Title says it all. What's your relationship status? Don't forget to vote in the poll!

I used to do a lot of covers. Namely vocal covers and guitar covers. If any of you guys want to know what my voice sounds like, check out the link below. It's a cover of Distant Early Warning by Rush. Actually, my father and myself did it, along with some help from a couple friends of his. The guitars and vocals are me. The keyboards and bass are my father, and the drums are someone else. Not perfect by any means, but it was a fun hobby of ours back in the day.

My Vocals and Guitar: 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tng7202umub7on...2.mp3?dl=0

We had a good time with it. We do a lot of them, and I want to get back into doing originals. I recorded the instruments for this track (titled Shrapnel) but I never got around to finishing them. 

Open to any feedback or suggestions. I'll be getting back into it in about six months!

I make MyBB plugins on the side. We've so far released a number of them made by members of Makestation, with several more in the pipeline. Right now, I'm looking for help with the status feed and I'll be getting it wrapped up in the next month or so as my schedule frees up. 

Namely, I'm looking at someone to help test, and someone to help us audit for security. I aggressively test my plugins before releasing them (both for stability and for rogue input), but another set of eyes is a huge help. I had some help with BAM's testing, so if anyone would like to help test, please let me know here! 

Regarding live boards, we are using the status feed here, but I can't recommend using it on a live board currently UNLESS you are okay with completely reinstalling it once the release comes. There will be no upgrade path from pre-beta releases to the final. We've been doing it by hand here, but it's a fairly involved process.

Hello community! 

We are, for the first time in six years, reconsidering some of our board layout. We're still a tight knit, small forum, so we don't need a huge number of boards. However, we're making a goal to shuffle a few things around and will probably a board or two in the process. We need suggestions on what you think needs improvement. I've done as many mockups as I can, and something just isn't quite sticking yet.  

The main problem we're having now is that project journals are kind of shuffled throughout the forum. That was actually something the original Makestation solved with its initial layout. We had designated sections for ideas, creativity discussion, and project journals, and these boards would contain just about any niche. The issue was that ALL project journals went into one board. You'd visit that one board and you'd see almost any topic imagineable. 

We ended up splitting them out by the topic (media, technology, writing, etc.) and putting a project journals sub-board in each category. It kept things a little more organized at the time. We're looking into some other improvements, so I wanted to get an idea of whether you guys would use these, and most importantly, for inspiration from the community. Current ideas in the pipeline: 

• Threadmarks. This is a specialized table of contents for project journal threads you create. If you write an update or another post, you can hit "add threadmark" when you add the post and it gets added to your table of contents. No feature exists within our forum software for this, and there is no plugin. We will have to write our own. I will happily do so, but I want to get an idea of whether or not people think it's useful before we go ahead and give it the green light.
  
  
• Project Journal list in profiles. Profiles have been heavily revamped in recent months on the forum. Ideally, we want the community to be as profile-centered as possible, so we've been adding new features for them. This would also require a special plugin, but if they'd be useful, we will write one. 
  
  

I use Python almost religiously for anything I can get away with. It's honestly *almost* the perfect language. It's easy to write and read (and clean and concise), works on any platform without compiling specifically, has libraries that are perfect for almost anything, and is installed (or easy to install) almost everywhere. 

The problem with Python is that, boy oh boy, if it isn't slow... And I do a lot of scientific computing with it. It's not acceptable to spend 5 seconds just to rotate one image. 

So I found Cython. It's one of numerous attempts to make Python significantly faster. Unlike some of the other options, Cython somewhat requires some custom modifications to the underlying code (namely declaring C data types). This is not required. It will compile without a hitch if you forget them, so it's easy to retrofit old code. However, you throw away a lot of the performance benefits if you don't declare the types. 

I find that it's quite a bit faster than PyPy (another good alternative to the standard Python interpreter that uses just-in-time compilation). Cython is almost a language of its own because it requires certain modifications, but it's literally the ease of Python with the speed of C, and I don't think you can get much better than that. 

The only downside? You have to compile for every architecture...

Would you rather? 

1:  Work a high paying job with sufficiently high stress for 15 years. Put off having a family, put your entire life on hold, but enjoy making a few houndred thousand dollars a year for the rest of your life. 

2: Work an hourly job making about 30K/year for the rest of your life, but live life to the full within your means, have a family, start your life, and get a head start with where you're at now in terms of your social life, family, and so forth. 

Many people ask this question of themselves. Curious what your answers will be!

Hello all, 

I threw this one together real quick tonight. It calculates the average rating of a user's threads on the forum, and displays this rating on the profile. We're using it here, and it offers a simple quality measurement of the threads posted on the forum. Hopefully this makes thread ratings a little more useful.

Disclaimer: Not responsible for any forum drama.

Features include: 

• Calculates average thread ratings on user profiles.
  
• Usergroup settings for which profiles are enabled. (For example, you could disable this for banned users or new members. These members would not have their averages displayed on their profile. )
  
• Separate usergroup setting to control master visibility. (For example, you could prevent guests or other usergroups from viewing ratings entirely). 
  
• Minimum threshold setting. This allows administrators to set a minimum number of ratings to calculate before averages are shown on profiles. This helps to prevent abuse if only a few ratings are available. 
  

Smileys on klick shoutbox ....I found something on the net and adapted something

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Hello all, 

I've been a loyal MyBB user for many years, but phpBB seems to have come a long way in recent years. I'm not very familiar with it to be honest. It's more popular and more widespread than MyBB (and SMF as well), and the extensions and themes seem to be very good. It also has alerts and responsiveness out the box. 

I'm curious to see what administrators who use it think of the software. What made you choose phpBB as your software of choice, and what do you like most about it?

Debian vs. Ubuntu. This seems like this question should be absolutely obvious. Ubuntu is based on Debian, and is generally the more popular of the two. Most people would choose Ubuntu in a heartbeat.

So the question is why. And the answer is that, generally speaking, Ubuntu is so much easier to use. It has PPAs which make third party software much easier to install, and it includes a lot of non-free components that are at least available. Doesn't mean they are necessarily well... out of the box, but being available is a great thing. Because sometimes you want to be able to play an MP3. 

Debian sure does have its advantages though. I literally use it as my daily driver on my development virtual machine (and I do all C development, most of my HDL development, and a number of other things solely from the development box currently. I use it very frequently). 

Debian, in my experience, is much more stable. And it actually has more packages than Ubuntu, by a long shot (Ubuntu removes a lot and makes you use Snaps or PPAs for some of the more obscure ones). It is a much cleaner experience and it very rarely ever crashes or has any issue whatsoever. So personally, even though I prefer Ubuntu on a server (newer software), I prefer Debian on the desktop.

The only downside to Debian is that a lot of Ubuntu's desktop Gnome improvements aren't really available on Debian, and stock Gnome have never been my cup of tea. I installed a lot of extensions and a highly customized theme to get around this issue, but it's definitely a challenge at first if you aren't used to using Gnome. Dash to Panel is a lifesaver.

What are your preferences?