One technique I came up with years ago for an exotic tone from electric guitar is to tune the A and D strings in unison, and the B and e strings in unison, giving about two octaves below the 12th fret for playing “courses” of strings. Tune the E and G strings to a suitable pitch for your chosen open tuning.
Then, place a microphone right up to the guitar and record it acoustically… add some reverb and it provides a wonderful (albeit tinny) sound to change the tone of a song.
Elder Scroll Digital TCG
I’ve finally started playing the free-to-play game “The Elder Scrolls: Legends”, a digital trading card game. It has the concept of lanes for cards, which can only interact in their own lanes, a player life total, being able to attack a specific target without the defender choosing how to block etc, and an increasing amount of magic to cast cards each turn (as opposed to “lands” in a game like MTG).
As you might imagine, it features the fascinating lore and concepts from The Elder Scrolls series.
From what I’ve played, it seems like a great game.
Eclipse Should be Number 1
I recently ran across an online ranking of IDEs, and Eclipse is apparently just barely below Visual Studio – you can see the full rankings here:
http://pypl.github.io/IDE.html
As much as I love Visual Studio, especially now that it’s free for individuals in its full form, I just appreciate the look, feel, and layout/interface of Eclipse much more. There is some relief in seeing that number 3, Android Studio, has less than half the share of either Visual Studio or Eclipse.
Tortex Picks and Metronomes… Playing Faster!
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working on clean, fast alternate picking on electric guitar. I’ve noticed I like a slightly thicker pick for this than general playing – so I’m back to using green Tortex picks, which are .88 size; I might try an even thicker pick at some point.
I also bought a mechanical metronome, which I thought was just cooler than a digital one or a phone app. It’s a cheap Chinese model but it works fine. It’s amazing how much more productive practice is with a strict time, like a drummer or metronome provides.
The work seems to be paying off as I’m playing fast lines much cleaner already.
Revisiting an Old Game
I recently got back into playing “Total Annihilation: Kingdoms”, one of my absolute favorite games of all time. I particularly like the sides “Veruna” (a force with excellent navy presence) and “Taros” (the “dark side”). Aramon is okay and Zhon and Creon, not so much…
The game has an excellent campaign with a great story, and came with a 40pg booklet full of lore and info (which, sadly, I discarded a few years ago). Ultimately, I spend most of my time playing the machine in free battles.
I also have the expansion pack, which comes with dozens of extra maps and a second campaign (and the side of “Creon”, a sort of steampunk force).
“Just Spring” – a Book on the Java Spring Framework
I just finished reading the Kindle edition of “Just Spring”, a very high-level view of part of the Spring Framework in under 100 pages.
While there is some decent content, and the author seems very knowledgeable, the writing is quite poor. Many missing words in sentences, typos, etc. ultimately mar an otherwise nice introductory book.
New Accord 1.5L Turbo… Lots of turbo boost!
Overall I really like the new Honda Accord sedan, especially the Sport model – but they put a 1.5L turbo in it with 20.2 psi of boost! In good news you can now get the better motor (now a 2.0L turbo instead of a V6) in the Sport sedan, not just the EX-L, plus you get the 19-inch alloys.
Schecter Guitars Introduces an Intriguing New 7-String Guitar
I don’t personally own any 7-string guitars, but Schecter recently introduced a 7-string electric guitar with fanned frets – what they call multiscale – where the lower strings (low B, low E, etc) are longer than the high strings. This makes all of the frets look crooked or “fanned”.
Very cool – though I would never want a guitar with fanned frets… I can’t imagine it does wonders for muscle memory and navigating a fretboard quickly.
http://www.schecterguitars.com/guitars/2018/c-7-multiscale-sls-elite-detail
Java Usage Decreasing, Python Increasing
Interesting article referenced by SD Times about the decrease in Java and increasing use of Python, especially for machine learning (and other popular languages’ stats as well):
https://sdtimes.com/coding-dojo-top-seven-programming-languages-2018/
Java and the TIOBE index
I check the TIOBE Index every month, and the continuous downfall of Java is quite unfortunate and surprising. C# and Java are my favorite imperative languages, and while C# is doing fairly well it’s still nowhere nears as prominent as Java, even after Java’s decrease. Here’s hoping Java makes a strong comeback!