The first cyberpunk novel I read was True Names by Rudy Rucker. John Shirley has been called 'patient zero of cyberpunk' for his novel Eclipse.
(I published a collection of Cyberpunk stories called Error Message Eyes Release 3.0 and it will be a free download on Kindle on August 24th. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D5CCRRSB I apologize for the blatant self promotion.)
Harp player here. When I first started playing, I had a Gindick's book, Country and Blues Harmonica For the Musically Hopeless. This was maybe 35 years ago. I would recommend that book and the tape (cd? mp3?) that comes with it, for beginners.
You can't see the notes you are playing on a harmonica. You have to hear them. You start by playing clear single notes and then shaping the note by articulating eeeh-yah or something similar and the note magically bends. You have to hear the note so you can tell if the note bends. It is very organic, and I don't think an app will help much. It may confirm what is happening, but it is not going to help if you can't do it.
Personally, I played along with Little Walter's greatest hits on my hour long morning commute, and eventually it was just natural to bend the notes at the right time.
My advice is to look for Jason Ricci on YouTube. He has hundreds or thousands of videos on beginner to advanced subjects. He is a weird dude, but I've never known a better teacher.
Howie the Crab was a weirdly warm place on social media. The daily cute pictures and videos of a pet land crab attracted hundreds of thousands of followers. The funny hats, visiting squirrels, a hedgehog, and friendly narrative always made the feed a nice place to visit. Rest in Peace Howie.
Damn! One of my old books can be found in the Anna's Archive search. The book has been out of print for years. I pity the Meta users who get results based on something that I wrote.
(Check Anna's for 'Keith P. Graham', and the first book listed is mine.)
I was there. It started three hours late. They showed a samurai movie with subtitles while we waited. My GF was sick from all the smoke. Dylan seemed drunk.
But it is a fantastic album!
It used to be possible to make a radio receiver out of a diaper pin and a blue razor blade. The coating on the blade acted like a crystal. You needed a cheap pair of headphones or a tiny transistor radio speaker. I made one when I was a kid, and I could clearly pick up 77 ABC in New York City from 50 miles away.
Razor blades aren't blue anymore, but there must be other things that work.
In the early 1980s, I got a job at Western Union (the old telecom company, not the thing it became). I was programming special reports in 4GL languages like RAMIS and MARK IV plus a little COBOL, and I was asked at one point to see if I could find a use for the Xerox Star, a descendant of the Alto. It was the first time I had ever heard of a mouse, and I had never seen a real GUI before. The system was very cool, but my experience was that it was best used as a word processor and typesetting machine. It had a programming environment, but I did have a language manual and was never able to write any programs for it.
I loved the machine, and even wrote part of a short story using the word processor. They moved it to corporate headquarters after two weeks, so I did not get very far with it, but I remember loving the experience. Windows was a poor substitute to the feel of the Star interface.
I repair tube guitar amplifiers from time to time, and I cringe when I see the 50L6 power tube and the 35Z4 rectifier. These tubes light up like lightbulbs, and run so hot that the amplifier case is often charred near them. The chassis shows staining from the heat, and the plastic tube socket can even melt.
These amps always hum because the same reasoning that goes for the cheap on the circuit design also uses cheap and low value capacitors.
I hate these circuits. Several times I've gutted the chassis, screwed a power transformer in place and wired the amp as a tweed champ, Gibson Skylark or Premier 50, so I have a chassis with the right number of tube sockets and pots, and I get a brand-new vintage amp for the cost of a used transformer.
I have a Gretsch amp that had two 50L6 tubes, that made a beautiful 1957 Fender Pro amp and sounds wonderful.
I always felt that Tom Bombadil was filler in order to bridge events between Crick Hollow and the Prancing Pony. Tolkien had already written The Adventures of Tom Bombadil as a separate piece with Goldberry and Old Man Willow. He just dropped that into the Fellowship and used it to fill the space.
I used to skip the Tom section and move right up to Bree. Now I read the books much slower, and I savor every section, even Tom.
Twenty-four Science Fiction Stories of Computers, Robots, Programs, and Algorithms. From artificial intelligence to the modeling of a digital soul. These stories cover the future of technology, written by the veteran hacker and master programmer, Keith P. Graham.
Keith P. Graham has been a programming/hacker since 1969. Keith wrote in assembly language because that was as close to silicon as a hacker could get without a soldering iron. He was a programming manager at Lockheed Martin for 15 years, and then a consultant at IBM Watson Research Center. Keith has sold about 80 Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror stories.
I am first mentioned 5/2/89. I was having fun writing MASM programs and released about 50 freeware programs around then. I used bulletin boards rather than Usenet back then. Usenet access usually required a toll call.
1. Bees have only been kept in flat frames for less than 200 years which would not be enough time to select for such a specific trait.
2. Domestic bees that swarm and find homes in hollow trees or gaps in houses form blobby swirls of what beekeepers call 'crazy comb'. The liberated bees create topological forms which are probably much more efficient than flat frames. Flat frames benefit the beekeeper, not so much the bees, and bees will make comb when and where they like.
20 years ago I bought CThreePO.com hoping to sell it to a Star Wars fan. Nobody wanted it. I still own it.
I used it to host my essays and blog about science fiction. It is now hosted on my home machine and the things that used PHP no longer work. Many pages are orphaned. I count about 8,000 pages, although google no longer spiders most of them.
While cleaning up my basement I found a box of 8" disks. These date back to when I had 2 5110s running in my living room one year. I wrote AR software for a liquor distribution company. They heated the whole house when I had both running at the same time. I wrote miles of code that winter. This was long before while loops and I had lots of GOTOs in the code.
I programmed MASM in the 1990s and found myself deciding exactly where to put the 90H bytes in order to make the code work. It is good to see this stuff.
The first FORTRAN programs that I wrote were a version called FORTRAN WITH FORMAT that ran on an old 1401. This was 1969. The compiler booted from an old dogeared card deck and somewhere around the middle of the deck there was a bent card. You had to slap the side of the card reader to get it going. I remember carrying a tray full of a hundred or so carefully typed program and data cards to the computer room.
There was a small control deck that loaded first and then the compiler and behind that the FORTRAN source and then the data deck.
Upper classmen on passing a freshman in the hall carrying deck would knock the tray so that the cards would fall on the floor and needed to be sorted all over again.