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....
I know Caltech did/does use it in their undergraduate core(?), and even has Dr. Prakash speak w/ the students. That said, I'm pretty sure field application of the device hasn't really panned out and runs into resolution problems. I'm honestly not sure if that was the intention, but checking a few literature review articles and recent pubs doesn't seem to show any major success stories, and mostly notes about resolution.
My favorite invention from his lab is the Paperfuge[^1], though the device is probably too recent to know how useful it'll be. Considering that so much point-of-care diagnostics can be done with either a cheap lateral-flow kit or some Cepheid or Abbot microfluidic product though, a non-integrated centrifuge might be a bit tougher to justify.
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?
