portion of my library.
The first iPods were pretty crappy from a functional standpoint. There were other mp3 players which were more full-featured, and the early iPods crashed a lot.
It's their aesthetic design which sold people on them. That's what Slashdot did not understand.
The scalability depends on the typing speed of the horse, which of course
is limited by how much they are carrying.
An unladen horse can clearly type faster than one weighed down with for example coconuts, and we must not forget the span between the shift key and the number row. This is a very large keyboard for native Icelandic horses, and while the European breed might make the span, the African variety can easily get those awkward two hoof symbols.
All in all it is clear that the Icelandic government must give immigration privileges to unladen African horses immediately to prevent this startup industry going under.
The poster seems to be trying to draw a parallel between his comment and an infamous post that he made nearly 15 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224), or maybe just to make him feel bad. I personally don’t think the tones of the two posts are comparable at all. His post has been quoted out of context for the last decade or so, though, so it’s not surprising to me. (Ask yourself, what did “app” mean in his comment?)
Several people seem to expect that he would be embarrassed by my comment or regret making it, but it honestly doesn’t bother him at all. I, HN, and even the world have changed a lot in 15 years.
Anyway, he's pretty satisfied with where life has taken him. He's certainly not going to sweat someone combing through his post history in a vague attempt to dunk on him.
Jeez, I loved working in the tourism industry. One day I'll get back into it :).
It's incredible how visiteiceland/norway/etc have refined and eliminated a lot of cruft in their website while still keeping up the appearance of professionalism and non-corp design. There are a lot subtleties in this website s design.
Typical. Here we are trying to outsource our work to foreign horses. It's all fun and games until the wheel stops spinning and we realize there are no typing jobs left for honest American horses, leaving our own ponies penniless.
But, here in America, our horses only want to carry guns and drive big trucks...and, well, hang out with cowboys. Not so sure that they even want to work! /s :-)
An EQUINE layout sounds like taking Dvorak to an extreme. E is the most common letter in English? Let's give the keyboard two of them! I'm half-tempted to mock up up such a layout just for giggles. It'd be a handy layout for dolphin.town, especially.
I'm running this to its ridiculous extreme. I'm imagining a keyboard layout that has duplicate keys matching letter frequency. The keyboard has to have 56 Es just to be allowed a Q. About 35 or so Ts. Etc.
The odds favor you getting the key you want, so it's best to not even look.
That could certainly put a Quine in EQUINE. Mash the keyboard all at once to get a frequency chart that resembles the keyboard. That's your new keyboard.
I would go for the same idea, but with cats in a shelter. Every time an email arrives, a treat is delivered to the cat horde and the resulting commotion is filmed and a linked delivered to the sender, with a caption like: "We want MOAR!!" etc.
With a few hundred dollars on hardware you can generate thousand of hours of quality video content, much more entertaining than a random keyboard press.
No offense, but horses are clearly less, shall we say, intellectually gifted to handle the subtleties of digital social interaction in the cat age. Horses are plain boring, yesteryear's thing, wouldn't want one in the apartment of my owner.
I think you're better off with the cat, they seem to be lighter on the keys, while you can see in the video that the horses, small as they are, are doing a number on they keys.
The video is funny-ish but it doesn't do justice to how cool Iceland is. I really enjoyed my time there. Would highly recommend. Felt like you could aim your camera in a random direction outdoors and it would take a beautiful photo.
134 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadAlright, fine, but where's the API?
Source: Wife's uncle did the electronics and software for it.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/16/iceland-...
I'd 100% recommend visiting Iceland in October in general. It's a lot less busy around attractions and the sea climate makes it not that cold (the main challenge usually is breaking the wind). Walking/driving around is absolutely no problem, and outdoors swimming is also fine because the pools are heated geothermally. Heck, glacier hiking wasn't a cold experience at all with fairly regular winter clothing (keep an optional rain layer in your backpack for the unpredictable weather though). There has been only one activity where the icey wind got the better of me despite adequate clothing (I don't know what more I could have put on, the only solution I see is electric heating or walking parts of the way to warm up).
If you go, take at least a full week excluding travel days and 'cheap campervans' was by far the best deal that I found for a vehicle (seemed almost too good to be true but everything was as advertised and the people super friendly).
The experience taught me a thing or two about weather at home as well. I don't like raincoat material so I never had rainproof clothes. Now it was kind of essential to prepare for that and I found there are more plasticy pants and jackets as well that are no problem. Layering and wind breaking is how one stays warm beyond staying dry. In the future I'm going to be enjoying the outdoors more during winters at home :)
Don't leave us hanging, what was the activity?
If you can forgive the self-promotion, I wrote a "things I wish I'd known" post about visiting Iceland which might be of interest to anyone planning a trip there: https://blackshaw.substack.com/p/iceland
Legally you can drive on whatever road you'd like in whatever vehicle you'd like, but coverage in case something goes wrong is probably not included in your rental company's coverage. The "4x4 only" signs you referred to are meant to discourage tourists who don't know any better.
Depending on the road, weather, your driving skills etc. you'll easily be able to traverse certain "4x4 only" roads even in a VW Golf. The trick is knowing which roads those are, and accounting for the tiny stream you passed on the way in potentially having turned into a river due to rains or snowmelt since you drove in.
I cant see the horses getting up there!
This is what my wife and I did a couple of years ago and I highly recommend it. It took us 5 days to circumnavigate the country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enMwwQy_noI
I'll have to take breaks to watch the Icelandverse vid every ten minutes, to get through 1h17m of Zuck and kitsch 3D. “You can bring things from the physical world: photos, videos, art, music, movies, books, games” ooof man.
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by streaming from /dev/urandom, mapping to cardinal directions and simulating a random walk on the keyboard.
2. It doesn't actually replace an email autoresponder. Most people I know will put things like their return date in the auto-response.
3. It does not seem very "scalable" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but it seems that down the road this may require a lot of horses.
And you apparently need to train every horse to actually write emails, so it also requires humans to train the horses. How many horses can an Icelandic horse trainer train in a month?
And do we know if all horses can even learn to write emails? What if it requires very smart horses? How many horses are there in Iceland and how many of them are email-grade horses?
Well...
A horse is a horse - of course, of course - and no one can talk to a horse of course. That is, of course, unless the horse is the famous Mr. Ed.
For those who don’t understand the reference this is satire coming from the comment on the Dropbox Launch post on HN in 2007 [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35083
Colin was a Putnam fellow (top 5 scorers) in 1999.
All in all, it was a pretty funny exchange at the time and quickly stopped the argument. Don’t assume that the person you’re talking with here is an idiot. It really demonstrates how HN users are varied with significant expertise in many areas.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathem...
> No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
(https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...)
It's their aesthetic design which sold people on them. That's what Slashdot did not understand.
I choose to think you are.
An unladen horse can clearly type faster than one weighed down with for example coconuts, and we must not forget the span between the shift key and the number row. This is a very large keyboard for native Icelandic horses, and while the European breed might make the span, the African variety can easily get those awkward two hoof symbols.
All in all it is clear that the Icelandic government must give immigration privileges to unladen African horses immediately to prevent this startup industry going under.
Write your Althing member now !
Several people seem to expect that he would be embarrassed by my comment or regret making it, but it honestly doesn’t bother him at all. I, HN, and even the world have changed a lot in 15 years.
Anyway, he's pretty satisfied with where life has taken him. He's certainly not going to sweat someone combing through his post history in a vague attempt to dunk on him.
Anyway, it's just a joke. I don't think anyone's trying to make anyone feel bad.
https://youtu.be/91LRPk8x14s
It's incredible how visiteiceland/norway/etc have refined and eliminated a lot of cruft in their website while still keeping up the appearance of professionalism and non-corp design. There are a lot subtleties in this website s design.
And HR is forever telling us we should "engage" with one another more.
This counts as engagement, right?
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
(X) D̵o̵g̵ ̵a̵n̵d̵ Pony Show
approach to fixing email.
https://www.sweetfarm.org/goat-2-meeting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-31e8Nlujw
https://obviousplant.com/products/a-3-5-inch-floppy-disk-tha...
The odds favor you getting the key you want, so it's best to not even look.
With a few hundred dollars on hardware you can generate thousand of hours of quality video content, much more entertaining than a random keyboard press.
No offense, but horses are clearly less, shall we say, intellectually gifted to handle the subtleties of digital social interaction in the cat age. Horses are plain boring, yesteryear's thing, wouldn't want one in the apartment of my owner.