helpfulContrib

Oh, there are limits to my tolerance of Shift modifiers, though, and they are small.

Something truly revolutionary, imho, would just be a row of about 32 Mod-wheels, all lined up along the back edge, some screens underneath, and nothing but flashy graphics AND VERY LITTLE TEXT (could even turn off the text with a dedicated key) ..

It'll happen, eventually. Someone will have the balls to abandon the washing machine methods, and just go freaky. It'll have to sound good as well, though ..

We see this, time and again, in the synthesizer world: menu-diving.

Its such a dreadful, awful paradigm - to scroll endlessly through some misguided attempt at 'user interface', only to be deflated and demotivated within minutes.

Its just so un-musical to have to be scrolling through endless blocks of text, only occasionally rewarded with tepid iconography or bleak fonts more appropriate for a dishwasher. Oh, you can only afford two buttons and don't have a GPIO to spare for proper scroll wheels? FUCK YOU. You deserve duct tape and LED-matrix after-thoughts, peon synth purchasers.

Sure, there are plenty who attempt to address the pain - Teenage Engineerings' particularly ridiculous and utterly useless overpriced and irrelevat graphics springs immediately to mind. Arturia's tepid attempts, also. The major players? Forget it, those guys are wedded at the neck to their type systems and rigid frugality. A 240x200 OLED does not a quality, classy experience, make. I'm looking at you, Axel Hartmann - just give up and make a living designing cigarette machines, for fucks sake.

But, as a result, for us synth nerds: its 40 years of dreck and muck. No wonder this world embraces the Eurorack!

Won't someone in the synthesizer world - please, just anyone at this point - take those endless lists of soulless parameters, and wang an utterly creative, truly desirable interface on it - something that not only makes the operator factually musical, but interesting to watch while they're doing it.

(Disclaimer: have tried and failed. Synthesizer designers shouldn't be influenced by bureaucrats and bean-counters - but they always are. We get it - you can't afford to innovate, the BOM is God.)

In the US, in the 90's, there were many, many other cottage-shop PC builders, setting up shop.

So yeah - your catalog Tandy has a 'competitive' price, but you could - in those days - take such a catalog into "Joe's Computers" and get a cottage-shop PC, or at least parts for it, like .. on the regular, much cheaper.

Pasadena Computer Trade Show was how I built my mega-PC's in those days.

(Amiga dominated in Hollywood, though, for a while .. I had pals who scoffed at my mega-PC's with their fully tricked-out Video Toaster rigs, and their Dec Alpha render-farms were often pitched against my SGI boxes, over lunch-time jests...)

I was 22 years old, hacking away in Progress 4GL, maintaining data centers across the country using a combination of Quarterdesk DesqView and "Remote Control", which gave a way to control a keyboard/mouse/monitor over a modem connection.

Every field office had 2 or 3 PC's dedicated to the task of providing a "remote terminal" to our development team, so that we could dial in remotely and do administrative things to the Progress 4GL database server that was running on another dedicated system for the task, usually a fat Novell Netware server with 4 or 8 "huge" disks of 640Megabytes dedicated to the databases.

It was my job to monitor the rows and rows of PC's on our side of things, that were used for remote admin.

Honestly, I despised this job.

I'd spent most of the 80's learning C and Unix programming - my first Unix machine was a MIPS Computing Magnum pizzabox running risc/OS. $15,000 worth of machine, sitting on my desk - but yet I still had to walk down the corridor and hack around on cheap DOS PC's just to get things fixed across the country in some hellish New Hampshire closet.

At least it paid me well.

Well enough that I could go to the regular PC Computer swap meets out in Pasadena every weekend or so, and buy myself the parts needed to build a "decent computer for home" - a 486 with 8Megabytes of RAM, a few hundred megabytes of disk space. A CD-ROM drive, maybe a high-end video card and monitor capable of 1025x768 and 256 colours. A modem, so I could work from home, run my own DesqView instance, have my own multiple-terminal connections to all those troublesome field offices.

I'd also make regular (weekly) jaunts to The Opamp Bookstore, in Hollywood - one of my favourite places in all the world. It was there I'd wandered into the "Unix" section and seen some magazines and books on the MINIX operating system, and it was there that I learned about the rise of Usenet as a place to get to meet other hackers, C programmers, Unix nerds. It was also where I'd get my 2600 Magazine fix, monthly.

One day, I got my home PC finally built, booted, and running. I connected to my mailserver, wnsnews.com .. checked my mail. A fellow operator had sent me a message "Check out the minix-list, they're talking about a new unix-like kernel you might be interested in..."

So I subscribe, and lo and behold, there it was - the link to ftp.funet.fi, Linux in its very early stages. It took me about a day to download it, about a week to figure out all the various floppy disks I'd have to make to get the drivers for everything set up, and a whole weekend of faffing around to get things installed alongside my Desqview setup, on a brand new hard drive.

I was hooked. It didn't have everything - X11 wasn't ported yet - but it had just enough for me to port some of my own C code, see that things could actually work like my MIPS pizzabox, albeit on my cheaper 486, and .. maybe .. someday .. someone would port "Remote Control" or even the Desqview terminals, to this brand new 'Linux' thing.

Some months later, in the middle of being shut down entirely by my fellow grey-beard programmers, who wanted me to stop fiddling about with all the spare parts in our "Remote Control" room, I learned about this brand new Linux 'distribution', Yggdrasil.

A trip to OpAmp book shop, and there it was: the bootable floppy and the full Linux filesystem, included on CD, to turn any of our machines into a working Linux system - with X11 onboard! And, probably working, if I chose our SVGA card settings right! What a revelation! I could use my home 486 as a decent terminal for my pizzabox! I could use telnet to get into the Novell servers across the other side of the country! I could endlessly annoy my grey-beard associates with the idea that "Linux is the Future, man!", over and over again, until they finally lock me out of the Novell server and decide I was only good for Unix things, as punishment, because as they knew full well "Unix is Dead, man!"

Well, the decades have rolled by, and what a death it is. Linux is everywhere. I have used it every day since that first post on the minix-list I noticed, the one about funet.fi. I've made a living with it, and I've done amazing things, boring things, mundane things, and normal things. "Netware is Dead, Man! Desqview is Dead, Man! DOS is long gone, man!"

Well, alright, MIPS Computing didn't last long, and that pizzabox was well and truly (sadly) de-commissioned. But, with the profits I made in SoCal during the 90's, putting Linux to work from my own little consulting office in One Wilshire, I bought all the SGI toys I could want .. and I still have them.

Curious, though, that I mostly use Apples' Unix as a front-end to access them all, heheh ..

I live in Vienna, Austria, and I have a fascination with the typography of the signage all over the city.

There are very distinct examples of different era, with 19th-century, 20th-century, and 21st-century periods in full splendour. This can be seen in various Instagram groups, which alas are not as open/public as I would prefer. [1]

Do you see much older signage and typography in Vietnam? In the villages versus cities?

It always impresses on me that a city, itself, is an open book for typography.

I wonder if you would be aware of any similar projects to "Fonts of Vienna", but for your region of the world?

[1] - e.g. https://www.instagram.com/fontsofvienna/

Yes, the logical next step for this site is to add escrow.

When that happens, I'll re-consider signing up for it. At the moment, I can't justify $30 for access to what could be, admittedly, a lot of pie in the sky.

As an 8-bit hobbyist, I have tons and tons of cassette tapes containing all kinds of wild and woolly things. Over the 40 years since I started this hobby I've collected commercial titles, as well as a large number of "personal archives" type cassettes from various owners/users.

This is often very rewarding and very, very fun to discover, buried deep in the middle of some tape, someones' first code projects.

Perhaps its a modified version of a BASIC game they've typed in, perhaps its some machine code that doesn't quite work, maybe its a missive typed to a long lost love using an ancient text editor nobody knows anything about, any more.

I have over 40 machines in my retro- collection, and have exhibited quite a few of them. In one case, 40,000+ visitors in Vienna were introduced to the Oric Atmos, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC6128, each outfitted with modern storage in the form of a USB drive where the floppy disk should be. On occasion I'd get some donations to my collection - a box of cassettes someone found in the attic, and no idea what to do with them.

I have a cassette player/recorder[1], in the style of the old 80's 'brick' design, which also has a USB port so that things can be recorded direct to .WAV files. This simple tool has been very effective in recovering stuff from cassette tape. Its kind of surprising how many folks still have boxes and boxes of cassettes out there, and no way to transfer things .. I've considered offering a service to do it and may set it up as a side gig, whenever I get my own retro computing museum officially started ..

[1] - similar to this: https://www.amazon.com/Gracioso-Converter-Cassettes-Headphon...

I used to host 3,000 active daily users from a 33mhz 486 with a 56k modem.

Thousands and thousands of lines of quality conversation, interaction, humanity.

To be honest, I kind of miss those days.

I love to think that the web of the future is just going to be everyones' mac Mini or whatever.

Big Data™ has always irked me, frankly.

A few years ago I had to build a custom embedded image for a high-quality scientific instrument that was going into production, and I made a pass at Yocto - but ultimately decided it wasn't worth the heavy load to get everything in place to do a full build, for the specific SO-DIMM module we were using, so ended up with a custom build script to build the bootable image and all intended embedded applications. This worked out, but I've always been bothered that Yocto didn't pass my first sniff test.

I ended up completing the project on time and under budget by adopting a strict "compiler on-board" approach (i.e. no cross-compiling), so that's where I got a bit dissatisfied with the Yocto approach of having a massive cross-compiling tooling method to deal with.

I'll have to give it another go, but I do find that if I have to have a really beefy machine to get started on an embedded project, somethings' not quite right.

Anyone who had hope that Trump would avert the catastrophe was clearly ignorant of the facts of his subservience to the greater Israel plan.

Meanwhile, while Palestinians are eating cats, we are free to refer to Monty Python all we like.

Just don't mention the war.

The requirement for all members of the target group to die in order for it to be called genocide is fallacious and not historically acccurate.

Was it genocide of the Native Americans, since 'they survived'? Was it genocide in Australia when white europeans took the land from the prior caretakers?

The answer: yes of course it was. Genocide doesn't mean total eradication - it means, attempted total eradication. In Gaza today, the lifestyles of the Palestinian peoples have been completely eradicated, and it will be years before they recover.

>GPL DJ Software

Its kind of a nuisance that, as a requirement to build Mixxx on MacOS, ones has to use foreign binaries, disable Gatekeeper, run a 'first build', and from that point on .. can treat the project as a regular CMake project. Re-enable Gatekeeper after the 'first build'.

Hmm.

What are the custom binaries for? Surely not cmake. Not having - yet - done this myself (until I can put it in a VM), I'm nevertheless kind of curious about this necessity.

Any Mixxx/MacOs devs care to describe the contents?

>Not everyone wants the software/OSes we run to automatically send data elsewhere.

I personally find it offensive when a mega-corp makes the assumption that my connection to the Internet is available for them to build for-profit services without giving me sufficient agency.

The cant-disable-Wifi-safely dark pattern is bad enough. But turning me into a data harvester for their million-dollar services, without even thinking about giving me a cut?

No thanks.

Alas, these anti-patterns have become a norm by way of ignorance, and its not getting better.

Enschede is serviced by German rail operators though, so that might be a reason. In fact a lot of trains in this region of the world are operated by neighboring countries ..

I've found different ways .. if its a simple Lua situation, where you just want to debug pure Lua code, Zerobraine Studio is a pretty good environment to do it and comes with a debugger.

I've tried various other Lua debuggers over the years, these are useful:

https://github.com/slembcke/debugger.lua

https://slembcke.github.io/DebuggerLua

You can also use the debug module:

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/lua/lua_debugging.htm

Otherwise, I just use gdb if needed (JIT/FFI stuff) and printf's.

However, I don't really need to debug much these days - more just testing. Its also kind of important to have automated tests and run them frequently with every major change.

Another thing I use frequently in my Lua projects, which I think cuts down a lot of the common bugs that might require debugging, is the lua_enumerable.lua utility module:

https://github.com/mikelovesrobots/lua-enumerable/

I was infected by the Lua mind virus 15 years ago and I have not recovered.

I simply don't see any reason not to use it .. for everything.

I've built games with it. I've built GUI's with it. I've built scientific analysis tools with it. I've used it as a total solution for previously-impossible embedded problems. I've used it for desktop applications and mobile apps. I've automated entire production lines with it. It has huge appeal as a general purpose software development ecosystem - but those who know how to do this, tend to keep it to themselves for some reason.

It can do everything.

There's just nothing I want to do with computers that I can't, legitimately do, with Lua - or its VM. Or, LuaJIT. Or, all of the above and a bit of luarocks built in. Throw some luastatic in while we're at it, bundle it all up as a .deb, and nobody needs to know a thing.

Its just so versatile. I hope someone builds an OS around it some day, making everything and anything the user wants to do, accessible through a Lua module, or some smart libffi wrappers around a handful of .so's, somewhere ..

In my retirement, I'll take antirez' LOAD81, turn it into a proper Lua editor, add integration with luarocks and luastatic and maybe a shit-tonne of IPFS, and then there won't be any need, ever again, to deal with anything else.

> There is a thriving "FPV" ecosystem of drones that can be DIYed.

As someone who has for decades built flying things which could be drone'ified any day of the week, it is sort of also necessary to point out that even before drones became so widespread and commonplace, rcgroups.com has been the ecosystem in which to find oneself.

And indeed, the "model airplane/remote control flight" subject has been prosperous and flourishing as a hobby for decades too .. just feast yourself on the categories here:

https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/index.php

A very earnest exploration of the various sub-forums will reveal some extraordinary designs - some which, indeed, break the 'norm' for what a flying thing should look like, in respect to a more casual view. Magnus, aerostat, Fettler are pretty good search terms...

It is a very, very important lesson to learn: how to understand and acknowledge ones failings.

The impulse is to defend, as failings are weakness and represent instances of unattained agency. In this day and age, agency is all you've got, most times. One feels the need to protect it at great expense. Have you ever noticed how crap it feels to over-defend something that turns out to be an abundant triviality?

So, to have the wherewithal to turn those weaknesses into strengths is an extraordinary human endeavour, and a testament to the strength of human spirit.

When people say that there are only material things in life, it will be interesting to consider this story where the moral principles of Captain Kohei Asoh led him to maintain his agency over his life as a pilot by protecting (superlatively), the lives of his passengers, in a material and ethical sense, and admitting the mistakes made in light of actual success.

Would the 'I fucked up' conjecture feel different if he were uttering it from the ashen mess of a death bed, with far worse survivor basis behind the statement?

The spirit is clearly composed of decisions, remembered for win or fail. Seems to me, a strong soul prepares for this eventuality, in perpetuity... I have to wonder if Captain Asoh was also, incidentally, a very good pilot.

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When I can engage in conversatons with a wide variety of different viewpoints, without any of those viewpoints being repressed through some censorship mechanism, then I'll agree that the platform has 'won'.

But Bluesky is already censoring viewpoints that the collective don't want to see promoted, so its really not much better than X.

The issue is, whether or not a collective, reactive crowd, is really the ultimate form of human discourse. I happen to think not, but its sure interesting to see the dynamics of humans flowing from one echo chamber to another ..

Amazing days ahead of us - if we can avoid blowing ourselves up over pathetic patches of land, we could have the entire solar system under our feet...

Misnomer? I don't agree.

Its definitely "a big pointy tooth dominating the mouth" kind of feature.

Could also have been called a snaggle-tooth salmon, I guess ..

In any case, definitely an interesting fish.

German is not that easy, either, though.

Das/Der/Die is a constant source of frustration. Its never easy to remember.

I have one. What would you consider a reasonable price?

Some folks I know did something similar - for fun: an artificial museum which shows you a VR space based on location:

https://artificialmuseum.com/#2/52.49/13.37

Its pretty fun to see what virtual things have been parked out there in the real world ..

I'm quite enamoured by the uConsole [0] .. I've had it for a few weeks and find myself reaching for it more and more, having set it up with the close family/friends Discord channels .. its nice having a machine just for the task, kind of thing. It would be so nice for a few more of my friends/family to have such little things, and leave the world of third-party-based social communication well and truly behind ..

Surely, somewhere out there, someone has a small fleet of these cyberdecks, connected with tunnels, doing nicely secure communication ..

[0] - https://www.clockworkpi.com

Except the balloon is a metaphor and the ink is hubris.

I truly hope there will be more work done on understanding megalithic pre-history. It is really, really fascinating - from Gobekli Tepe to Narwala Gabarnmang and beyond, the whole subject is rich in intriguing questions about what humans were up to, 10's of thousands of years ago ...

"Stoked" implies there was already a fire - indeed, an animal was attacking and killing villagers - it doesn't mean 'created entirely out of nothingness' ...

You stoke a fire to get it going, and you can do that with old or new fires, alike.

Australian here, spent my youth in the deep West.

I found your description inspiring.

I remember feeling, once, that night time was when everything in the universe could be seen, and daytime was when we slept in the shade of the sun, away from it all.