[sdiy] My Fancy Paperweight, the ESQ

[cheater cheater]

That's why I love being a contractor: you can work 1-2 months out of
the year and live a very good life.

Regarding a 'steep learning curve': sure, if you want your first
project to be a virtual analog synth, then it's going to be difficult.
Same if you want to write a new OS kernel from scratch.

However you can do a lot of cool stuff easily. It would take you 30
minutes to learn how to do powerful things with math in python.
Download python for windows, install it, open the interpreter, and off
you go. Later start putting your programs in .py files so that you
don't have to type them in. An example I can think of that would be
perfect as a first project for a musician is to come up with the
frequencies for the 88 notes on an equal-temperament piano. Simple
for() loop and some print commands. And it's amazingly fun.
You can do a lot of very powerful maths stuff that just takes a lot of
manual calculation or iterations otherwise if you tried it on paper or
with a calculator or spreadsheet.


Also, regarding linux, I've seen linux in toasters, watches, and washmachines.

D.

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 9:53 PM, David G. Dixon<dixon at interchange.ubc.ca> wrote:
>> I might be "a bit" biased, but given that many of my friends learned to
>> program as preteens or teens before the age of internet and widely
>> available tutorials / manuals, it shouldn't be That hard for a determined
>> adult to pick up the basics in reasonable time. Just use an overpowered
>> platform and you don't need to worry about the speed of your code that
>> much either.
>
> Yes, Antti, but teens and pre-teens have something in abundance which I do
> not: TIME.  I have to parse my free time fairly carefully to build anything,
> and I find I'd rather use that time designing and building stuff I actually
> understand than learning one more new abstract skill which I will only be
> able to apply after much (relatively non-productive) effort.
>
> The other thing which I find a little bit discouraging about software vs
> analog is that I can build a relatively simple analog circuit which
> absolutely kicks ass and competes with the best of what's available
> commercially at much higher cost (the Polymoog Resonator comes to mind).
> However, with software, there are teams of highly-skilled professionals
> designing stuff which I'll never be able to understand, let alone replicate,
> but which I could buy very cheaply (if I wanted to).  The motivation for DIY
> in that case is a lot less.
>
> I'm still going to learn microcontrollers, though.  I just have a whole lot
> of analog (with the occasional digital logic) to get out of my system first.
>
>
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