colomon

It's worked about 90% of the time for me. Basically everything I've sent to kindle the last two months I've sent as EPUB, and most of it worked. A lot of them were the "Compatible EPUB" version from Standard EBooks. (Even though it says they're not for Kindle, that appears to be out-of-date.)

So I just tried Man and Superman this way -- https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/george-bernard-shaw/man-an... -- and it worked just fine. I guess I don't know if the formatting is completely correct, but I haven't had any difficulty reading books loaded this way -- pretty sure they look significantly better than the Project Gutenberg equivalents.

If you're just talking about old enough to have a grandchild, 50 is plenty old -- indeed, old enough to have gotten married after college, had a kid who got married after college, and that kid now has a kid of their own. At least one of my high school classmates did that. (I'm 51.)

If you're talking old enough to be, say, a college student's grandma, then obviously your 70-90 estimate is much more likely.

(Bigger picture: I've been professionally programming for three-and-a-half decades. I find myself more and more annoyed by the user-unfriendliness of tech as I age. As an on-topic example, earlier this month Amazon's mail-to-Kindle feature rejected an EPUB I sent it, and when I used Calibre to convert it to MOBI and sent that instead, lectured me that MOBI was obsolete. I guess this is especially annoying because it seems like they're replacing a service which basically never failed with one that is failing like 10% of the time I try to use it...)

Nothing against the Asahi team, it sounds like they're doing fantastic work. But I'm a little surprised at the talk (which I've seen before) which indicates theirs is the first approach allowing you to use Linux on ARM Macs. A few months ago I used UTM Virtual Machines (which itself uses QEMU) to get ARM Linux up and running on my M1 Mini, and it worked brilliantly. Admittedly I only use the command line interface for working on Linux -- maybe the GUI is lacking? -- but I effortlessly got G++, Perl 5, and Raku working on it, and used that to get a full build of my $work up and running. It was actually easier than getting the same setup working on the MacOS side of things, with great performance.

To be more precise, he wrote the music which was used as the theme song for "Cosmos" -- it originally appeared on Vangelis's album "Heaven and Hell", five years before "Cosmos" came out. Apparently it was called Movement 3 from "Symphony to the Powers B", though on my old CD copy of the album it just appears in the middle of the track "Heaven and Hell Part 1". Really powerfully evocative music, takes me right back to being a 10 year old watching "Cosmos".

Oh. I'm still using MacOS 10.14, so there's an official up-to-date version to download from the Lilypond site, and I think I'm using a two year old version of that. (I am very slow to update the OS on my main work machine, usually just ride out the major version it came with until I update to a new machine; and since I was working on a book in Lilypond, I wasn't in a hurry to update it, either.)

Sorry I can't be of more help immediately!

ABC is very well optimized for single voice traditional instrumental music. In that domain (and with a bit of experience at it), it's very easy to write and read ABC:

  T:The Three Smokestacks
  M:4/4
  L:1/8
  C:Solomon Foster
  R:Reel
  K:G
  EF|G2BG FGAF|GBdg ecAF|G2BG FGAF|GEFD EDEF|
  G2BG FGAF|GBdg ecAF|G2BG FGAF|GEFD EDEF||
  GBdg e2ef|gefd edBA|GBdg e2ef|gefd e2dB|
  GBdg e2ef|gefd edBA|Beed efgf|ecAF GFEF|

The header L: field defines the default length of a note. In the body of the tune, uppercase letters A-G are notes in the octave that starts with middle C, lowercase letters a-g are notes in the octave above that. A number following a note name is a multiplier for the note length. Bar lines are pipes.

The drawback to ABC is as you wander away from that original use case, it gets harder and harder to use. Here's snippet of an arrangement of Sleigh Ride I was working on a few years ago:

  z +mf+ (+accent+e .^d/) z/ z|(+accent+e .d/) z/ z +p+ .^F/.=G/||[K:G bass octave=-1] +crescendo(+ .A .A .A .A|.A .A .A .A|+f+ +crescendo)+ +accent+ d zz +sfz+ G|

Studying it again, I can mostly figure out what it is trying to do -- z is a rest, things surrounded in +s are extra commands, so +p+ and +f+ are dynamics, +accent+ puts an accent over the next note, etc. It's still pretty easy to understand, but I'd have a hell of a time playing the music from that notation. And I coded up that ABC, if someone else had done it there's a decent chance I'd have to stop and look up some of their notation in the ABC standard.

I've never noticed any difficulty getting LilyPond running on MacOS or Linux? I use it regularly on MacOS, and keep it installed on Linux for special occasions.

Off-topic, but is there a guide to best practices for portable pre-compiled headers out there somewhere? I'm under considerable pressure to add pre-compiled headers for Windows to my code, and it won't have any significant benefit for me unless I can also make it work on MacOS and Linux. So far my Googling has turned up little information for any platform other than Windows, and nothing that would suggest how to do it well for all three platforms. (Well, more to the point, Visual C++, clang, and g++.)

There's a bassoonist urban legend (possibly true) that Bernstein wrote the ludicrous high Fs in the West Side Story bassoon part so that one of his pals who played bassoon would have to be hired for the pit orchestra, because he was the only one around who could play that high.

Yes, the first edition of The Princess Bride had red text for Goldman's "editorial" comments. I don't know if there have been editions since which maintained that convention?

Huh, that happened to my Galaxy S9 phone, but I haven't noticed issues with my MBP. Geez, something else to worry about...

For me the big eye-opener was learning to play traditional Irish dance music on whistle. About two years into the process, I thought I was great. I could read sheet music, I could play fast, I could play rolls, I knew a couple hundred tunes! Clearly I had to just keep it up at the same rate a few more years and I'd be a master.

And then, about two years after that, it gradually sunk in that I'd been missing everything about what the music was really about. I hadn't been able to pick out what made good playing good, so I couldn't tell that my playing wasn't. I had been focusing on a bunch of superficial stuff and missing the heart of the thing.

And now 20+ years on, I am vastly better at it than I was when I thought I was great. But I know there are loads of people much better. And I'm constantly worried there's some other epiphany waiting to happen when I will realize I'm still missing something absolutely key...

Ugh, just went to Amazon to check out the book, and discovered I bought the Kindle version last summer (maybe when the article originally came out) and then forgot to actually read it.

My librarian wife tells me she has bought some of them for the public library, so I guess it's just a weird gap in my own knowledge and not a "nobody in Michigan has heard of these" thing.

Is this a regional thing? I ask because this seems like something I should have heard of -- my family had the 54 volume "Great Books of the Western World" on our shelves, I took two semesters of Great Books in college, frequent bookstores wherever I go, etc. -- but I can't recall ever hearing of this series before.

I think Thucydides is exactly what we read next in 1st semester Great Books.

There's also a classic Liz Carroll reel, "Barbra Streisand's Trip to Saginaw": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr2RgTmO1pI (I was in the (Saginaw) audience the night Liz named it.)

"It can read the formats R13, R14, R2000, R2004, R2007, R2010, R2013 and R2018 for 99%." So it seems Wikipedia is wrong there.

Are you sure that github points to the same Cat language? The stuff in the readme there seems like the same sort of idea as the other Cat, but vastly more primitive.

I got into Forth in the mid-80s on my Commodore 64. At that point I'd learned C64 Basic and 6502 assembly, and Forth was just a revelation. A much more expressive paradigm than Basic, the full power of bare metal programming, and if using a "high" level language proved too slow it was trivially easy and almost seamless to define performance-critical words in assembly instead. It was a joy to program.

(Edited to add that while I haven't done any significant Forth work in probably 20 years, I've long been intrigued by Factor and I keep meaning to try 8th, as I've got some small simple program ideas that would be lovely to be able to run on Mac, iOS, and Android.)

I have a perfect real-world example. About four years ago some of my code broke in certain cases. I came up with a fix that relied on a case-sensitive regex to check for those cases. I think I made it case-sensitive because I wanted to make sure it didn't trigger accidentally on something added in the future. And these case names had never changed, right?

Yep, now that I've spelled it out, what happened is obvious. Three years later, I got ordered to change one letter in these case names from lower case to upper case. Of course I didn't remember that I'd used a case-sensitive test against the names three years before. And bam, the bug was back, and as there was no test for it, I shipped code with the bug.

The good news is the bug was obvious as soon as the customers tried to compile my code, so it didn't cause any harm but embarrassment on my part. Even so, it took me a while to track down what was going on. Imagine my shock when I got into the code and found the fix I thought I needed to make was already there... but itself needed to be fixed!

Looking at their overview, this is Constructive Solid Geometry rather than B-rep (Boundary Representation) solid geometry. STEP does hypothetically support CSG, but B-rep STEP files are vastly more common in my experience.

Goderich also has active salt mines... I'm presuming this project is using a played out branch of them.

Wait, isn't this the obligatory one in this context? https://xkcd.com/224/

And yet... asking us to sign up for Board Game Arena and Discord is exactly what the weekly game night I've been involved with the last month did, and they have 8+ people every week. (For that matter, I asked the folks in my new D&D campaign to sign up with D&D Beyond and Discord, and that went fine as well.)

Since she mentions it is on sale, the answer is most likely Swordheart: https://www.amazon.com/Swordheart-T-Kingfisher-ebook/dp/B07K...

Indie writer isn't exactly right, she's a successful children's book author under her real name, with at least a dozen books out from Puffin. (Also a Hugo award winning comic book creator, but that was self-published.)

But yes, writing for adults as T. Kingfisher she's mostly self-published, and that was the case with the book in question, I believe.

I haven't done any serious Forth programming in 30+ years, but every time I see a limited resources programming environment, I immediately get the urge to implement Forth on it. "This new game is going to include a DCPU-16 virtual computer you have to program? Great, all I need to do is implement Forth on it..."

Luckily for my already very limited spare time, so far I've managed to resist this urge.

I just carry a small Anker USB-C hub in my laptop case -- has two USB-A ports, an HDMI port, and an SD card reader. I must say, though, I've used it less than I expected to when I got it.

Right, that's actually my standard Calibre use case: Load book into Calibre. Convert it to MOBI if needed. E-mail it to my Kindle address.

It then pops up everywhere I have a Kindle app, mostly my iPad and Galaxy S9.

Huh. Now that I'm thinking about it, it seems like this would be even easier to do from the command line...