I still miss rdio. Even though I have pretty diverse tastes in bands and musical styles, I loved how rdio would match me up with other people who shared similar musical interests. I could look at their music collection for inspiration. I would find many new artists I loved this way.
For my 40th, my wife rented out a theatre and paid them to project my favourite film (2001 A Space Odyssey). It was all done in secret. My wife dropped me off in front of the theatre to look for parking (we were going shopping, or so she said), and then I noticed that the theatre had 2001 posters up with MY FACE photoshopped onto the characters. Talk about triggering an identity crisis! When I walked into the theatre with her all my friends were sitting ready to watch the movie. I am tearing up now just reminiscing :)
I am Canadian, I lived in Joburg for 2yrs. You are bang on: huge gaps in doors, windows that can't fully close and uninsulated homes. It was bloody cold in the winter, with my indoor temp being around 10C in the morning! And of course, all sorts of creepy crawlies appearing in my living room (scorpions, prawns) at random times. Loved the cloudless skies, however.
> I am Canadian, I lived in Joburg for 2yrs. You are bang on: huge gaps in doors, windows that can't fully close and uninsulated homes. It was bloody cold in the winter, with my indoor temp being around 10C in the morning! And of course, all sorts of creepy crawlies appearing in my living room (scorpions, prawns) at random times. Loved the cloudless skies, however.
I live in JHB, have been for most of my life. Still not used to how cold it is in the winter.
But the creepy crawlies? C'mon - you're in Africa, what did you expect? In my experience, the benefit of moving to JHB from the east coast was the lack of creepy crawlies!
I grew up on the coast, and there's no end to the wildlife (including creepy crawlies ... maybe the occasional leopard).
The east coast of South Africa is a pain to live in; monkeys frequently raid the garden, large, flying cockroaches get into any food, people will frequently find frogs and/or crabs getting into their pools, snakes frequently getting into the house ...
I'm from a place that (I'm told) has similar weather, and it's common for people from colder climates to complain about lack of insulation. The quick answer is, here you don't have winters that are as cold, therefore developers can get away with shoddy construction without killing its inhabitants... so they do. If you built something like this in Toronto, people would literally freeze to death inside, so it can't be done.
Also, take into account that spring/summer is warmer, and construction practices also have to take this into account.
According to the wikipedia article they jump and shoot ink and are generally very annoying, to the extent that there's an april fools day story that they were genetically modified...
I worked for Nortel for 3 months. When I returned for work after Christmas, we were sent to the Holiday Inn and told we were retrenched. I ended up with a great payout AND received a $14K performance bonus on top a month later!
All the "enter, exit" stuff is what makes d3 beautiful. From a core handful of ideas, Mike is able to express a vast world of visualizations. I think it is the most amazing framework I have had the pleasure of using in my 30+yrs of software development. Ya, you could grab bar chart library and just give it data and get a graph out, or, you could spend a little time with d3 and actually learn something so powerful you can make bar charts - or virtually any other kind of visualization you will ever need. Well worth working past the frustration, imo.
Check out Bitwig. Some ex-Ableton engineers split off to rewrite Ableton using modern programming techniques. It has a public JS API for controlling anything in the GUI. Also, has a modular synth mode called the grid (which is similar to Max, but more like eurorack)
Bitwig gives you no access to their DSP technology in its scripting language, so it is not remotely comparable to Max in that regard.
Max, on the other hand, gives you no access to Ableton's UI or API.
I have both, but prefer Bitwig. But there is nothing out there quite like Max. Not even Reaktor covers the same territory.
I am hoping that the next big thing in Bitwig will be to open up their DSP API, and give us the ability to create our own Grid modules, and, beyond that even, our own native instruments and effects. But I do not believe that extending their Javascript API is the way to do this.
I remember reading the book by Miller Puckette about DSP as applied to music, featuring examples in PureData, some 10 years ago.
Back then, I thought that PureData was the open-source version of Max, while Max offered basically some polish and GUI conveniences. But now, I read about Max much more often than PureData.
What it doesn't give you, however, is access to the control surface internals, i.e., to create new control surface "drivers" inside Ableton itself. But of course, that's currently the ONLY thing Bitwig lets you do with their API.
I just got into learning music production and have been using Bitwig 8-track that came with my baby synth. I love it so far, honestly just for the aesthetic and the little tool explainer that appears at the bottom when you hover over anything.
If I stick with this for long enough I’ll spring for the full version but $400 is a steep price.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point
We go round every two hundred million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whiz
As fast as it can go, the speed of light you know
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is
So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth
> The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding In all of the directions it can whiz As fast as it can go, the speed of light you know Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is
Faster than that - the universe expands faster than the speed of light, because it's not the matter that is moving away, it is the space itself that grows between.
That's nonsense. I have worked in remote northern locales for years as a geophysicist, and - the northern lights can be utterly amazing. You do not always need a long exposure camera to see them; they can be vivid, dancing and mesmerizing in reds, purples, whites and greens. Sounds like the sun wasn't active when you saw them. I have seen such incredible displays it was unnerving - with the entire sky shimmering in pockets of bright green whisps of light, and purple bands of light shining down upon me as I stood on a frozen lake on a cold, crisp night.
I want to believe, but I'm skeptical. Without any actual metric to measure how amazing the lights look, you have to rely on people's subjective opinions. One person's "amazing" light show could just be faint wisps to someone else.
I also think that pretty much any photo is going to look more intense that what anyone can see in real life. Look at the main photo in the article. The lights are so bright that the ground is illuminated green. Really? I doubt the lights can be such a strong light source. They are also very sharply defined as a result of the longer exposure, a human would probably see something blurrier and more ethereal.
I could perhaps believe that under the right conditions and dark adaption a human could see the lights a bit more colorful instead of just white, but I don't see how the sky could dance with clear and crisp ribbons of green and purple for miles unless the solar activity was so strong all our electronic hardware was being fried. (A long time ago there was an event so strong the lights could be seen all the way down near the equator, luckily before we had computers)
I've taken pictures of them with a cell phone. I don't get them all the time here in Trondheim, Norway, but a few times a year. The cell phone degraded the site, in no small part because it intensified the city lights.
Yes, I'm in the city.
I've seen one snake brightly and I've seen some just shimmer in the night. I've seen purple and white and green. I've also seen some that were more impresive than others.
But none of this matters because you won't believe personal testimony, and at this time in your life, you haven't spent a decent amount of time in a northerly location during autumn. Rent a cabin up north for the month of October and possibly the beginning of December. And I'll add, just because you don't understand how such a thing happens doesn't mean you are being lied to about this stuff. It only means that you haven't seen it, are untrusting, and that you don't understand it.
It's definitely green (and a little blue and red if you're lucky). You'd have to be massively colourblind to not see this. The ground though.. just like with the moon, it's still greyish, that part is usually from long exposure (so the photographs with a bright ground are suspicious indeed, same for blurred (or line!) stars).
The strong lights can be moving quite fast, so they're more blurred even in pictures with low acquisition times.
But again, it's hear-say as you say. Here is a more official scale for brightness:
I live 60 degrees north, where Aurora are common but usually underwhelming, difficult to distinguish from clouds in city lights. But when a big solar storm hits, it's a spectacular show even this far south.
Further up north they are more common and more spectacular.
And it's definitely green and doesn't look like anything else when it's bright enough.
They really do light up the ground green on occasion. I've seen it with my own eyes. First hand. I'm not being subjective about this. As a photographer myself, I don't have the photographic skill, nor the post production skill to have done it justice. It was magnificent in the truest meaning of the word.
> They are also very sharply defined as a result of the longer exposure, a human would probably see something blurrier and more ethereal.
The is completely wrong and backwards, the lights are very textured, but they move rather fast, something you see with your own yes, but something you can't capture in a photograph because of the long exposure, which blurs out details.
