That's a damn fine looking list. I cannot understand why people like King Crimson no matter how hard I try, let alone well enough for In the Court... to place at #5, but otherwise, looks great to me.
For anyone starting from nearly-scratch with popular music I'd recommend a chronological approach to lists like this. Don't start at #1—cut the list off with however many you're willing to commit to listening to, then order them by release date, and start at the beginning. For the earliest entries consider hunting down the major influences on their genre or a couple major popular acts from the preceding 10-20 years before them to get a sense of where they came from—maybe a few tracks of ragtime, a crooner or two, a couple big-band acts, some early and mid-period jazz, maybe an album of "standards" or something, a small selection of early rock. That's a decent set-up for starting on 60s-and-on popular music, which is mostly what these lists treat (Kind of Blue is almost always the highest-ranking exception to the "60s and later" rule)
[EDIT] incidentally, I don't see a CSV or Excel export option for the list on this site, even in the list of "subscriber" features that I could unlock by paying $15. I am entirely certain I'm not the only person who needs my lists to end up somewhere like that so I can mess around with sorting, checking-off, and so on :-)
An API has been on their to-do list for quite a long time, not sure how the progress is on that. It would be absolutely great, bringing opportunities to make automated curators and whatnot.
I found Wii Sports gave me nasty RSI in a way I'd never experienced before if I tried to play it "seriously" for any length of time. All that vigorous motion but with no weight or resistance was really, really bad. It also allowed a much faster pace of action than the real sports it mimicked, which probably didn't help—no stopping to fetch the ball or wait for people to get into position in tennis or baseball, for instance.
Waggling the controller with one's wrist was more effective in game and didn't hurt after 15-20 minutes like playing "for real" did. It also wasn't really any more fun than playing with a normal controller—so, fun, but nothing special.
I'd expect to hurt myself trying to get a workout with something like this, based on that experience.
Hi, Martin from Quell here. As someone who shares this exact experience, it's something we have been thinking about from day one when building Quell. If we make something that causes injury or can easily be "tricked" into thinking that the player has done something they haven't, we have failed in our core goal of making a fun, accessible workout that can be enjoyed at all fitness levels.
We're working in consultation with boxers and boxing trainers to ensure that the game teaches users proper form. To break through your enemies defences and succeed in the game, you'll need to perform precise, accurate strikes with good technique. In addition, our wearable prevents you from hyper-extending when throwing straight shots, which can otherwise cause injury.
IIRC it used to work a lot better (like, a whole lot better) but modern X apps mostly end up sending bitmaps over the wire, rather than native X rendering instructions.
Agree that it works better than other remote desktop options on Linux. Overall though I get better performance with RDP to Win10 running Linux in Virtualbox (!) than any other option I've tried though, including Linux on bare metal with a variety of remote desktop options, and Virtualbox's remote desktop server.
The first time I heard of it was the wave of articles a couple weeks back about how it was failing and would probably shut down soon. Suddenly it was everywhere but it was all coverage of how it'd already failed.
There was a Russian travel-photoblogger obsessed with street signs and fire hydrants whose blog I read a lot of a few years back, out of whose very extensive travels a few patterns and interesting observations emerged, one of which was: planned cities are almost always eerily empty, with streets way too wide and not enough in between them, and are typically just about the dullest cities to visit.
[EDIT] and no, I don't have a link, I lost the URL years back and have repeatedly tried to find it again, failing every time.
I don't think it's necessarily that the cities are planned but that they're planned for cars. Dubai, Vegas and parts of Doha are pretty miserable to explore due to the scale. You're expected to be in an air-conditioned car between buildings, not wandering the streets.
In Brasilia's case the city was designed from a "bird's eye view" by an architect who didn't really understand the scale of that kind of liveable space. If you look at it out of the window of an aeroplane it looks well designed and pleasingly laid out. Walking through it at ground level, not so much.
That seems to be a mistake in a lot of "city of the future" concept art. All that empty space, tons of long strips of green and trees, very wide streets, huge squares everywhere, looks nice on a drawing or a render but is miserable to exist in because it means everything's really far apart and the scale of everything feels overwhelmingly. A lot of naïve attempts at a "green" city design have the same problem—in trying to incorporate all kinds of "eco friendly" green space they make an area less walkable, spread out the urban footprint, and make it a ton less eco-friendly.
It depends? Personally I like such large spaces, at least where I walked them in weather which allowed for that. Also E-bikes and rollers do exist now, not to forget old-fashioned bicycles.
Maybe "zone" them in ways which allows for many tiny oasis in the deserts of asphalt, concrete, steel and glass?
Everyone likes parks and plazas and the occasional wide boulevard, it's when there's a bunch of "green space" of indefinite purpose strewn about, and wide streets with big setbacks everywhere because they "look grand" and not to serve demonstrated human purpose. Utopian city designs and planned cities often suffer from both of those blights.
High-rises but tons of wasted space. If they'd just put in a normal allocation of space for parks & plazas and right-sized roads the whole city could be much smaller and everyone would be fairly close to the actual countryside, not just unpleasant strips of green between wide roads.
Once you start looking for it in concept-art type city plans, it's everywhere: way too much purposeless, empty space, mostly in the form of non-park green spaces and too-wide streets and sidewalks. And if you have all those problems, in a real city at least, then you need a ton more parking, because nothing's walkable and the buses are slow (because everything's so far apart), and that's even more wasted space.
Not the only comic that puts a bonus in the img tag alt text—I think Wondermark does, and I wanna say that at one time SMBC did that and had the red-button extra panel, both, and it may still. I always check for it when I find a new webcomic, now.
If you want support from an app for piano and especially if you already have a keyboard or digital piano with MIDI out, I would strongly recommend Simply Piano on the iPad. I'm not affiliated, just a very, very happy user with a young kid getting more out of that app than I would have imagined—I started off keeping pace, having played a few instruments but not piano before, but when your kid spends every spare minute on the damn thing it's hard to keep up, after they get the hang of it.
It's not so hot at form—it tries to teach and reinforce it but of course it can't dynamically check that you aren't screwing up—but is great at most other things. Heavy focus on playing recognizable and fun music (they license tons of stuff) to keep up interest, with arrangements adjusted down as necessary. Long, segmented "curriculum" plan with some branches, free play modes on songs you've "unlocked", sheet music available and play modes that scroll the page for you. It's really nice.
Age was it, in part, for me. I used to do lots of hardware and OS tinkering. Now the last goddamn thing I want to do is troubleshoot graphical glitches in x-windows, or try to get my audio to handle changing outputs correctly, or cross my fingers while "dist-upgrade" runs, or fix scaling and font rendering in GTK apps, or whatever, when I'm just trying to do something else.
At some point I became acutely aware of every time I was doing something with a computer that was simply fucking with the computer, and not actually getting anything that I wanted or needed to get done, except to the extent that making my computer be not-broken is required for those things. Around that time I was exposed to macOS and iOS and finally had an actual choice to (mostly) not have to do that when I don't want to, and if I decide I would like to tinker then I can use... any other option on the market.
I'd probably be screwing around with trying to run NetBSD on Android phones and turn them into mobile computers I can plug monitors and keyboards into and embedding RPis and Arduinos in all kinds of crap around the house, if I were 16 again.
At the age I am now, though, you'd literally have to pay me to even think about doing any of that. Even when I screw around with getting allegedly set-it-and-forget-it RPi media projects (think: kodi, lakka) working I usually end up regretting it. I do know how to work with those sorts of things. I also very much don't want to any more, but do still want computer-things doing stuff for me with few or no hassles. Luckily these days you can pay to get that, in some categories at least. Largely from Apple, if you want them to last a while—I do wish they had actual competition in that sense. More options that don't spy (much) and Just Work (mostly), please.
So... we're gonna throw out the freedom to play with non-cheating strangers when your friends are all busy, in order that every computing device, instead of just lots and lots of them, can have arbitrary software installed on it?
> we're gonna throw out the freedom to play with non-cheating strangers
Freedom? No. Opportunity? Maybe. I think communities would arise to fill the demand though. Pseudo-anonymous reputation systems tied to matchmaking could fill the roll. I have a group of pseudo-anonymous friends/acquaintances I frequently play games with online. None of us cheat and if any of us did, we'd stop playing with them. We don't need big brother. We don't need technical solutions to social problems.
For anyone starting from nearly-scratch with popular music I'd recommend a chronological approach to lists like this. Don't start at #1—cut the list off with however many you're willing to commit to listening to, then order them by release date, and start at the beginning. For the earliest entries consider hunting down the major influences on their genre or a couple major popular acts from the preceding 10-20 years before them to get a sense of where they came from—maybe a few tracks of ragtime, a crooner or two, a couple big-band acts, some early and mid-period jazz, maybe an album of "standards" or something, a small selection of early rock. That's a decent set-up for starting on 60s-and-on popular music, which is mostly what these lists treat (Kind of Blue is almost always the highest-ranking exception to the "60s and later" rule)
[EDIT] incidentally, I don't see a CSV or Excel export option for the list on this site, even in the list of "subscriber" features that I could unlock by paying $15. I am entirely certain I'm not the only person who needs my lists to end up somewhere like that so I can mess around with sorting, checking-off, and so on :-)