The set of toys I spent the most time playing with was a big bag of wooden blocks my grandfather gave me when I was very small. They are well designed, with a good selection of different shapes, e.g. it has cylinders and arches and thin planks as well as cuboids. They got a lot of use because they're so flexible in combining with other toys, e.g. you can build roads and garages for toy cars, or obstacle courses for rolling marbles. The edges and corners are rounded and the wood tough enough that clean-up was just dropping them back into the bag.
I've since given them to a nephew and I'm happy to see he gets just as much entertainment out of them as I did. Plain wooden blocks can represent almost anything. There are no batteries or moving parts to fail. Mine got a little bit of surface wear but they still work just as well as they did when they were new and small children don't care about perfect appearance. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up getting passed down to another generation and continue to provide the same entertainment. I highly recommend this kind of simple toy for young children.
> I highly recommend this kind of simple toy for young children.
As a parent I very much agree. And for grown-up children too.
On my desk I have a small tin containing small wooden blocks and planks, arches, etc. I get lots of play value from them - when my thinking is blocked, or if I just want to fool around and not think at all. I'm in my mid fifties.
And over at my climbing club's off-grid climbing hut we have a big box of over-sized, home made jenga blocks. Pretty-much everyone plays with them: not only jenga, but also just building structures or giant domino runs or whatever.
Sticking to the magnetile theme of the OP, my kids and I have spent the most time and most occasions playing with the mangetile marble run kits. It works so well.
I bought the magnatile-knockoff-version essentially and while not as pure montessori as the wooden blocks, they're 1/10th the price and my 4-year-old is _loving_ this kit: https://amzn.to/3MVXRXg
Beech is the cheapest of the common European hardwoods. Even through a distributor it’s only about 1400-1700 € per cubic meter in 5cm / 2” planks. For context, the cheapest construction lumber is about 300-800, oak 2500, american walnut 4000.
It’s not great compared to 10 years ago, but the last 3 years it’s been pretty stable. About 11-15 euros incl VAT per square meter at retail prices for the cheapest 3-ply 9mm and 5-ply 12mm softwood ply, brazilian import.
I dabble in furniture, which means I’m looking at baltic birch plywood, at about 40 euros per square meter of 15mm 11-ply sheets. At that pricepoint I might as well buy actual hardwood lumber.
As an aside, there's an app out there is an app for the iPad called "Cuboro Riddles" which is a "how do you make the marble go from here to there using the blocks." Given that there are multiple ways that a block can channel a marble, this is a tricky one.
... and then if you get this over into the lego domain (not as "just something to fiddle with..." it gets you into the GBC. There is a standard for how one connects to another described at https://www.greatballcontraption.com/wiki/standard ... and then at lego conventions people hook them all up. https://youtu.be/avyh-36jEqA
Looks like their site links to a good number of US stores that sell them, many mom/pop. While there may not be a store close enough to you, perhaps there's one that would ship to you.
As an adult, I bought on impulse a set of wooden dominos intended for domino runs. It included a few other props. It was on clearance for almost nothing because the box was damaged.
With friends and family on occasion (individuals ranging in age from 27-70) , multiple hours have passed setting up and playing with this domino set.
I really believe that play is vitally important at all ages.
At one point way back then, my dad made something in the workshop that improved them tremendously: Wooden boards.
These were small, thin, very flat boards of oak -- about 3/16" thick and 3/4" wide. Their lengths varied in 2" increments, and the length of each board was written on it.
With boards added in, the blocks got a lot more interesting. Fastening was still limited to gravity, but things like cantilevers started happening.
Same. We had a kids’ play table (low to the ground and rectangular) that we’d prop up with a few blocks under one end to give it a slight incline. We’d spend hours covering the surface with blocks in different positions to simulate a pinball table.
Then we’d take a large marble and use two long triangular blocks as flippers to “play” on it.
Same here, my kids favourite toy was a set of wooden blocks their grandfather made from just simple 2" by 2" stock and sanded them. Cubes of different sizes they could build anything out of.
And because they were just untreated wood, they could be painted and decorated etc.
100% agree. Box of blocks cannot be beat. My sister and I used the hell out of ours: we built towers, cantilevers, mazes, Rube Goldberg devices, houses for rodents, vehicles, elaborate locks, catapults, you name it. They're still in the same condition as day 1, ready for our children.
Bonus: You can roll a lot more down those long rubber racetracks than just cars.
I had such blocks as well. For a recent take on this, I can recommend Kapla, typically come in a large (a couple 100s) box of skinny rectangular cuboids. I had fun doing, ahem, preliminary testing, before gifting them to my niece.
I got set for my son after noticing he loves stacking Jenga blocks and generic Kapla gets 10x more usage than Lego.
Can it be that the moment Lego moved from mostly bricks to custom single use shapes for every kit the joy of combining them died? My kids build car, Dino, Harry Potter set once and then gather dust. Bridges, castles, towers and roads from Kapla get rebuild every day.
When I was young there were fewer types of shapes but a lot of new sets contained a lot of such specialized shapes. I rather played with the lego i found in the attic.
My kid builds the specialized sets, and also makes houses and other structures out of basic brick pieces. But he rarely combines the two like I remember doing.
I remember having an airplane and an airport. I built them once, played with them for a while, and then broke them down to add to the pool of bricks which I built into other things.
Interesting that you mention it. Now I recall we also had wooden blocks,
they were rectangular. I played with them a lot to build simple things.
Kind of before I transitioned into LEGO. But those wooden blocks really
were great - simple, durable and one could do quite a lot with them. I
think I also built houses for my cat back then. Quite amazing how wood
is so dominating - price-wise nothing beats it. And LEGO is now so expensive
that I wouldn't buy it due to that outrageous prices alone.
I’ve seen some sets that are blocks with random flat surfaces but still balanced.
However, I notice that many antique block sets seem far superior to newer sets.
(I’m sure someone must make an amazing new set, I see some suggestions in the comments).
Having made some wooden block sets from scratch, what I am always amazed about with a good set is balance / size of pieces, coupled with variety and quantity. The balance being a vitally important part that seems to be overlooked in “bad” sets.
I also played wooden blocks for hours as a kid but I've tried getting them for my kids and they're not interested. And I suspect it's because the product is worse than the set we had from the 80s.
Similar story for me but the blocks were just a few scraps of construction wood. Infinite possibilities even with a few short blocks of 2x4 and angle cut pieces.
I did my first programming with those wooden blocks.
I would build structures deliberately designed to gradually self destruct through a long sequence of actions. A cylinder rolls down a ramp and displaces a support that tips a tower that hits a lever that tips another ramp… endless fun.
I used to use these and a big table to simulate Stalingrad and other WWII battles. Popsicle sticks laid together as half-destroyed floorboards, and of course I had a lot of army guys to position around.
It’s called the Humdinger set. Made by an eccentric guy in NZ with no online presence beyond resultantly keeping an email address.
Stumbled across him randomly at a market when we visited last and had to triple take - “is this THE Humdinger” type thing. My mum confirmed it was the real deal, so we bought it on the spot.
There is one important difference between the harmonics of string and wind instruments: it's possible to build a wind instrument that suppresses (although not entirely eliminates) the even harmonics, e.g. a stopped organ pipe. If it sounds like a filtered square wave it's definitely a wind instrument. But if it sounds like a filtered sawtooth wave it could be either.
All wind instruments and all bowed string instruments produce a perfect harmonic series while emitting a steady tone. The most important difference between timbres of different instruments is in the attack, where inharmonic tones are also generated. Several old synths used this principle to greatly increase realism, by adding brief samples of attack transients to traditional subtractive synthesis, e.g.:
While I agree with the point about improving skills, I think there's a distinction to be made between artistic code and engineering code. Linus Åkesson writes some exceptionally clever code, but it's artistic code. The cleverness is both essential to the artistic effect and unlikely to break anything important.
But I wouldn't want my OS written like that. In engineering code, the only benefit of cleverness is better performance, and the risk is unreliability. My previous computer was a lot slower and it already did everything I need, so I'm willing to sacrifice a lot of performance for reliability. Most software is written so wastefully that it's usually possible to make up for the lost performance without cleverness anyway.
> Linus Åkesson writes some exceptionally clever code, but it's artistic code.
Thanks. I somehow ignored the URL and the sidebar, and only now made the connection that OP is by the guy who does all that ridiculous C64 tech demo stuff (especially the music).
Searching the transcript has the problem of missing synonyms. This can be solved by the one undeniably useful type of AI: embedding vector search. Embeddings for each line of the transcript can be calculated in advance and compared with the embeddings of the user's search. These models need only a few hundred million parameters for good results.
As somebody who's tried using a miswak [0] teeth-cleaning twig out of curiosity, I can say with confidence it's not the same experience as using a modern toothbrush. It's capable of cleaning your teeth effectively, but it's slower and more difficult than a modern toothbrush. The angle of the bristles makes a huge difference. When the bristles face forward like with a teeth-cleaning twig your lips get in the the way a lot more. Sideways bristles are easier to use.
I can think of two big improvements to desktop GUIs:
1. Incremental narrowing for all selection tasks like the Helm [0] extension for Emacs.
Whenever there is a list of choices, all choices should be displayed, and this list should be filterable in real time by typing. This should go further than what Helm provides, e.g. you should be able to filter a partially filtered list in a different way. No matter how complex your filtering, all results should appear within 10 ms or so. This should include things like full text search of all local documents on the machine. This will probably require extensive indexing, so it needs to be tightly integrated with all software so the indexes stay in sync with the data.
2. Pervasive support for mouse gestures.
This effectively increases the number of mouse buttons. Some tasks are fastest with keyboard, and some are fastest with mouse, but switching between the two costs time. Increasing the effective number of buttons increases the number of tasks that are fastest with mouse and reduces need for switching.
I use Emacs as my daily-driver so point well taken wrt incremental drill-down though I'd argue that's not just a "desktop thing". You see that in the Contacts manager of every smartphone.
I see "mouse gestures" as merely an incremental evolution for desktops.
Low latency capacitive touch-screens with gesture controls were, however, revolutionary for mobile devices and dashboards in vehicles.
Experienced traders can make a quick estimate of the purity by rubbing it against a touchstone, which has been used since ancient times. And by treating the rubbings with mineral acids you can make even more accurate determinations, although I'm not sure if this was done in the 1620s.
>The quality of music and enjoyment of it isn't depending on fidelity
It depends somewhat on personal preference, but also on genre. Classical music often has very high dynamic range, so analog recordings can have obnoxiously loud hiss in the quiet sections. This is probably a big reason why classical music labels were early adopters of digital recording, and why classical recordings often have a SPARS code [0] prominently displayed. Classical music was also much less affected by the loudness war, removing one incentive for buying on vinyl. You rarely see any preference for analog among classical listeners.
I've since given them to a nephew and I'm happy to see he gets just as much entertainment out of them as I did. Plain wooden blocks can represent almost anything. There are no batteries or moving parts to fail. Mine got a little bit of surface wear but they still work just as well as they did when they were new and small children don't care about perfect appearance. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up getting passed down to another generation and continue to provide the same entertainment. I highly recommend this kind of simple toy for young children.
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