Not a native speaker, so I hope I phrased it correctly. Let me explain. It happened to me at least twice.

Some years ago, I picked up the "Metro 2033" book by Dmitry Glukhovsky. I read part of it until I read about the Stalker, who was a badass wearing a black coat. It was so cliche, I was unable to continue. I wrote off the book as trash.

Then, some time later I played the video game under the same title, which is an adaptation of the novel and I liked it a lot. It had that eerie atmosphere and a unique Eastern European feel to it, unlike games like Fallout. I decided to give the book another go, but this time I knew the lore and I had images from the game in my mind and everything changed. I really liked that book, it was a good mix of horror, action and sociopolitical commentary disguised as a postapo novel. It may not be great, but it's a very pleasant read. By now, I've read all three books and played all three video games (btw if you plan to play Metro Exodus I'd advise you to read "Metro 2035" first, as the game is a direct continuation of that story and both were written by the author) and I consider myself a fan of the series.

Another, more recent example is "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone". I am not a Potterhead, I never read any HP books, I even despised them for the most part. By the time J.K. Rowling's stories were published in my country I was already 20 or so. I was familiar with Jordan, Tolkien, Sapkowski, Williams and many more authors writing fantasy. I was into the tolkienesque depiction of wizards, so something like Hogwart with robed men and children riding brooms and waving wands is both weird and strongly off-putting to me. Also, I considered myself already too old for what I saw as children's books.

I'm 42 now and those words of C.S. Lewis resonate with me ever so more:

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

So I decided to give Harry Potter a chance. I first tried watching the first movie. I didn't like it much and dropped it somewhere in the middle. Then a couple moths ago I loaded a free sample of the first book from Kobo Store and it was... alright. I dropped it as well. I thought it was well written, but was definitely a kids book for which I was too old.

I started playing Hogwart's Legacy a week ago or so. I'm now positively hooked on that game, it's beautiful, it has characters I like, it has a good combat system and it's been my doorway to Hogwarts. So when I couldn't play, I was thinking about it and picked up that book which I dropped earlier. But this time I had a better understanding of the lore, had images of certain places in my mind and it clicked! I am still an old fart and it is still a kids book, but I have found new appreciation for it. I think it's well written on the literary level, it has a lot of situational and verbal humor (I think it has a distinct British flavor to it, like a very toned down version of Pratchett) -- I actually often chuckle when reading it. I bought the whole set (books 1-7) and maybe I'll even read them. Here's hoping that they mature with the readers, that's what I've been told. I'm sure that if I were 12 when reading them for the first time, I'd love them.

As you can see, in my case it's usually that good video games drive me to give another chance to some books that I initially didn't like and because of the great experience with video game adaptations, I start liking the source material. Do you have similar experiences?

(btw this is my first post on Tildes)

Lox is a toy programming language that is designed in Java and C at craftinginterpreters.com.

My challenge to you is: given the constraints of the Lox language, what are some creative or advanced programs you can create?

This page provides a rundown of the design of Lox.

To kick it off, here's a simple function that estimates the value of pi:

fun estimatePi(rounds) {
	var pi = 0;
	var alt = 1;
	for (var i = 0; i < rounds; i = i + 1) {
		pi = pi + alt * 4/(2 * i + 1);
		alt = -alt;
	}
	return pi;
}

print "The value of pi is:";
print getPi(100000);

How did you learn to cook? Who taught you? What factors were important? Looking back, what do you think could have been better?

Or, if you're learning to cook: how is it going? What are you finding tricky? Is it easy to find teaching resources?

There are some very groovy mixes out there. Which ones are your favorite?

Mine is Alice by Pogo, whimsical and slightly spooky, just like the movie it's sampled from.

So apparently Pogo has held some problematic opinions in the past, I'll go with my second most favorite being this Breaking Bad remix.

I've noticed we've gotten in the habit of using the author.[name] tagging convention on articles and blogs and I think this is a great idea. But to me it just seems more important than having to see it as just a tag amidst all the other tags. Right now we put the site name and favicon in a prominent spot whenever we post a link, and I get that this is much easier to extract reliably from just scraping the page than the bylines tend to be. But I wonder if any author.[name] tag could get promoted to a special spot in the "Article: X words" element?

Of course this does leave the question of what to do about multiple authors, but I think the usual convention in academia is to list the first author who appears on the list as the primary author.

I assume this has been discussed before, but when I tried searching for it the abundance of topics with "author" tags made it so I couldn't find anything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Just wondering how many average 10 year olds you think you can fight off before being overwhelmed. Here are the basic terms of fighting: the kids are very angry at you, each one will fight you until they get hurt enough to quit or become unconscious, you are unarmed, and you are in a gated school playground as the battle arena. The playground is about 50 feet around, closed gate around in an octagon and closes up top like a dome. First one kid comes at you, then it adds one each time you defeat a group. Defeat 1 and 2 come, defeat the 2 then 3 come, and so on. Each group arrives by sliding down a pole into the middle playground and sliding down the slide. From there, they rush at you full force.

I feel confident in my abilities to fight. I'm pretty sure I can get to group 13, so that would be roughly give or take 70 kids if I can take a few out in that round.

What do you think?

I would like you to think of two things that you associate with your favourite colour. For example, if your favourite colour were black you might choose "the night sky" and "New Zealand rugby." Try not to put too much thought into it, and don't expand the spoiler sections below until you have your two things.

Today I am putting in writing some very personal thoughts on how to best communicate online and otherwise.

We all know the importance of interpretative charity in online discourse. Without it, we are bound to waste precious time and mental resources chasing dead ends which can be easily avoided by assuming that the interlocutor is both capable and willing to engage in rational conversation. Charitable interpretation can be surmised as the practice of giving precedence to interpretations that maximize the truthfulness and correction of arguments. Charitable Interpretation is essential for civil debate, bypassing unproductive exchanges to arrive quicker at the core of the matter at hand so that each argument has a chance to shine. Charitable Interpretation is a recipe for politeness and intellectual honesty but says very little about emotions and ethical considerations. To address those concerns, I propose a similar concept.

Compassionate Interpretation

Compassionate Interpretation goes a bit further, using a similar procedure to incentivize interactions that also achieve an amenable emotional resolution between the parties. So, while Charitable interpretation allows for productive debate by assuming the most cogent version of an argument, Compassionate Interpretation allows for serendipitous and emotionally enriching exchanges by assuming the interpretations which would lead you to believe that the interlocutor is the most ethical, virtuous, and worthy of sympathy.

When practicing Compassionate Interpretation, one must assume that statements made by others are not only reasonable but also interpret such statements in a way that is least detrimental to their morals. When more than one possible interpretation is possible, the Compassionate Interpreter must choose that which would not equate to a negative opinion of their morals.

By doing that, you avoid needlessly aggravating potential friends and allies. You also give a chance to those that require a change in worldview to improve their morals, stimulated by your kindness and optimism towards them.

On writing this, I remember of how much compassion, patience and kindness I need from others. That makes it easier for me to dispense compassion towards others.

I'll give an example using myself.

I'm a black man. Suppose that someone tells me the following phrase: "I do not understand the appeal of rap music". For some, that statement might indicate that the utterer holds, in addition to a musical preference, a negative opinion of black culture as a whole, which might entail that they hold some kind of prejudice against black people. Or it could simply mean what their words indicate on a surface, literal level: they genuinely do not understand what is appealing about rap music. As a Compassionate Interpreter, I give precedence to the latter. If, in the future, I accrue evidence telling me otherwise, I may revise my interpretation.

As is the case with Charitable Interpretation, there are situations in which a blanket application of Compassionate Interpretation might lead to unfavorable results. That would be the case of a truly malicious individual who intends to exploit our goodwill to cause all kinds of havoc. The principle would still apply, with a few adjustments. When encountering pernicious elements, the Compassionate Interpreter might feel compelled to interpret their actions as the consequence of ignorance, some kind of mental suffering, or traumatic experiences that led them to adopt ill behavior. However, compassion should not be mistaken for foolishness or naivety. A compassionate attitude does not prevent strong measures against wrongdoing. In online spaces, the best recommendation in these cases is to disengage completely and report the wrongdoer on whatever platform you are in.

In writing this, I share something very dear to me, in the hopes that it may lead to some good and helpful thoughts in the minds of the reader.

An offshoot of /r/cocktails recently had a weekly challenge of making cocktails with specified ingredients. In lieu of that, I thought it might be neat if you had an ingredient (spirit, liqueur, fruit, etc.) that you've wanted to use in a cocktail, we could workshop potential uses. Alternatively, if you've found something that works (maybe unexpectedly), you can share it here.

In general, I found a lot of real gems this year! The indie scene is thriving like never before, and smaller teams are being enabled by the likes of Unreal Engine to create really beautiful games on a budget. So I had a lot of free time today and yesterday, and decided to go through my discovery queue and check out a few demos. That quickly ballooned into sitting down and playing right through over a dozen demos, two of which (The Lies of P and Wizard with a Gun) I didn't get far enough into to give any coherent thoughts on. How many demos did you check out? Are there any games you're looking forward to on that basis?

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood: 5/5
From Deconstructeam, a Valencian studio with a strong emphasis on narrative, choice, and empowering the player to create their own art, this demo was one of the big winners for me. Gameplay revolves around conversations, VN style, but those conversations often happen in the context of you performing, essentially, tarot readings where the cards are all designed by you. I had a lovely, relaxing time making my own cards, and the challenge of interpreting them to the people around me in a way that felt… true, I guess, was memorable. There is an impressive level of responsiveness to your choices on display here, both on a micro level and, it seems, on a macro level, so I have to think that the game will be pretty replayable. My one gripe was that the dialogue felt a bit stiff and unnatural at times. The game isn’t voice-acted, and the lack of rhythm or cadence in a lot of conversations kept them from flowing well. But that said, even if individual lines of dialogue fell a bit short, placed in context, the conversations felt meaningful, engrossing, and interesting. I will be buying this on release.

Death Must Die: 4/5
I’m a sucker for the “Survivors” genre. My first experience with it preceded Vampire Survivors, the little $3 game that swept the world last year and popularized the new gameplay style; I started with the mobile game that inspired VS: Magic Survival. I had tens of hours in that game. And each subsequent entry into the genre; VS, HoloCure, 20 Minutes Til Dawn, etc., etc. have only worn me out more. These games are all the same: more enemies fill the screen; you get more autofire weapons to deal with them and dodge around to avoid contact damage. Fun for half an hour, but don’t really leave you wanting more. Death Must Die is different. Isometric rather than top-down, the combat here is all manual. You click to fire off an attack that needs to be well aimed; enemies don’t deal contact damage but instead have telegraphed attacks that you have to dodge. It feels very ARPG, actually; a bit Diablo. And the level-up system, which sees you selecting boons from different gods, is clearly inspired by Hades and offers considerably more interesting choices (so far, at least) than the usual Survivors game. Feels a lot more skill based, and a bit more build-craft-y, than usual. And I even caught a whiff of a story, though how well it’ll be executed remains to be seen. I look forward to the full release. Just wish there were more defensive options – maybe a parry?

El Paso, Elsewhere: 4/5
This is cute. A Max Payne-style third person shooter that’s well written in a surreal, noir sort of way; corny enough to be delightful; dark enough to maintain the tension. Visually, it’s a low res, low poly callback to the PS1 era. The gameplay is pretty tough; I didn’t finish the demo, but I imagine it would be a lot of fun to master. I’m keeping my eye on this one, even if it’s not my usual type of game. A special callout: there are biblically accurate angel enemies in this game, which makes me a very happy woman.

Escape from Mystwood Mansion: 3/5
I like escape rooms, and this demo is just a well-constructed escape room – actually, it skews very closely to the types of puzzles and mechanics I’ve come to expect from physical escape rooms. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing; I do wish the game used its medium to get a little more wild with it. But the puzzles were generally pretty well constructed and offered a few fun “aha!” moments when I solved them, and I didn’t need to look at a walkthrough or lean on hints to get through. That said, the hints that I did use were pretty lackluster, and in one case, actually wrong, so that system needs some revision. Some of the sound design got a bit grating, too. I don’t know. Were this a co-op experience I’d probably like it a bit more. The appeal of an escape room is the excitement of solving it with a friend, and there are certainly enough self-contained puzzle sequences here to support that. But no; Mystwood Mansion is a solo experience, and I’m not sure if it’ll be that fun to solve multiple predictable escape rooms alone, staring at a computer screen.

The Invincible: 3/5
I am of two minds about The Invincible. This game is an atompunk sci-fi walking sim adapted from a novel (my roommate tells me) by Stanislaw Lem, and so, suitably, what we have in this demo is a slice of high-concept sci-fi steeped in personal stakes. I have a hard time thinking of anything bad to say about this game. It looks good, runs well, has an interesting story that left me wanting more. And yet, one day after playing it, I just do not want to pick the game up again. I suppose part of it was the pace. Some of the best walking sims – What Remains of Edith Finch – tell incredible stories in the space of two hours. Meanwhile this demo was 40 minutes long and felt like only a small piece of some grand, sprawling story. Environments are huge and your walking speed is pretty slow, so there’s a lot of time between set pieces where your character is just having headaches or struggling to breathe, which really wore me down. I can’t imagine playing this game for 10 hours; 5 might be pushing it. It’s not super tempting when I could just read the book.

Loodlenaut: 2/5
Oh boy, Loodlenaut. Where to begin. Okay, so, I actually like this game. It’s pretty, and relaxing; an ocean exploration game where your job is to clean up trash, rescue wildlife, and climb the tech tree. I have played through the entire demo, done everything there is to do, which took about an hour. And I will absolutely not be playing the full game. If you’ve played Powerwash Simulator, you know how satisfying it can be to get rid of muck and watch a meter climb up to 100% clean, and Loodlenaut scratches a similar itch. The problem here is that the game feels so clunky and limited that the frustration often outweighs the satisfaction. For example, you have a cleaning gun that picks up trash, destroys goop, and breaks boxes. But you don’t aim the gun, the game does, and it’s not really based on where you're facing or what you're closest to so much as it is on the game’s capricious moods. Say you’re trying to pick up a glass bottle, but there’s a crate nearby that you can’t break yet because you don’t have the right upgrade. Well, Loodlenaut will snap the gun to the crate and repeatedly try to break it, until you wiggle around enough to get it to change its mind and pick up the bottle. Wielding the gun is a constant frustration, as is sluggishly moving through the ocean. Your swim speed is slow, and your boost recharges slowly, so going back and forth between central base and the area you’re cleaning – something you have to do pretty frequently – takes what feels like an eternity until you sink lots of resources into infrastructure. None of this is a bad idea – incentivising players to craft boost rings to improve traversal is a good idea; auto-targeting is more comfortable than aiming on a controller – it’s just these systems are poorly implemented, which leads to frustration.

Luna Abyss: 5/5
Luna Abyss is a fucking wild demo. I downloaded it because the game’s description used they/them pronouns for its protagonist. I had no idea what I was getting into. So, okay, the best comparison I have for this game is to Returnal. Like that game, Luna Abyss is a high-production value 3D shooter where hitting your shots is easy, and the difficulty comes from avoiding the attacks of bullet-hell style enemies. And like Returnal, it has a strange, unsettling atmosphere, tight movement, and punchy, satisfying guns. Of course, Luna Abyss isn’t a roguelike, and it appears much more straightforward with its story beats so far. I don’t know, I’m having a hard time capturing what makes this game so great. Let’s start with the world, which is bleak and dark and oppressive. You run through cavernous metal structures, all black and grey, lit in harsh red. Enormous metal pipes twist and curl and embrace each other like enormous, mechanical intestines, and you run across them to get to your next objective. This place was not designed for you, and you feel that so clearly as you traverse it. You jump off the pipes and enter into combat, where a generous aim assist ensures that all your shots will hit. But there are a couple of enemy types to prioritize. You fire your shieldbreaker at a flying enemy, killing it, and time slows to a crawl, increasing the impact of the shot and giving you a tiny moment of respite to see what bullets you’ll have to dodge and decide what enemy you should prioritize next. A miniboss spawns in, grinning facelessly, and releases a flower of projectiles. You sprint and jump and dodge and you keep firing until she’s dead. The room is clear, and the demo is over, and your screen is awash with the bright, striking red of the UI. “Thanks for playing,” it says. I felt like I should be thanking it, instead.
It’s impossible to say, at this juncture, whether the game will be good. The crumbs of story were certainly engrossing; the combat fun; the world, striking. At the very least, Luna Abyss looks like it will be one of the most interesting and unique games of the year, whenever it comes out. I can’t wait.

Sea of Stars: 3/5
This one is alright. The world is beautiful, the music peppy, the character designs good. I just honestly have not played enough turn-based isometric RPGs to compare it to anything. I did have two big disappointments: I thought the writing was a little… on-the-nose, I guess? Characters just stated their objectives and everything was pretty surface-level. Dialogue wasn’t attacking or defending, only conveying information. And while the combat was fun and had a challenging timing element, it ended with a boss who I spent like ten minutes fighting for a single attempt, used all my items, did everything I could, and still lost to in dramatic fashion with no indication I had done any real damage. My suspicion is that the boss is simply meant to be an organic end to the demo, a scripted loss, but I don’t know; if not, it probably indicates that this type of game isn’t for me, since I found it to be quite a slog.

Stray Gods: 2/5
I really wanted to like Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical. It is, essentially, a choice-based VN in the style of a broadway musical about ancient Greek gods struggling to live in modern society. A tantalizing premise, if a bit theatre-kid-y. But my degree is literally in theatre criticism, so I have a lot of tolerance for the genre’s usual excesses. I can’t think of another musical video game, but Stray Gods’ demo did not convince me that the idea could work. The performances aren’t the problem here; Laura Bailey is a charismatic lead with pipes good enough to carry the show, and the supporting cast of big names (Troy Baker, Felicia Day, Khary Paton) are no slouches either. But so much about this game is just not working for me. Let’s start with the sound design. This is one of those games where it feels like all the actors are recording in totally separate rooms. There’s a lot of dead air, not a lot of dynamism or one person bouncing off the other during conversation. It robs scenes of a lot of momentum and impact. And when I say “dead air,” I mean dead air. Bafflingly, the game seemingly has no room noise, no background audio, so when people aren’t talking, or music isn’t playing, everything is completely, uncannily silent. It’s genuinely weird.
The musical numbers alleviate this weirdness by filling the soundscape but do little else to pull me in. We get to see four songs in the demo; two from the opening act, two picked from later in the game. All of these songs are very similar – fugues or duets, where one character has one perspective and another character (or chorus) has another perspective, and their conflict is expressed and then resolved through song. Which is a fine structure for a song in a musical, don’t get me wrong, but it is not a fine structure for every song. Even our main character Grace’s “I Want” song, the song that establishes her, her desires, and internal landscape and should absolutely be a solo, is a duet with a woman she’s just met. It does not work. And when the game has you making dialog choices during songs, it robs them of a natural arc; there’s no organic progression from the characters’ starting points to their ending points. Some part of me hopes that this game will be good, but I’m not optimistic. Stray Gods is no Hadestown.

Vampire Hunters: 3/5
In the Death Must Die blurb, I praised that game for refining the “Survivors” genre by making tweaks that allow for more skill and expression. But fuck that. Vampire Hunters is a braver game than Death Must Die will ever be, because it dares to ask, “What if Vampire Survivors was a boomer shooter where all your guns were on screen at the same time?” The result is absolutely wild; by the end of a run, more screen space is devoted to your guns than the entire rest of the game. It feels pretty weird to play, too; all of your guns have different ammo counts and may or may not be automatic, but all fire with the same button, so it can be tough to manage all of their separate ammo pools. And XP drops have a tiny pickup radius, so you really have to move to get them all. The neatest trick the game pulls is that it increases enemy spawn rate when you sprint, so moving at a high speed carries a lot of risk. But apart from that, this game is maybe too audacious to be enjoyable.

Viewfinder: 4/5
I am not a frequent puzzle game player, but I, like most every PC gamer, have a soft spot for the kind of reality-warping sci-fi-y puzzle genre originated by Portal and carried forward by the likes of Superliminal and, now, Viewfinder. First: this game is a technical marvel. You are able to, in essence, carry around entire environments, often with a wildly different art style from the rest of the game, and place them seamlessly and instantaneously in the world. I played this at 1440p, >100 FPS with nary a stutter on my midrange system. The ability to place photos and enter them is genuinely incredible on all levels other than technical, too; it feels magical, like stepping into a painting that you yourself made. My only question, one that the demo did not answer, is whether Viewfinder will be able to construct interesting puzzles out of this mechanic. This was something that I think Superliminal often failed to do, too; when the central mechanic of your puzzles is so unique and novel and powerful, how can you limit it in such a way that players actually have to think and put in effort to solve problems? For me, at least, every puzzle in Viewfinder was solved pretty much instantly, with no “aha!” moments, and that does worry me a bit.

I, like many gamers, grew up playing Pokémon Red and Nintendo 64 and was obsessed with Nintendo products. I graduated to a PS2 and PS3 and became super into Metal Gear Solid and Call of Duty and Fallout. Also spent a ton of time with the Guitar Hero series. I loved the escape gaming brought me and it genuinely helped me relax.

Fast forward a few years and I hadn’t really played a video game between the years of like 2011-2017. College, moving cross country and busyness of life kept me from gaming. Finally in 2017, I bought a Switch and Breath of the Wild and felt the same magical feeling I remember when I first started playing Ocarina of Time, or the first time I booted up Metroid Prime, or Metal Gear Solid 4. I started to get into online gaming and made a lot of friends. I played my Switch frequently for a few years.

During the beginning of COVID lockdowns, I turned more to reading than gaming and my Switch gathered lots of dust. I ultimately ended up buying an Xbox Series S when it was announced because I’d never owned an Xbox system and Game Pass really intrigued me. I went through a phase of being very into Destiny 2, Halo, Gears of War, Forza Horizon…a bunch of games I had never played before.

Then, a divorce, a new job change, another cross country move brought new levels of stress to my life. I lacked an attention span strong enough to focus on a video game. FPS’s seemed boring, online games couldn’t keep my attention long enough to get through a match, and eventually I’d just leave a game on the pause menu while I messed around mindlessly on my phone. Gaming wasn’t even a way for me to decompress anymore, it seemed more like a chore I was procrastinating—which sucks.

I’ve fallen deeper into this lately, as more life changes have come along. I work a stressful job with long hours. I’m now a stepparent to two young boys. The little free time I have I spend walking the dog, reading, and trying to just let my mind settle and decompress. Let alone, if I try to turn the Xbox on or have the Switch on my lap, it turns into a whole event where the kids want to sit and watch and participate and ask tons of questions (which is fine, but sometimes I just want to do something by myself for me!)

I miss the time of my youth where gaming was a relief and a release for me. I miss how I felt when I first got a Switch and felt so excited and so nostalgic and reinvigorated and looked forward to playing a game! Now…I feel like I can’t even consider myself a gamer.

So. That’s a long winded way to ask if anyone else has gone through similar ruts, or fallen away from gaming, and if so, what games helped you get that spark back? What games brought you back to that nostalgic feeling you had when you first got into gaming? What games help you decompress after a long day? What games have you recently become obsessed with in such a way that you look forward to playing them and are always thinking about them?

I want to get back into gaming. I want to feel the magic again.

I have to preface this question with a disclaimer that I am an eager learner of Linux and servers in general, but I'm still a beginner and often run into roadblocks.

Current setup:

• Raspberry Pi 3 with Adguard Home acting as primary DNS
• unRAID server with Adguard Home acting as secondary DNS
• About a dozen other containers running on same server
• DHCP is handled by my router

Goal:

• provide local DNS names for the containers running in unRAID so I don't have to enter IP:Port (e.g, calibre.local) which also has the side benefit saving the various username/password combos into Bitwarden with an actual domain attached to it instead of 14 occurrences of 192.168.x.x

Additional info:

I had PiHole running on the Pi before as the primary and only DNS previously. And I seem to recall you could put IP:Port as a custom DNS and have it resolve. AGH does have a feature for DNS Rewrites but it does not allow for port numbers, IPs only. I switched to AGH because it seems to be more effective at blocking ads, which is likely more a function of the provided DNS blocklists out of the box as opposed to what I was doing in Pihole. I would prefer to stick with AGH for adblocking/DNS if possible.

I looked into just modifying host files on the main computers I touch these apps from, but again, can't include port. What is a good solution for this? Preferably something approachable for a newb like me.

I recently learned about the Wooting two HE, a keyboard with analog input. The interesting feature is something they call "rapid trigger", which defines the actuation point as when the key changes direction (up or down), rather than the key reaching a specific height.

I'm wondering how much faster this could let someone press or release a key. I tried searching online but I can't find anyone who has measured the average time for typists to reach the actuation point, or even the average velocity of a key-press.

Yeah that's the question. I was thinking of the possibility of posting deals here. But it might just eat up the other tech content here. That's not my goal, but I'd like to start a PC building\support\tech deals tilde.

I may be asking a dumb question or going about this wrong but I'm not sure what to do here.

So right now, I receive an estimation from one company in a PDF. It has a bunch of fields such as customer name, product, address, etc. Then I type that data and put it into Excel, where I add additional data that I have. From there I have a second PDF which has form fields that I fill with the data of the Excel spreadsheet.

My problem is with the first PDF that I get from this other company, unless I am doing something wrong I am unable to get that first PDF to show the data as fields. If I convert the first PDF into an Excel then the table data is very messy.

The amount of typing or copy and paste that it's not hard but it is time consuming. What is the best way for me to go about doing this? I've been Googling things but I'm not sure the right words of action I'm looking for.

I hope this all makes sense, but if not please ask questions and I'll do my best to try and clarify further.

This is currently going on with me. Someone has spoofed my home phone number, and has been using it to call other people. Whenever the other person misses the spoofer's call they end up calling me. I have answered quite the handful of calls from this. It has been happening since Wednesday, and it has gotten often enough that I have been carrying around a wireless phone in my pocket. I did end up reporting it to the fcc, but that hasn't done anything yet.

Anyway this gets me wondering, have you ever had your phone number spoofed? If so, how did you deal with it?

As a hobbyist, I do digital and film photography, but I tend towards film unless the situation calls for it (like doing motorsports photography, for example).

I'm curious how many of this smaller community shoot film, and what everyone's relationship with film is. Do you shoot casually? Professionally? Part of this post is trying to gauge how much interest there could be in the occasional discussion of analog photography subjects. Would love to hear anything you have to say on the subject, be it film itself, gear (liking or collecting gear is not a bad thing!), or the process of shooting on analog formats.

If anyone is in the CA Bay Area there is a film group (organized through the Meetup app) that does semi-regular meets that we'd love to have more participants in.

Feel free to drop a link to wherever you post your work, if you do. I've really been enjoying posting on Glass for the last 6 months. It's paid but sure as hell beats Instagram, in my opinion.

I am going on a road trip with my family, including two young kids. I want to build a massive playlist for this, as we will be in the car for probably 30 hours round trip. I’m looking to branch out and add some stuff that I haven’t heard of before, but also I want to keep it PG (no swearing, sex, drugs, etc.)

Open to all genres and styles.