I got a free piano from a lady that paid 25k for it back in 1980. Mice had lived in it while in storage, but I could tell it was in good shape.
Spent a summer going down the rabbit hole of tuning it myself. I found the Entropy Piano Tuner app to be quite helpful. Took me weeks to get it tuned to where I liked it.
My digital Yamaha doesn't even come close to capturing the resonance you get on a real piano. I find it hard to play digital pianos for anything other than simple melodies.
Seriously, I feel the same way. As a former teacher, I remember when kids started having smart phones and you'd hear a notification go off in class. Other kids were like, "what was that?" The kid in question only wanted to look down and see what it said.
I soon started joking that the notification was saying, "YOU MATTER!" As if that student was so important that he/she/they could distract a class of 25-30 students.
Kind of like the first time I heard someone talking loudly in a college hallway on their cell phone. I thought it was such a social faux-pax.
Nowadays it's pretty normal for anyone to loudly talk that way to their phone. We only get concerned if there's no phone.
True story: I adopted a pit bull mix (mostly beagle, I'd guess) and she was a wonderful dog. One day she chased a rabbit (in Conejos county, so yeah, rabbits were pretty common) that ran under our car. It drove her nuts trying to get at it. She left teeth marks all around the right front passenger tire well.
We loved her so much we left it like that. It's a great conversational piece for fellow dog lovers.
Rabbits were so common that once we took our car in to have the oil changed. The guy opened the hood and a rabbit jumped out. He asked us if it was our pet....
I once recorded an album and had to deal with latency issues. This was way back using an IBM Aptiva and Magix music software (because it was pretty affordable). I spent so much time trying to figure out why my vocals were behind the beat. Eventually I worked out the correction factor to be 1.002433. So that's what I named the album!
Since then, I'm glad that latency problems are much less of a problem. Nothing worse than a little latency if you have ears like Donald Fagan. :-)
Yeah I understand your point, but vinyl is kinda sacred.
I mean, of all the things you mentioned, it's by far the most likely to still be usable in the future. Even in a post-apocalyptic world people might figure out how to play vinyl. MP3s? Not a chance.
Full disclosure: I never liked cassettes. Oh, and I made the mistake of choosing Beta over VHS....
And this is why I still hang out here, after abandoning nearly everything else.
I love how a discussion like this can occur here and there's no flaming or egos getting hurt. When you post a labor of love like this, it's great to see the reaction on HN.
I spend a lot of time trying to decide what to do with old tech in my volunteer gig. We have old Univac "dumb" terminals and I feel the need to plug them in and see if they still work. I come here for re-charging.
I think emulating old hardware is fascinating. Am I the only one who watches old media just to hopefully get a glimpse of the past?
I have attended two conferences for educators using Alice in their Computer Science curriculum (back in the mid 2000s, I think). The Alice Team at Carnegie Mellon were great in their efforts to make something for educators teaching CS at the high school entry level. In fact, one of the workshops was shortly after Randy Pausch passed away. I remember it being a pretty somber time on campus at CMU.
Don Slater and Wanda Dann (two of the original Alice team members) were extremely approachable and helped me build a darn good high school CS curriculum that offered many classes for kids in a pretty low socioeconomic school on Colorado's front range. Don even was an old-school tabletop sports gamer who played a lot of Paydirt (an Avalon Hill title) back in the day.
I was a bit of throwback and taught kids text editors, SVN (they just wanted to use "Dropbox" to collaborate), and Linux (my classroom was a Linux LAN and it was pretty fun to teach kids how to administer it with me)--I appreciated Alice as a great way to get kids working on day 1 on programming concepts.
Using recursive methods to make a shark attack a person swimming in the ocean was one of the lessons I used to teach. In fact, if you want to pretend you're a freshman in Intro to Computing, my lesson (for the level 4 challenge: the advanced level) is still in Vimeo:
Be kind :-) I was stretched so thin. I basically created the entire HS CS curriculum (except for APCS), and I would create these screencasts just in time, adjusting them as necessary for my students that year.
Yeah, those cds and tapes you could get remarkably cheap and they sounded like total s*it as far as sound quality, but at the same time those were some of my favorite performances. Like hearing Donald sing "Brooklyn" on piano.
This is one of the great examples of how true artists produce gold and then the real world sets in and the relatives (who were not there at the time) force a bunch of legal issues and fight over copyright.
Somewhere in Nirvana/Heaven/Whatever Steely Dan songs are available in all their forms. We will look back on this era and just do a facepalm....
I highly recommend Fagan's book "Eminent Hipsters."
This is unethical in so many ways. People are going to be thinking these are like Tuff-Sheds or something. They should have a button that says "Show Me What I Actually Get" and then show them just that.
And yes, I know it says "Steel Frame Only", but I only really noticed that after trying to see a complete listing of the parts.
Couldn't agree more. I had an active computer programming club for years at the high school level. One year, some of the very same kids proposed that we start a "tabletop gaming" club. Computers weren't allowed. Nothing like pushing cardboard around to make a person whole again. :-)
That said, I can see how something like this could be pretty cool. Instead of playing Up-Front and imagining that the terrain cards are now serving different purposes (like desert or jungle terrain), it would just look correct. Of course that says nothing about why 3D is necessary....
I posted about this at top level, but should have done so here. My friends and I assumed our buddy's car had a warped disk or something that caused her to sound slightly pissed off. :-)
I can't believe this showed up on the front page today! I was just talking to a co-worker about this:
Back in 1989, my college buddy Matt had a used Sentra that had that same voice. We assumed his got "warped" or something because the inflection of the female voice kind of rises at the end of some of her statements, making her sound annoyed with the human(s).
Listening to the video, however, it sounds exactly like I remembered--so I guess that was standard.
Wow, this is worth watching if you're a guitar player. There are so many variables in the sound of an electric, and he certainly provides a strong argument as to which ones matter the most (his "air" guitar at the end is great).
I have played classical, acoustic and electric guitars for most of my life. Over time my collection grew and finally settled to just a handful of guitars. The most expensive was the acoustic. Next was the classical. The electric I have now was easily the cheapest of the lot (I paid 18x it's cost for the acoustic, fwiw).
It always seemed like with electric there were just too many things that could change the sound--like information overload. Yes, you have the guitar and the string choices, but also amps and effects. With acoustic I hardly ever use an amp and I never do with classical. To me, the difference in sound from those guitars is much more inherent in the guitar itself.
Seems like even cheap electrics, if you set the intonation and action correctly (and pickup height, etc) are a better deal than similarly cheap acoustics. Just test out the pickups first, as they vary greatly in quality.