pixelface

it's also completely illegal, but doing anything about it would be a pyrrhic victory at this point - we can't go out and interview for new jobs when the whole state is on lockdown.

definitely have it better than many, but it's a frustrating situation.

one more anecdata, complete freeze on all movement and we all got handed down a 20% salary cut backdated 2 weeks. this came shortly after a round of layoffs, and another round is rumored to be coming soon.

one niche where i'd argue it's not only valuable but also period correct is restoring and modifying vintage electronics. Frequently they are single sided through hole boards that were not born from a CAD program, and are not available for purchase. You can certainly make the new board with CAD and a fab house, but for things like vintage synthesizers a hand etched board may actually be more appropriate and original.

Also the importance of latency in some cases is significant. When the goal is to iterate a board quickly several times and a diy board is good enough, being able to have a board in an hour or less could mean multiple board iterations in one day where sending out to fab might draw out each board iteration to a week long wait.

"ODIN will be based in the cloud and designed to deliver data in near real time on aircraft and system performance under heightened cyber security provisions, Lord said. "

heart warming to see us draw ever closer to the cyberpunk dystopia of my childhood dreams.

after using larger machines I realized that laptops (for me) are for situations where a desktop is unavailable - airline seating, casual couch use, all generally things that don't require much. having recently acquired some P53s at work and traveling with them this week has really reinforced that idea. if an X230 isn't up to the task, it's probably the kind of work where I need to be at a desk with one of my desktop machines anyway.

my initial reaction is that it's a hefty price to pay for a lightly modded x230, but not everyone wants or is able to do these mods themselves.

I'm surprised nobody is going so far as to do the other common mods (1920x1080 IPS, x220 keyboard swap, make the X220 keyboard have all its native functionality, whitelist mods, i7/16gb config) to offer the fully hotrodded ultimate form. Having done them myself and seeing the amount of work, maybe the market isn't such that they would sell at a price that makes sense for the seller.

if you're not already aware, swapping the X220 keyboard (and palmrest) onto an X230 is a fairly straightforward swap. That modification plus the FHD mod and accompanying 1920x1080 IPS make the X230 a very nice daily driver.

using your mill and grain combo, can you speak to your experiences with different end products? reviews appear mixed so it would be interesting to add a data point for both the particular grain and the mill, in terms of specific final dishes.

generally we get around this by using rentals for a lot of things, the only people purchasing them (in my realm) are production rental houses like PRG or VER, or permanent installers where the cost is just another line on the buildout of a space.

I'm very happy with my current dumb 65" 1080p screen, but have thought about whether I would pay signage screen prices if the only other option was something with its own rogue computer - smart TVs really are terrible in every iteration I've seen. Eventually I may desire more resolution or size, or my screen may have an irreparable failure.

Having modded thinkpads to use better / higher resolution panels, and having disassembled a number of consumer TVs, I do suspect that the next best option is going to be getting a dumb driver board to accept HDMI and turn it into the LVDS / EDP / whatever interface is needed to directly drive the panel (as well as a backlight driver, and something to spit audio from the HDMI to some speakers). As it gets harder to buy a quality large screen without crapware (without paying signage prices) I hope enough of us will pursue this route that there can be a known process and BOM to make it a straightforward project. I would imagine you could have your cake and eat it too by pairing up a quality dumb driver board and a high quality screen that is not available in dumb form.

At that point we could consider interesting modifications like a teensy with ethernet to allow remote control over LAN with a protocol like OSC, or some lightweight hardware to decode an NDI stream to allow creating "channels" coordinated by a centralized media server / NAS. One could accomplish interesting things that would be concerning if not under local-only control, like video calling that hops between screens in the house as you change rooms, shows that automatically pause if you get up for a restroom break, gesture control for when you're watching a cooking video while cooking and have dirty/wet hands, and so on. There is a ton of smart home functionality around screens that is compelling and useful when not paired with creepy companies or unknown data exfiltration.

why not? i use neither but they both have rich histories as audio programming tools. autechre are/were heavy max/msp users at the forefront of IDM, max for (ableton) live is a popular thing, and i have several friends who write pd things that then get run on their eurorack modules.

check out touchdesigner, it has the ability to go deep into GLSL and python but is also quite approachable. i feel like it is generally regarded as a node based graphics programming environment, but would argue that it is really just an arbitrary real time data handling system that happens to have a lot of built in graphics nodes.

it's not just that, they're generally rated for 24/7 usage and feature much higher build quality - often with ultra thin bezels to allow them to be used in tiled arrangements.

whether that usage rating is related to any actual difference in the hardware is something i've pondered, but it is something they do specifically mention.

I wish it was only a 30-50% premium though as my experience is that they are an integer multiple of the equivalent consumer TV.

Another company using this model very effectively is Derivative, makers of Touchdesigner. Licenses are sold at an initial price that includes a year of updates. Once that year expires, the newest version (old versions are kept available on the site) within your update period will continue to be usable with your license - which is freely transferable between machines. They offer a couple license tiers, custom work, and paid support hours. They even provide a free non-commercial license that is minimally limited and great for learning. The other great thing is that they are highly responsive to user feedback and bug reports. I've had a situation before where we found a bug in the course of a project and they fixed it in a matter of days, had a build sent over in time for my deadline, and then the fix was pushed for everyone in the following update. I frequently point them out as a model for the best way to offer a software product to both a professional and amateur market. It's essentially all the benefits of perpetual licensing while still providing a revenue stream for the company and ongoing support for professional users.

No direct affiliation, but I've shared drinks with the devs and am a very pleased user.

Without taking a position on future possibilities I think your point misses half the truth - if solo developers can create what we now consider to be AAA-quality games, the bar will raise. Consider the incredible tools at anyone's disposal for free* have not removed the need for a variety of talents to craft worlds and tell stories that make for compelling games.

One could draw comparisons to the availability of high quality film making equipment or incredibly realistic VST plugins for making orchestral scores. At its heart, the limitations of tools define the upper boundary of a medium or genre, but do not lift all creators to some upper limit of goodness.

*until sales reach a point that royalties must be paid, in the case of unreal engine

you're both in the right realm insofar as thinking of 1980s Roland gear, but this is very much a modernized tribute to the SH-101 to the point that it more or less shares not only the functional side but also the control layout and aesthetic of the SH-101.

It seems like this could be a very nice unit, although far from the first modern thing to recreate the SH-101 (for a very recent example, see Behringer's attempt)

That being said I find it a bit odd to make such a fuss about rechargeable batteries as the original Roland unit already had battery power (as did the TB-303 and TR-606). You can simply put rechargeable batteries in them.

Worth noting that you can still buy the original Roland SH-101 for less than even the "early bee" price on kickstarter.

ray wu on aliexpress/ebay(I think?) has a good reputation and is widely used

on jobs we use pixlite controllers for controlling lots of addressables and send it artnet out of touchdesigner. no need to involve madmapper as touchdesigner handles all the mapping you could possibly want without adding the latency of piping out to madmapper. if you're just doing hobby projects you can stream serial out of touch via USB to a teensy 3.2 and control (in my experience) around 4000 LEDs at ~60fps. for lasers you should check out the etherdream, simple and works well. servo control you'll need a board but generating the software side in touchdesigner is simple.