Oh how I do miss the Daily News. My coffee just isn't the same. Thank you for this small portion!

Same here. Still not getting it. Have you learned anything?

I wish my father would have done the same. He left me a garage and three sheds full of crap. I have to admit I've loved and used some, a very little, but the vast majority goes to the dump. It's a lot of work. We should not do this to our survivors. Also, I think we enjoy the little gems like the PCRef, that our kids won't recognize. We should follow your example and clean our own house while we can, and maybe enjoy a few gems of our own. If I follow your example and my own advice, my last box of stuff will have my 1984 intel LAN Components User's Manual. I spent a lot of time in those years building boards around the 82586 Ethernet Coprocessor. Way too much fun.

If you are comfortable with this sort of thing, a homegrown protoboard approach is an option. I'm currently working on a project where several Arduino devices communicate over a rs485 bus. I use Max3488 chips to switch between balanced rs485 lines and the Arduino's single ended Tx/Rx signals. For troubleshooting, I run an Arduino and Maxx3488 8 pin DIP on a protoboard. Once you have that, you can snoop on the 485 bus with a very few lines of code and a serial monitor.

Thanks - The astronomy projects came from reading about a simple home made device to follow the moving night sky, called a Barn-Door-Tracker. I thought if the simple Barn-Door approach worked, then a stepper motor and some cheap gears could do wonders. It worked, and I learned a lot, but exposed the limits of cheap gears. Now I'm on version 2 of that project using higher quality gears, and I have a new astronomy hobby on top of it all. It's easy to spend time on it, because I really enjoy every aspect. Playing with computers. Coding. Building little devices. Now the astronomy element. Too much fun. That's why I have to work on the life balance element. I get lost in this stuff. p.s. Your post got me going this morning. I tried out your link. That looks like a fun project. I know you can put serious hours into building something like that. I wish more environments embraced that clear menu based format. I miss that in modern software.

I like your plan too. I've also invested 1000's of hours into learning to play music, but never really reached a desired comfort level. Closest on claw hammer banjo these days. My favorite music partner passed away, and that hobby is kind of in a lull at the moment. It could work its way back to the top at anytime. Fortunately being retired, we have time to do all these things. Retirement is great - hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

I don't know what I'm looking at. Maybe two sub woofers on the floor? Tube amp in the middle. That's a big guess. Where do you plug in the guitar? Looks like fun.

The only limit is the health hazard of spending too many sedentary hours in front of computer. Hopefully the daily exercise goal addresses that risk. Otherwise, agree completely - do things you enjoy!

Today's Daily News highlighted a post about a home project with 10,000 of hours invested. I'm so happy to hear that other people put thousands of hours into home computer projects. I've certainly had a few over the years. Lots of small computer projects, but a few that raised to the 1000's of hours level. Since I retired a few years ago, its home built telescope mounts controlled by Arduino's, Raspberry Pi's and phones. Way too much fun. I'm several thousand hours in, with no signs of letting up. I have to be diligent to avoid spending an unhealthy amount of time at it. My approach is to make sure I get some exercise (yard work, bike ride, dog walk,...), do something productive (bills, groceries, home maintenance, help Mom, ...), and do something fun (play with computer, ...) every day. I'm interested an anyone else's approach to maintaining some balance and not spending too much time at this stuff.

Fiddle to woodwind translation. That's too much fun.

Please forgive my loose Balls-In-The-Air metaphor (or is it a simile?). Maybe jeron1 was onto something with:

Quote:

not sure if it relates to Balls-In-The-Air, as much as perhaps, critical thinking and problem solving.

Maybe a KISS approach to this question is better. Are programmers (technology professionals, ..) more likely to be musicians? If so, why?

Maybe the programmer and luthier have more in common than the programmer and the musician! Sometimes I feel more like the luthier, and sometimes the musician.

I had a former supervisor equate programming to juggling - many balls in the air at a given time. I know that's nothing new, but it fits. You tear into a problem, unwire the code, then string it back together. We all know the pain of distractions while the code is unwired, while many balls are in the air. OK, what got me thinking this morning was [Christian Graus's New Guitar post](https://www.codeproject.com/Messages/5971605/New-guitar). I was wondering if a collection of programmers is more likely to relate to a new guitar post than other communities. I relate. I'm not an accomplished musician, but I play. My guitar sits right next to my computer. I often back away from the keyboard and strum/pick a tune to work my way out of a rut. Is there something that might make a musician more likely to be a computer person, or visa-versa. Of course we know music is mathematical and programming certainly has a mathematical component, but I don't think that's it. For me it's the balls-in-the-air aspect. Fun music for me is playing my banjo or guitar in a jam session with other players. When I don't know the song, I'll look at a guitar player's hands to see what chords they are making, then play the same chord structure on my Banjo. So see a guitar G, play a banjo G is the first translation. Sometimes the banjo is tuned in C and capoed to a D, which requires another translation. So, the guitar player is playing a G, I need to be playing around G, I'm tuned in C, but capoed to D, better play an F shape. That's going on at the speed of the music. That's music's balls-in-the-air situation. So there's my thesis. Music and programming both involve trying to hang on to several things at once, and that's why you find so many programmers are also musicians.

Quote:

Please give me my IT world back from 10 years ago - Everything has only been going downhill since then.

There's the problem -- you thought it was your IT world (a.k.a. your computer and software). On the bright side, I can now setup a computer without out installing any MSOffice software. When a user must deal with a legacy MS document, I point them at the web app. I realize this isn't an option for most people, but it is liberating for those of us who can live this way.

My min desirements always gets me over $2K. From my first 1988ish 286 desktop, to my most recent 2020 Rizen 5 desktop build. My newest computer is a 2TB, 32GB, M2 MacBook Pro. It is my first computer that costs over $3K, and that is with a family discount, and I love it. Worth every penny. I know CP is mostly Windows developers, but I turned to the dark side and switched to Macs around 2011. I still keep a PC around, but may not turn it on for 6 months at a time. Maybe that topic is better suited to a new thread. Hope you like your new $$ computer too!

I'm also a huge fan of SwiftUI. I like the fact that my UI code is no longer dependent on drags and drops, and is entirely encompassed in source code that's easily kept under source control. Now, if that debugger was as easy to use as Visual Studio's, I'd really be happy.

C64 raster interrupts were too much fun. You could change video modes, or increase the number of colors that could be displayed on the screen at one time using the raster interrupt. Way too much fun.

If you want mechanical and ergonomic, take a look at the Feker Alice 80. I have an Alice 80 and love it. I had to add a numeric keypad to go along side it. I see there is a newer model, the Feker Alice 98 that includes the keypad and a full set of function keys. I'd probably go for that today, but like my current Alice 80 too much to make a change.

I love hearing about the 80's and 90's projects. All us retirees can relate. Developing software to support the Olympics had to be really satisfying. One of my most meaningful (satisfying) projects was an Ethernet interface (hardware and software) for Gould mini computers in the 80's. Ethernet was around, but by no means mainstream. We used this custom hardware for communication between mini computers running flight simulators for what is now the Air Force Research Labs (AFRL). This hardware and software was optimized for low latency. I provide the users with three routines. EtherInit, EtherOut and EtherIn. No TCP stacks here. Way too much fun.

I love hearing about the 80's and 90's projects. All us retirees can relate. Developing software to support the Olympics had to be really satisfying. One of my most meaningful (satisfying) projects was an Ethernet interface (hardware and software) for Gould mini computers in the 80's. Ethernet was around, but by no means mainstream. We used this custom hardware for communication between mini computers running flight simulators for what is now the Air Force Research Labs (AFRL). This hardware and software was optimized for low latency. I provide the users with three routines. EtherInit, EtherOut and EtherIn. No TCP stacks here. Way too much fun.