Under $100:
A second hand piano for $80. Learning an instrument is a deeply satisfying experience if you stick to it (as well as frustrating and confusing). Literally no end to how much you can learn. It has given me hours of “in the zone” moments, so well needed in a stressful world. I also see (hear?) music in a different light and can understand it better.
I am interested in learning piano myself having just gotten one for my kid. Did you learn it by yourself? If so any resources you can point in my direction? Thanks!
I've started recently, for an adult absolute beginner I would recommend: Alfred's Basic Adult All-In-One Piano Course (covers all types of music). A popular alternative is the Faber Adult Piano Adventures (more classical). Both books will go over how to position your wrists and fingers, music theory, as well as pieces.
I'm sure Alfred and Faber have books for kids. Check reddit and amazon. But you won't go wrong with books from either probably.
Late reply…
Self taught. YouTube has a ton of resources (recommend Pianote and Matthew Cawood). Learn some music theory basics, if you have the time study sheet music, you will understand what you are doing on a deeper level. I found it motivating to not only play simple pieces in the beginning but also harder ones that you enjoy listening to. They will be reallly hard initially but you will improve!
I recently dusted off piles of CDs from my wardrobe to put up for sale. Was really chocked that they go for around €30-50 each, one sold for €90! It is mostly semi rare electronic music from the 90s so I would not expect the same from pop/rock. But do check out your old CDs laying around, could be worth quite a bit
OSM has the potential to be the open, available source of truth for so much of our data. From there, we can simply build curated UIs that displays what we need (keep in mind that OSM is not a “map”). Opening hours for example. Today this info is either on a webpage or google maps. Sometimes contradicting each other, where a Facebook status update has the most accurate info.
Unfortunately OSM doesn’t solve the problem if the POI owners don’t use it; and in my experience they often don’t even know it exists. Even in my densely-populated area with tons of OSM contributors a lot of POIs are still outdated because restaurant and store owners care only about their website/Instagram/FB or Google Maps and don’t know about OSM. When I started contributing ~12 years ago a main contributor used to say it was a waste of time to map restaurants because the data quickly becomes outdated if nobody’s there to check; I don’t know if he still thinks the same.
This will be massively controversial I'm sure, but I'm starting to think it should be illegal for companies to get the (unpaid) public to contribute to their own private database. Those store owners don't want to make the data available to Google, they want to make it available to the public. Companies like Google are abusing the public to further their own goals at the detriment to us all. Pay someone to do it? Fine. It's yours. Get it from the public? Then it's public data and you have to make it available to the public.
I have a similar abacus (japanese soroban) and use it to keep scores in board games by dedicating say three columns per player (they will never get more than 999 points). It is such an underrated piece of "technology". Calculating actions (e.g "add 45", "subtract 13") become finger movements. You can "feel" what the actions represent in finger movement. This enables you to calculate very fast, faster than typing it into a calculator. I am sure the roman calculators (the humans operating the abacus) got really fast at this, maybe even to the point of internalizing a mental abacus. Look at the guy on the left in this counting contest, he's air counting on his mental abacus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-THPY14fzc
The boy got the answer wrong! But I have seen math schools where the children do similar arithmetic on air abacus. Just this kid couldn’t hack it with those fast digits!
Why aren't we building "products" from lego rather than seeing them as toys? The promise of 3D-printers haven't really played out, but it would be interesting if we had a material like lego to build some of the things we need. Lego is infinitely customizable and each brick would be potentially useful in any product that you would build. Of course there are some obvious downsides but I think the idea of an ecosystem of standardized, "open" and adaptable materials is super interesting.
> The promise of 3D-printers haven't really played out
I don't know what you think the "promise of 3D-printers" was but if you think it hasn't played out then probably you had unreasonable expectations.
> Why aren't we building "products" from lego rather than seeing them as toys?
Would you buy such a product? They would be much larger than the same thing not made out of lego. They would shatter in your bag during transportation. They would be more awkward to use because of the rectangular shape of the bricks. They would collect dirt in all the crevices/studs.
Look around your home or recent purchase history, which products would be improved by making them out of lego?
That said, I have made a couple of things as prototypes, mostly for archery:
- spine testing jig (had to use a bunch of washers on a bolt for the two-pound weight though)
- fletching jig
Also some small desk accessories --- a tablet stand w/ pen holder, a rack for a CD-player --- the two stacks of bricks holding up a wooden shelf are still on place though.
Ｉ actually toyed with the idea with the Technic "bricks" that give much much more flexibility.
I can vouch for the versatility, it kinda works for a headphone hanger, or a cup holder, small foldable desk racks etc. But then these components are too light and don't have enough strength to keep shape for months. Many of the parts bent over time, some broke under abuse.
Also for these kind of use pieces are big and finding a compact build is really a chalenge. I ended up using a ton of custom built third party pieces.
I'd definitely try with a 3d printing next, it will allow for smaller parts at least, and probably cost way less in materials (Lego are overpriced for that)
At one point they sold a set around building toddler-sized furniture that could be disassembled and repurposed as the kids grow up. Now it looks like the closest thing they offer is desk organizers (which is still cool).
There are tons of plans available online for LEGO "products". Stands for smartphones and tablets and headphones are the first thing that comes to mind and I've seen a lot of those. Pencil holders and such are popular as well.
3D printing is much more versatile than LEGO. Take just a random example: a cup holder for in the car. Using 3D printing, it would look and work similar to the ones you can buy in a store. Using LEGO would make it very bulky, aesthetically not so great, and also it would fall apart easily.
I think the original commenter above has simply never used a 3D printer for anything practical.
Which doesn't make sense, either. 3d printers are the ultimate bracket makers. I've used mine numerous times for things like broken sliding light switches or really anything small and made of plastic that breaks.
Tesla is trying any means necessary since they know that Swedish labour laws are strong: if they do not have a union agreement, workers are allowed to strike (indefinitely). This vacuum we are now in is probably very costly for Tesla so I at this point I think it is an ideological/personal battle..
Are they on strike though? Are they refusing to come in to work and not being paid?
From the blurb it sounds like they're choosing to not deliver mail to one particular person/company .. which sounds absurd.. I assume postal workers can't on their own decide to not deliver mail to people/companies they don't like as long as it's framed as a protest
I think they probably have the power to not cross a picket line, or even a full blown sympathy strike if they want. In this case, the union who wants Tesla to accept the sectoral contract is striking, so the postal union is refusing to cross the picket line by doing business with Tesla.
That doesn't make sense. It says they're refusing to allow Tesla to pick up the license plates as well. And in any case, is a picket line a legally protected entity now?
Stealing or withholding property is not a legitimate form of striking. If you don't want to deliver something, fine, but you can't stop someone from picking it up themselves
They are not stealing or withholding the property - they are refusing to deliver it. They are not stopping someone from picking it up, postnord is. It would be weird for any carrier to allow outsiders to enter their premises.
Just going by what's been reported, so let me clarify I'm totally ignorant of the actual facts of Swedish law. But it appears that Tesla can't pick the plates up due to a law on the books stating that plates must be sent via mail.
I'm using the word "picket line" informally to describe a strike / labor action, which I would guess is a legally protected and regulated thing in Sweden, as indeed in the US.
Good, I’m rooting for the people. Tesla (and others) are blatantly ignoring human decency and social contracts in the pursuit of their founder’s greed. This must stop. I’m glad Sweden has strong enough labour unions to battle this at scale and head on, unlike most other countries where it’s too easy for corporations to exploit workers with little to be repercussions other than the occasional drop in the bucket settlement and massive profits.
Costly in terms of eventually being forced to choose between allowing unionization and leaving the nordic market entirely.
It's something that just about every other big anti-union American company have had to deal with and it's in the past always led to the American company basically surrendering and allowed unionization usually without any major loss of profit/revenue, apart from the money wasted fighting the strong and very popular Scandinavian trade unions.
Yup, not aware of any US company that would have exited nordics because of unions. Nordics are politically very integrated societies and large scale actors are all perceived to ”play on the same side” including unions etc. So Tesla is not just taking on the unions, they are challenging the entire social contract by proxy.
Which is a number that makes it worse... it means they're only popular in at most 4 countries, and have stiff competition (or in general unappealing to buyers) everywhere else.
If they were selling like hotcakes more equally around the world, a place with only 10% of US sales would not be in their top 5.
5th largest country by revenue. By the "population" or "territory" logic, Russia, India and China should be the most important markets for Tesla (they are not).
Elon dont control Tesla the way he does X and have been consistently overruled by his the tesla board of directors so this will merely be another case of Elon loosing face.
If he does that, he will have to do the same with norway, and probably Denmark too.
Also, Tesla will have to open-source his hardware, because it will have to respect warranties, and without transport/local Tesla shops, the only alternative will be conventional car shop, which right now cannot really serve Teslas, at least in France.
> Also, Tesla will have to open-source his hardware, because it will have to respect warranties, and without transport/local Tesla shops, the only alternative will be conventional car shop, which right now cannot really serve Teslas, at least in France.
If force majeure is a valid reason to not receive mail, how is it not a valid reason to ignore warranties? Sauce for the goose and gander and all that.
Sorry, the situation is complex and I should have been more clear. As long as Tesla tries to operate normally in Sweden despite the strike, it probably won't be an issue (might go to court but it will win). If Tesla leave Sweden however, and the strike stops, Tesla might have to open source its hardware for local mechanics.
Yes, sorry i wasn't clear, but consumer protection laws spawns across all EU (i think it's more than that, even Switzerland is in that agreement), so if Tesla do not respect Swedish warranties, Tesla would be at risk in the whole EU.
And Eu is not the US. Some young people might like and follow Musk and his venture a lot, but most people just do not care about him, and when it comes to consumer laws, EU do not joke around. If you have to trust EU to agree on one thing, it's consumer protection. More than market integrity, for sure (hence what is allowed to happen in Ireland: if you do not import consumer grade product or food, the irish sea border basically isn't enforced). So unless Tesla is far more popular accross EU than the Uk, Tesla will have to bend.
EU sucks ass for consumer protection. I bought an overengineered EU designed electric plug adapter in Paris. It wouldn’t work without applying 10kg of force to insert my charger, which it broke doing so.
Store wouldn’t offer a refund only replacement. Only got a refund after I made the clerk test the replacement which also had the same issue.
Same happened with floss that was the thickness of shoelace. Tried to return but Monoprix wouldn’t take it.
In the US, stores take back anything and if they don’t it’s a credit card chargeback away (which I would have done for the electric plug if they didn’t refund me.)
If you didn't involve the authorities to exercise your rights, it sounds more like anecdotal experiences with those particular stores than the entire EU "sucking ass".
This could be more expensive for Sweden if the US gov decides to retaliate (current or next one) or companies watching this and considering entering their market or not.
I mean, this is hardly the first time this has happened; US and other foreign companies have incurred the wrath of the unions in the Nordics before. Why would the US _government_ retaliate against the Swedish _government_ for a dispute between the Swedish unions and a company? What form would this retaliation take? Bear in mind that, for practical purposes, even if for some reason it wanted to (and again, why would it?) the US couldn't really impose trade sanctions on Sweden without starting a trade war with the Common Market as a whole.
As for other companies entering the market, like, this is a thing companies know about the market before going in. This isn't something new.
>Why would the US _government_ retaliate against the Swedish _government_ for a dispute between the Swedish unions and a company?
If you want to go down a fun rabbit hole, look into conspiracy theories about how many things Tesla's (and Amazon's and Apple's and Microsoft's and-) stock price is propping up.
US officials have done so lots of times. Go to any official political meeting between countries and US businesses are participating together with state officials. Like in US China meetings.
Xi Jinping just met with Tim Cook, Elon Musk, etc.
Exactly! Peak gives a sense of relief.. Better is of course relative, should we be happy that we are no longer stepping further down on the gas pedal, but still going at dangerously high speed? When where we should really be is at least in full stop, preferable going in reverse..
I was a psytrance DJ through much of the 00s and what a wonderful and diverse genre this is :) It takes some time getting used to though. My first listening experience I basically denounced it as "too hard" and noisy but my general love for electronic music made me keep listening and all of a sudden I was hooked. I listened to and played mostly goa-trance due to its very melodic nature, it really has something unique with its focus on melody (with non-western scales) and not just squeeky and strange sounds (which I do like). The explosion of "Full-on" in the mid 00s made me loose interest and it dominated the parties I went to and played at. Full on has this particular annoying feature of being, yes full on, hardly any buildups just cheap, cheesy breaks and "in your face" to please the fistbumping crowd. I still occasionally listen when there is an interesting release but this is mainly a fading memory from my youth..
This is in general a great guide, very impressive! I mean it even includes Suomisaundi (one of my favourites) which is such a small subsub-genre, back in the days it encompassed maybe a handful of artists on 1-2 record labels. The sometimes narrow BPM ranges I'd say you can ignore. The genre is very experimental so you can have pretty much any of the faster sub-genres speed down and then just call it "* chill". This was often the case when albums were made in the 00s, that an artist would end with a chill track, many times these were their best outputs and sometimes lead to new side projects.
I don't want to pick on the song selection but there is at least one major artist missing here. Shpongle is probably the most successful psychill artist of all time and one of my most powerful musical experiences of any genre. Start with "Tales of the inexpressible" and work your way through their catalog :)
I'd recommend starting with "Are you Shpongled" personally.
More than Shpongle missing, I would have expected a sample from Hallucinogen (also Simon Posford's project) which predates Shpongle by a few years, and was at the forefront of the wave of Goa as it spilled over to the western world in its nascent years
