I’ve always wondered why chalk and blackboard are still used heavily in professions like that. Are there really no decent software options? Even a smartboard would be nice since you can save and revisit past work. Or does artisanal Japanese chalk really just feel that amazing to use?
I had a college professor that hid his artisanal Japanese chalk in a hole in the wall behind the blackboard so that he didn’t have to carry it around (and risk breaking it).
I’m not kidding. He said it was his favorite chalk and he bought a bunch of it in Japan.
I’m just guessing, but I assume that after a certain point, what you’re trying to draw is so niche and/or new that no one’s bothered to make decent software for it. Like, you can do a Feynman diagram quickly on a chalk board, or spend 3x as long dragging lines in Visio or something to make a diagram diagram.
Even with CAD existing, I still always sketch initial project ideas out on paper just cause it’s fast and easy.
I work in software, so I guess we use a whiteboard instead of a blackboard. There are tons of options for virtual whiteboards that have features which sound like they’d meet all your needs and more. One big plus is that you can virtually collaborate, which is a big argument for working remotely.
However, given the choice, I’ll always pick a physical board to write on. This might sound like a personal preference, but there’s some solid reasoning behind it.
You see, when you want to write or draw something, your brain has to do some kind of neuromancy in order to transform that thought into an idea that can be shared with and understood by other humans. When you write physically, the process is very kinetic. The idea starts in the brain, then is sent to the hand to write it out, and is verified by your eyes for correctness.
When you want to write that same thing digitally, there’s more steps involved in subtle ways. You have to decide which tool is best, move things around with your mouse, know which keyboard commands will translate to the thing you want to do, etc. Many of these steps are far more abstract than picking up a marker, and for this reason there’s a higher cognitive load in transcribing digitally.
Depending on what you’re doing, that higher cognitive load can come back to bite you. A lot of my whiteboard time is ultimately spent on reasoning out a complicated system, brainstorming, or trying something new. In these cases, you want your cognitive load to be as low as possible because you want to be able to use it for the task at hand.
However, that’s not to say that there isn’t a benefit to the digital tools. Collaborating with remote colleagues is difficult without a virtual tool. You also typically benefit from having an infinite canvas, which means your board is always going to be as big as you need it to be. If you already have technical drawings or specifications or whatever you can also easily copy/paste them in.
So all this to say, I guess the way I look at it is that physical and digital boards are separate tools. You want to use the right tool for the job, and in my evaluation the physical boards are still very useful tools.
I don’t think it’s the interface that is the problem. You just don’t have the bandwidth to communicate in virtual that you have in meat space
You don’t hear the snort of the person who sees how your idea is ridiculous online. And they’re not going to speak up unless they’re called out.
I have a team member from a previous team who wouldn’t use a camera in stand-up because our scrum master was not good at scrum mastering and she didn’t want him to see her roll her eyes at stupid things he’d say. If we were in a room she couldn’t hide; he would know he had said something stupid.
You use the tool you have. We have the luxury of whiteboards and four or five colours (and even monochrome print), but if you work in a university you may only have blackboards, and perhaps that Japanese artisanal chalk is nicer to use
Anyway you can save any *board work; you have a phone with a camera. I have so many pre-pandemic photos of sprint planning boards in my photos
there don’t seem to be that many on Steam that catch my interest.
I don’t know the situation on consoles, but on the PC…
I am not a pinball expert, though I do enjoy video pinball, but none of these are what I’d call the major PC pinball engines with reasonably-realistic physics, things that do a lot of tables. Look at these:
Visual Pinball. I was not able to get this working on Linux the few times I’ve tried or to successfully get access to the forums that distribute tables (some kind of broken registration system). This is, as I understand it, what a typical person uses if they just want to make and distribute a free table. It also has many bootleg implementations of commercial tables. Open-source Source-available, though only runs natively on Windows.
Pinball Arcade. IIRC, these guys used to have a license for some major physical table distributors, like Williams, and had it expire. I have this, and the engine hasn’t been updated in some time. I run a high-refresh-rate monitor, and IIRC it has a limit of 60Hz, probably because the physics engine also runs at that rate. I don’t think that it’s getting a lot of updates, and I had some trouble running it last time I tried. This would not be my recommended engine unless it’s the only place to get a table that you specifically want.
Zaccaria Pinball. Good if you want elderly pinball, pre-solid-state-electronics era, electromechanical pinball tables. They have some tables that they developed, not copies of real-world tables, that I personally like more than their real-world tables. They don’t have implementations of real-world tables for some major popular US manufacturers.
Pinball FX3 (less old than Pinball Arcade). Not bad, but replaced by the below Pinball FX.
Pinball FX (despite the name, newer). This is the only one off the top of my head that can do high-refresh-rate, and it’s also being kept current. It has a lot of stuff that I’d call fluff and would rather not have, like toys that animate more than on the real-world tables and sometimes obstruct your view, animations to wait through, and such. Also has some kind of online-DRM system that takes a sec at startup. Some of this can be turned off. Places a lot of emphasis on this virtual pinball basement full of virtual trophies. Has occasional very brief stutters for me. Many of the non-real-life board are wide, designed around a present-day portrait-orientation computer monitor, which feels weird but is more friendly to, say, a laptop with a fixed orientation monitor, though maybe not what you want if you’re going to set up a dedicated pinball computer with portrait-orientation monitor. Lots and lots of non-real-world licensed tables associated with movies and the like that I’m not really enthusiastic about; I would recommend trying those tables before buying them. This is probably what I’d look at if I were aiming to get one today, as the engine’s the newest.
I think that all of these let you download the engine and try out some basic play (IIRC Zaccaria has time-limited plays on tables that you don’t own, and Pinball FX has a rotating collection that you can try for free), so you can just install them and see what you like, but if you’re looking for a starting point with something reasonably modern and with a bunch of tables, these are probably where you want to look.
If you don’t have a strong preference as to tables and are also just feeling around for something to try, I personally like some classic real-life Williams tables, Medieval Madness and Tales of the Arabian Nights. Neither is too rough in terms of draining down the side channels, in my humble opinion. The Addams Family is also a popular table.
Note that if you haven’t touched video pinball for a long time – like, I played a few games in the late 1990s and then was away from it for a while), these engines also simulate nudging the machine and doing so is expected during play.
EDIT: If you’re willing to hit Reddit for information, /r/videopinball and /r/pinball exist; they were where I got some information back when. If not, there’s !pinball – not a lot of life yet, but, hey, each additional person adds to it!
EDIT2: My understanding from past reading of said forums is that Visual Pinball is considered to have the best physics, but is fiddly to get working and get tables working on (and I don’t think that this was said from the standpoint of someone trying to run anything on Linux, just Windows).
EDIT3: I would also recommend not purchasing a great many tables unless you’re sure that you’re actually going to play them. Yes, you can buy the equivalent of multiple arcades full of virtual machines at one swoop thanks to modern technology, but…I have tables on all of the commercial engines here and personally find that I play a very small percentage of the tables that I have. Pinball, I think, benefits from becoming familiar with particular tables.
As someone using Windows who decided to check out Visual Pinball after reading your post, I’ll agree it’s pretty fiddly. It seems like if you have the patients/ focus to get everything set up it’s really good, but if you just want to download and play something you’ll probably want to go with something else.
Oh! I actually can personally answer this one. I’ve been a competitive air gun and rimfire .22 LR for years and even attended college on a rifle program scholarship at a D1 program (yes! The US has a major collegiate rifle program)
Traveling internationally depended much on where you were going. We competed at the international junior Olympic championships just outside of London one year in the UK. We had to package all ammo and firearms separately, in locked containers which ultimately wasn’t that big a deal. As with flying with firearms in the US, it ultimately comes down to how familiar those such as gate agents and check-in staff are at the airport with their country’s firearm travel laws. Flying out of the US was always easy as they’re used to firearms, but flying back to the US was sometimes a nightmare and we’d get to the airport up to 6 hours before a flight to deal with any BS.
I had a housemate a couple of years ago who had a side job where she’d look through a load of these and confirm which were accurate. She didn’t say it was AI though.
Pushbike stolen … Many times. Once was kinda my fault for leaving it out, but every other time it was some cunt working hard to get a push bike. Every time I only found out just when I was going to the bike to go some where. One time, the bike was in a secure garage with two gates and the fucker secretly tail gated a car on foot to get in and then waited for another car to leave to tailgate them.
Motorbike stolen … it was a cheap and nasty one but still
Apartment broken into … 18th birthday present fancy watch stolen along gaming console
Nah, never your fault. You were just being you. Humans make mistakes. Assholes just take advantage of that fact. That garage bit there is why I always tell my girlfriend safety is an illusion. Cause like you could have some Fort Knox shit going on, and still get absolutely screwed out of something. I mean, I'm still locking my doors. I'm not saying like...I'm not, but you know - if people see something they want they'll work their damndest to get it. I'm sorry people kept hitting you up, but I hope things are somewhat better now? At least on the homefront. I don't know about bikes, cause those things are still being stolen like crazy.
Cheers! Yea things are all good. The way bikes are stolen is crazy though. I’ve known otherwise reasonable people that honestly believed any bike they found that was not locked was free game. Not friends with them anymore.
Hahaha! I had an ex who said they grew up with a neighborhood bike - because there was one, and all the kids took turns stealing it from one another =P!!!!
Someone on here said like 30% of stolen goods are bikes. Look at at least 30% of the things stolen here. Makes me laugh! But in a kinda "life's a beach" way. It's crazy.
On the friends thing, doesn't it make you wonder sometimes if they ever grew out of it or are out here acting as agents of chaos in ways we might feel but do not know =P!? Cheers!
On the friends thing, doesn’t it make you wonder sometimes if they ever grew out of it or are out here acting as agents of chaos in ways we might feel but do not know =P!? Cheers!
All the time.
Hunter S Thompson once said “in a world of thieves the only final sin is getting caught”
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You probably got it but “came second” might sound like he came second to the other person in the picture. The couple who got the gold isn’t in this comparison image.
Word of advice–be a good person to your colleagues, and let friendship possibly develop after one of you leaves. I’ve made many friends throughout the years once we each know there is no pressure to be friends. I’ve had many job leads throughout the years because people I previously worked with thought I was a great colleague.
Easy, move the second and third together, 4th, 5th and 6th together, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th, and so on. Killing 1 + 2 + 3… until infinite, having Killing a total of -1/12 person.
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