It goes without saying that the bestsellers list isn't a bad place to start when it comes to quickly vetting books that might be interesting. If I'm not lying, most of the books I read are probably either from the bestsellers list, or they are too specific in niche to get that kind of an at-scale audience. They're easy to find, and they're usually pretty good. 

It has, however, also had me wondering about the lesser-known circles of the writing world (a world I know very little about). How many excellent books, fiction or nonfiction, never had the kind of audience to get that level of attention? And of course, a quick stroll through a library (or these days, a few searches on the Amazon Kindle Store) shows that there are far more books that have been written than a Barnes and Noble can really give me a fair comprehension or appreciation of. 

What are some of the less-popular (but heavily underrated) books that you've read, and what makes you recommend them?

The last 20 years or so (and especially, the last 10 years) have been dominated by a significant increase in the use of electronics in music. Percussion styles have often changed significantly to reflect this. Autotune has become popular. Keyboards and experimental sounds are commonplace, and increasingly, the guitar is taking a few more steps to the back. 

Indie music is also rising, and it encompasses pretty much everything. From more grungy 90s style music, all the way to the more electronics-heavy styles of music today, but there's also a lot of music that is becoming simpler, more traditional, and more "authentically imperfect" in terms of intentionally avoiding an overproduced sound. It's interesting that what was once a natural effect of producing on ancient recording equipment is now something we put a lot more effort into reproducing with modern equipment (tape saturation is one of those things), and my prediction is that the indie music genre will bring a lot more of this back to the forefront, at least in some ways, in the next 10 years or so. 

What are your predictions for music over the next decade?

Apple originally announced a 2-year transition period in November 2020 for their Apple Silicon transition. This deadline has already been missed, and many are asking about when the Apple Silicon Mac Pro will arrive. 

Reportedly, the M1 Extreme (what would have originally been the Mac Pro's first Apple-Silicon processor) was scrapped for various technical reasons. Apple was reportedly working on an M2 Extreme version, but now rumors are suggesting that this, too, has been cancelled (apparently due to prohibitively high prices that would have been required in their current price structure). 

The M1 Ultra is already ludicrously powerful in the Mac Studio and can significantly outperform existing Intel Mac Pro models, but the Mac Pro still has other advantages over the Mac Studio, such as PCI-E and storage/RAM extensibility. Apple is apparently working on these with the Mac Pro, but this will require significant work to develop platforms to support, considering that their existing models are very locked down and do not support standard off-SOC RAM protocols, third-party GPUs, etc. 

My feeling is that Apple is already capable of releasing Mac Pro models, but does not want to cannibalize existing offerings with the prices that they would have to charge to get the Mac Pro to sell. It's probably an example of where Apple's very locked-down strategy isn't working in their favor for some of the Pro systems that rely on more extensibility. My feeling is that Apple will probably wait another 6-12 months before releasing it, and it will probably coincide with price drops on some of the other parts of their lineup. Hopefully they release something sooner, but being that it's been canceled twice already, we may be waiting a little while longer.

Hello all, 

We are very excited and pleased to announce that Makestation is back online! A flurry of recent personal events has taken my life by storm, and it’s unfortunately meant I was unable to be here as much as I had hoped. I’m not in the best of places (life has thrown more than a few curveballs for me). I want to be clear that the responsibility lies upon me and me alone, and that the blame does not lie upon SpookyZalost or Guardian. 

I know there will be many questions, which I will do my best to answer in this post and in future communications also. We are working hard to restore Makestation as quickly and completely as possible.

As you have probably already noticed, we have had to restore Makestation from a backup. The good news is that we were (mostly) able to restore things back to where they were before (I'll describe some exceptions in a moment). The bad news is that the most recent backups were unfortunately corrupted and unable to be restored (we have tried our best, but unfortunately we were unable to restore these). This has greatly complicated our efforts, and has meant that we have lost more content than we would have originally liked. 

We selected the most recent backup that was able to be restored successfully, which was from late 2021. This means that all user accounts, avatars, threads, forum organization, structure, and various other things has been restored to this point in time. Makestation files (which contain the site's code, but not necessarily its content itself) was from a slightly older backup. This means that you're looking at a slightly older version of Makestation's theme, along with some of the custom code and plugins that we wrote for the community. This has been less of a concern long-term as we are able to source more recent versions of most of these things from other places (and will be tying loose ends in the coming days and weeks). In other words, some of the missing features will be coming back soon.

This restoration means that we do have a decent amount of work set out for us (especially with regards to lost content). Many of the more challenging aspects of getting the site itself restored are behind us, and continuing work will take place as we take care of some of the other details. I would also like to take this time to allude to the future of Makestation and what some of these changes mean for the long term prospects of the community. 

As many of you know, Makestation started as a high school project of mine during my senior year. We wanted to create a creative arts community that had an open and tight knit community, one that was run in a democratic spirit and one that was laid back and open to creative projects of all kinds. Seeing Makestation blossom to the size that it became was a dream come true, and I never imagined that the website would still exist all these years later. It not only met our dreams, but it exceeded them, and I can't take the credit for that. I founded this community and poured many blood, sweat, and tears into it, but it was all of the amazing people, members and staff alike, who contributed to this community, helped to build it from the ground up, promoted this community, built connections with other forums, created amazing content, and participated in the community spirit that brought us to where we are. This community is here not because of me, but because of YOU. You built this community, and it is because of you that it stands. 

There will be some leadership changes in the coming days, weeks, and months (which I will allude to more in the coming days). I won't go into full detail quite yet, as we are still focused on getting MS back on its feet first. However, due to some personal events in my life, I will unfortunately be unable to run Makestation full time in the long-term at this time. I think that it is only right to transfer the full ownership of the community to the other two administrators who have served this community diligently for the past several years. SpookyZalost and Guardian will soon inherent full ownership and lead administration of Makestation, and will be taking this community into many bright years to come during the transition. I will, of course, still be around as well and will be a part of this community as I am able (and expect to help out with various things as well). But I also have FULL faith in these two administrators (and to the Makestation community as a whole) to bring Makestsation to new heights that it has never seen before. These are two of the best administrators I have ever had the pleasure of working with (and I've worked with many across several communities, so I don't say this lightly). And I also have full faith that because of YOU, Makestation's best years are ahead of us, NOT behind us. 

We greatly apologize for the downtime and for the significant inconveniences caused during the restoration process. We expect that there will be some bugs and various other things that need to be taken care of, so absolutely feel free to share any and all suggestions, feedback, ideas, and comments here as well (where we will be happy to address them). Any account related concerns can also be addressed in the Official Makestation Discord, where we can help address any possible login or registration related issues.

We want this thread to serve as an open discussion for the current events and for the future of Makestation. I know that there will be many questions, which we will be very happy to be able to address. Many thanks to the entire Makestation community, for whom this community would not be possible without. We built this community collectively AS a community effort, and we are committed to making sure that it will live on in the same spirit for many years to come! 

Best regards, 
-Darth

It's been 30 years since Finnish graduate student Linus Torvalds drafted a brief note saying he was starting a hobby operating system. The world would never be the same.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torv...-birthday/

Hello all, 

It's time for the September 2021 MOTM award nominations! Guardian has done a fantastic job running these for the past year or so, and Leo and I will be filling in for a month or two while he settles in with his move to a new city with his family. As such, we're continuing the MOTM tradition and will be running nominations this month, and wish Guardian the best as he settles in!  

This month, we're gonna run MOTMs in a slightly different way. Nominations will be placed as normal, but in the event of a winner via nominations, we will announce it directly. In the event of a tie, we will bring it to a public community vote for you to decide. So we encourage you to submit your nominations and we will be announcing winners based on who gets the most votes! 

You can send your nominations by sending a PM to ForumSquad as normal. Nominations will close on Sunday, September 26th, giving a full week to submit votes. We look forward to your submissions as always, and to announcing the September 2021 winner!

Hello everyone, 

We are back online! We had some unexpected server issues after routine maintenance and updates corrupted the server configuration files. We ended up needing to rebuild the entire nginx config for multiple domains from the ground up, but everything should now be working as expected. 

There may be a few loose ends that we are still fixing. Let us know if you come across any other bugs or issues and we will resolve them promptly!

Hello everyone, 

As many of you know... 

We've been hinting at some big changes over the past few weeks.

We've actually been internally discussing BIG things since last summer, and have tried a LOT of different prototypes. We've been working behind the scenes for quite some time, and we are finally getting ready to do the biggest facelift in the entire history of this community. 

We will be sharing more details over the coming weeks, and want to make everyone a part of everything that will be taking place. We're putting a lot of time into this and will be exploring new limits that are much further than what we've been able to do previously. The purpose of this post is to not only announce the facelift, but to also get open ended feedback and ideas from you guys. We want to know what you'd like to see in this community. If you could take MS in any direction you wanted over the next five years, what would you implement, and why? 

This is an open ended discussion for everyone in this community. Although not every idea will be technically feasible (we can't make Facebook 2.0, nor would that be a good thing  ), we will be seriously considering your suggestions as we progress. We also plan on implementing a lot of long-overdue fixes and features during this transition, and will make sure it's as seamless and simple as possible. 

We will be announcing more details as we progress. Stay tuned!

Art Metrano, who portrayed Officer Ernie Mauser in two Police Academy films, has died. He was 84.

The actor, who suffered a serious injury that derailed his career in 1989, died of natural causes on Wednesday at his home in Aventura, Florida, according to Deadline.

Metrano's son, Harry Metrano, revealed the news on Instagram on Thursday by sharing a series of photos of him and his father.

"It's with a heavy heart that I write this caption. Yesterday I lost my best friend, my mentor, my dad. He was and will always be the toughest man I know," Harry wrote in the caption. "I have never met someone who has over come more adversities than him."

He added, "He's fought and won so much over the years that I always viewed him as indestructible, but the truth is we don't live forever on earth, but a person's spirit can live forever within you. Dad, you will always be a part of me and I will continue to live out your legacy. When someone came up with the quote, 'legends never die,' I'm pretty sure they were talking about you dad. I love you and miss you so much! One day I'll see you again. Rest in Paradise. You're now my guardian angel...


R.I.P

I’ve been wanting to dabble with Linux again on a couple of old computers laying around. I still use Debian for my development machine from time to time, but I wouldn’t call it my daily driver. I’ve also heavily customized Gnome with custom themes and am purposefully using Debian so that regular gnome shell updates don’t break the extensions that are installed. 

Gnome is great. It's an elegant desktop that has a wonderful workflow, but I must admit that it has also started to become frustrating. Not because it’s a flawed concept, but because they have increasingly adopted the mentality of discouraging any customization away from default behavior. Yes, extensions and themes exist, but both are somewhat hacked together and both break on new shell updates. And gnome has few intentions of doing anything about either problem and has actually started to speak against theming of the desktop. This is a bit odd because customization is a hallmark of the Linux experience, and the Gnome desktop has started to become, in recent years, wary of it. 

The devs are quite defensive about this, and it's sort of become an "our way or the highway" mentality. They recently started posting on their blog about the issue, and it is taken as a bit of an insult to suggest that the default theme or functionality might not suit everyone’s tastes. I’m not the hugest fan of Adwaita, for example, and it turns out that many Ubuntu users agree. It’s not that Adwaita is "bad" in any way (it’s certainly simple and clean). It’s just a style that not everyone will like, and that’s very normal with any design ever made. Not everyone likes MS’ default design either, and that’s why we have alternative themes.

Suggesting this to Gnome devs, however, is gonna get you slammed publicly in front of the open internet.

Ubuntu did A LOT of work and made Gnome recognizable and easy to use for many of us who loved Gnome, but who weren’t fans of the defaults chosen by the Gnome team upstream. Ubuntu even had to hack together desktop icon functionality back into the desktop after Gnome removed it. (Yes, desktop icons). This has become very commonplace in the Gnome world, as the defaults are often a contentious issue. And people go through all the work of fighting a broken theme and extension system anyway because Gnome has a TON of potential once the loose ends are tied.

It’s been the general direction of Gnome for years, and it’s stood as a bit of an outlier in the Linux community. A similar mentality happened with SystemD when the developers were starkly defensive of their ideals and were not open to outside input (To be fair, Systemd did a lot of stuff right and did a lot of work towards improving Linux performance. But they also made a lot of highly controversial changes and the devs were very notorious for being completely closed off to any kind of criticism or input from the Linux community). The general direction has been disappointing because Gnome 3 was a brave project in many respects that has done a lot of things right - and they’ve made perhaps the most unique mainstream desktop ever made. But they are also ignoring a lot of glaring requests from users and are making it harder to work with on each release. They’re increasingly working against customizeability and are increasingly forcing defaults and removing features, which has left much of the Linux community feeling frustrated.

I still love the concept and workflow of Gnome 3 once I’ve extended it a bit. I’ll probably continue to use Debian/Ubuntu for the time being, but I do hope that they reverse course and start listening to their users again with regards to customization. If not, it will eventually force some of their user base to jump ship.

What are your thoughts?