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Peppered with strong, revolutionary names, the songs written by Citizens of the Empire are restless and beautiful. These Minneapolis anarchists produce quality post-rock under a free license (CC BY), which is really the cherry on top.
It’s hard to properly describe it, but the music is instrumental, melodic and thoroughly entrancing. If post-rock is your cup of tea, give it a try! Their bandcamp page allows gratis downloads too, but if you like it, consider getting them a pint of beer :)
Portland has become a mecca for all things hip and cool lately. Unfortunately it has made national news lately because of the Rioting, but normally it is a pretty chill place. I was born here and I still live here. The housing market is kinda messed up right now because everyone is moving from California and pricing everyone out. The Portland Timbers Football Club is essentially a religious cult. Also, voodoo doughnuts are HIGHLY overrated.
Innovative site that allows you to review and share just about anything you can think of. It’s early days still, but already the site is quite usable and useful.
Slide for reddit is an open source, modern application for Android for accessing reddit. In my opinion it is the best reddit app available and nicer than the other reddit apps available such as reddit is fun, redreader and relay.
Pros
- Modern material deign UI
- Offline viewing
- Customizable UI
- Open Source
- Rapidly improving feature set
Cons
- None that I can think of
XKCD is comprised of mostly nerdy sciencey things that are even over my head, and I sit around writing software all day. The comic has become somewhat of an internet phenomenon and is cited quite frequently.
cjdns is a very simple, yet powerful routing layer. It is meant to replace the internet at the protocol level. All traffic is encrypted between each peer and everyone has a static ipv6 ip address. Nodes manually peer with each other via config file. The routing uses kademlia so if peers are geographically close to each other, then network routing is much faster than the current internet topography.
The steelseries Apex 350 is a gaming keyboard complete with a numpad, media keys and 22 extra macro keys as well as 5 zones of customizable backlight LEDs.
On Linux all the basic keyboard functions on the steelseries Apex 350 work fine. steelseries provides a program for enabling the extra macro keys and customizing the LED colors. Unfortunately this software is only available for Windows and MacOS however thanks to tuxmark5 there is a tool for using this keyboard to its full extent.
ApexCtl is a command line tool for using the extra functions of the Apex which are not supported out of the box. While this command line tool is more complex than the GUI solution provided by steelseries, ApexCtl is still quite usable for those familiar with the command line.
Conclusion: The steelseries Apex 350 is a nice gaming keyboard which through the use of a 3rd party tool can be completely utilized on Linux.
Spacemacs is a distribution of Emacs that completely overhauls the editor. Originally the default mode was based on vim key bindings, but the app lets you choose between emacs or vim default mode on install now-a-days [I still use vim key bindings]. It introduces the concept of a “leader” key which is supposed to reduce repetition induced strain since it only requires one hand. For example to launch Magit (emacs git client) you type <space> <g> <s> in sequence rather than some weird key combination consisting of control and alt keys. The characters after the space key are grouped by mnemonic [g is for git, s is for status]. I have found myself to be about 100 times more productive in spacemacs than any other editor. The learning curve is pretty shallow as well. I would definitely recommend any programmer give it a try.
Or at least they did last time I went there.