July 29 – Patti and Lenny
Daxophone
The daxophone is a relatively new instrument. Like the electric guitar, it uses analog pickups to amplify sounds the player creates with a simple physical interface. This is the type of instrument I like most.
This video shows how the daxophone is played and some of the sounds it can make.
This album by the remarkable Kazuhisa Uchihashi is super fun music music played brilliantly, and probably the most accessible example of what the daxophone is capable of as a musical instrument.
The daxophone is a pretty interesting way to get sounds in general.
Well, THAT took long enough!
This secretive digital weapon propelled an outsider candidate to Colombia’s presidential runoff
Wappid—A gamified social media-style SaaS political marketing platform! The idea sells itself so hard, they didn’t even need to add “Blockchain!”
This is gonna work like crazy when it hits North America. Political campaigning already works like crazy here.
Literally
…experienced a palpable frisson from using the phrase “I am replying from @netdud…” in a sentence and realising it was completely correct.
“Replying from @…”
Mmmmmmm….
Same as it ever was
tl:dr: A very small number of people make a shitload of money from popular music. A slightly larger number make not enough money from popular music. Everyone else makes no money from popular music.
Worth a read, if only to find out that you are probably part of the problem.
On the upside, popular music has never been so cheap.
Great article for small business people
In this clear, well-written post, a person describes how a small project for his business went badly, and ended up taking about 7x the resources (in time and money) that he expected.
You’ll probably see this story reposted a lot, because it can sound really clickery-baitery. If you have to make decisions for a small business, the source article is really worth reading, though.
He’s taken the time to figure out what went wrong, especially the last part, where he discusses the mistakes he made. They are pretty common mistakes, but it is unusual to see someone present them so precisely, point out WHY these are easy mistakes to make, and why they are sometimes unavoidable. Excellent, useful writing.
General advice regarding physical volume
Tip for mail and delivery people: If you can’t fit your head in my mailbox, you can’t fit something the size of your head in my mailbox. You should not try harder to do the latter than you would the former.
This advice can be scaled and applied to all body parts and most professions.
Troubleshooting advice
If you hit a dead end while troubleshooting something, try this:
- Stop focusing on what is broken and why
- Explain to yourself (or preferably, someone else who is patient), step by step, how the thing is supposed to work, and where it fits in with other things
This will very often change your perspective, adjust your scope, or knock out a wrong assumption that you have been following.
I don’t have the original source for this, but if you do, let me know and I will attribute.
Big Sur to Monterey
Car: 40 mins
Bicycle: 2 hours, 45 minutes
iMac (2017), wired connection: 8 hours, 10 minutes