A variant using the four digits, 1 9 7 and 2, in order, was educational to me. Took a few minutes to write a BASIC program to generate and evaluate random Polish notation expressions. The program took days to generate almost all of 1..100 on a time-shared mini-computer. When one of my kids had a similar assignment in school, I wrote the program again in C for modern hardware. Ran instantaneously. That program taught me that computers can solve problems without human super-skills being needed.

Same here. Two bifocal glasses. One for normal-driving||reading-close, the other for computer||reading-close. ... after un-cataract lenses put in both eyes. Eyes change in random ways over time, but am still on my original, post-cataract script, as it's close enough to being OK. 3 seconds of looking through progressives told me they ain't gonna happen. Their effect was the same as a cheesy movie from a half century ago showing the main character, drugged.

Experience tells me building an API is often more work than building the guts. And it often involves more creativity. Now, do I want to preclude someone being able to assert a copyright over something that is unique and imbued with creativity and a lot of work? Gotta say "no". One good thing might come out of this: Licenses should cover implementation and API as separate items.

They cared about the details of your solution to some coding task? Yeah. Broken. Coding questions filter out those who can't write a line of code to save their lives. Over the years I've found that filter to be quite handy. But, for those who can code, the coding question is a forgettable formality. It doesn't matter whether your code works well or is clever. You're just showing you can write code.

A week or so ago I accidentally impulse-bought a MIDI keyboard, but instead of returning it, I installed Python3 packages and wrote a program to listen to the keyboard and play sounds. It's been fun. The Python packages contain the fluidsynth.py, mido, and sf2utils modules. mido reads MIDI notes from MIDI devices. The "o" at the end of the name is not a typo. fluidsynth plays MIDI audio. I started it with fluidsynth.Synth().start(driver = "pulseaudio") not "alsa". fluidsynth makes sound from instrument recordings contained in "sound font 2" (.sf2) files. fluidsynth, itself, is a separate thing you apt install. The Python script is a wrapper around it. fluidsynth.py is at various places on GitHub. I'm using a very slightly tweaked version of one that has disappeared in the last week, but was a slightly tweaked version of pyfluidsynth/fluidsynth.py at feature/fluidsynth-2 · SpotlightKid/pyfluidsynth · GitHub[^] which is a modified version of the original somewhere else on GitHub. sf2utils.sf2parse lets me read .sf2 files and list the instruments in them. I found nice .sf2 files through a couple of URLs: Soundfonts 4U[^] SoundFonts and SFZ files | MuseScore[^] The fluidsynth package, itself, contains a couple of OK .sf2 files. I could not get LMMS to read my MIDI keyboard and/or make sound. Renoise hogged the CPU and, when running, whether idle or not, caused videos to not play in my browser and possibly not in VLC. Good luck.

Over the last 15 or 20 years, I've used wxPython and web-browser UI. Alternatives haven't filled the bill for one reason or another. Question: How have I chosen between wx and browser? Answer: Which was used for the most recent project? Use the other. Seriously, the grass has been oddly greener over several cycles. So, apparently, my next project will be browser-based. Because the last one was wx. Note: I've wanted to use Tkinter because it comes with Python. But, jeez. Have you experienced its out-of-box?

I agree with all you say. My mantra is, "First, get it digitized and let the bits take care of themselves." I have a lot of phone or old point-and-shoot camera digitizations of paper based stuff. Why? Because just clicking a camera is quick and easy and the picture is phenomenal, if begging for post-processing ... someday. My slide scan-o-thon was from 2014 to ~2016. ScanCafe slide scans were notably better than the various other methods I tried. Keep in mind I can't physically perceive the kinds of nuances the committed "X-phile" (or even average-aged person) can sense. Just getting noise, dirt, and color-balance in half-way decent shape is worth it, though. Too, scanning thousands of slides can take serious time. Rankling though it was to spend roughly the same nominal money on digitization as I had on the original Kodak slides, there was no way I could do it burning my own time. YMMV.

I know you have the hardware, but my experience back a few years ago was that under $2000 equipment just didn't cut it. Over that price I didn't try. And the scanning services were not up to snuff except for one. I found ScanCafe and ended up doing 10 to 12 thousand slides, some photos, and a tiny number of 8mm movies from the 30's over the course of a couple years. The whole thing was a rare, rare excursion in to very-happy-customer land for me. They regularly have sales where the price for one media or another is way-lower than normal. Get on their email list and wait a few months to save 1/3 to a half. My slides were in the 20 cent range, some more, some less. I sent them 50 or 100 or so slides as a test before boxing thousands of slides. The test runs were done on high importance slides that had been scanned other ways. ScanCafe's scans were clearly superior. Answer to the parenthetical question: Slides were the only way to go back in the day. Printed pics were flat, comparatively speaking. Also, a lot of pics just work better at a big size in the distance. But that's like, do you want to see your pics on a 75 inch monitor or on a phone? Glowing or dim? Life size or tiny?

No one has mentioned Python?!? That's interesting.

The Semware Editor. Used since the late 80's. Based on the Wordstar diamond, the reason I still use it. There's an almost-finished Linux version, which I usually use for an editor.

Oh, man. Where's the "like" button?

The flying saucer. One of the 3 or 4 best robots ever. (Separate list: Klatu, HAL9000, Robbie, T-1000, and pick a solid pair from the current crop of cute / AI-take-over-the-worlders.) Hilarious scenes in today's context (trash fling; light up while saying wonderingly, "He's over seventy!"). Opening music's piano riff. Scary philosophy in today's context: Give the robots absolute power and say "It's a system and it works." i.e. "Advanced peoples are Soviets." "All units deploy using Plan B." Channel your inner kid when you watch this great movie.

Found it wouldn't call to a couple of the free phone conferencing systems I needed to use for work. The out-of-box was good. Their web site and approach is all-sell, all the time, which is a bit of a put-off. Other than that, they presented a professional and no-non-sense face. The MJ thingee worked at a couple of places, WA and CA. Not high performance net connections.

Ah, but you can optimize those pluses and make the # with only two distorted pluses.