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Our guest this week is Ben “Gitty” Baker. Ben fell in love with the idea that anyone, anywhere can build their own musical instrument and make music on it. His company was founded to spread that message all around the world.

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Show notes:

12-ounce Brass Head Dead-blow Fretting Hammer ($14)
“I got to thinking, ‘What tools am I always reaching for when I’m there at the bench, building a new cigar box, guitar or other instrument?’ This little hammer is a dead-blow hammer, which means the head is filled with a metal shot. So when you strike something, it doesn’t have that bounce and recoil that a standard hammer will. One of the heads is brass, and the other head is kind of the molded plastic that the rest of the hammer is, and it’s great for more gentle tapping or hammering. You know, most people have a hammer of some sort, but with that hardened steel head, you can dent softer metals. You can dent wood. Having a little more, shall we say, gentle method of persuasion, is handy at the work bench. I always find myself reaching for one of these.”

CigarBoxGuitar.com
“[This] is a site that I created and have built up full of free how-to information, related to cigar box guitars and other homemade instruments. We’ve got how to build them, how to play them. We’ve got modern plans and blueprints. We’ve got historic plans and blueprints. We’ve got photo galleries of famous celebrities holding and playing cigar box guitars. So, my goal with that was to make it the one-stop resource and knowledge base for the entire homemade instrument movement and it’s been a work in progress over a few years, but there’s a lot of great stuff on there.”

Tablature
“Tablature is a way of depicting where you put your fingers on a fretted instrument neck to play your particular tune. So, usually there are horizontal lines that represent the strings on an instrument, and then there are numbers that get placed on those lines that indicate what fret you place your finger on to play a particular note. And the number of horizontal lines depends on what instrument it’s written for. So, a conventional six-string guitar will have six lines. A three-string cigar box guitar will have three, and so forth… It’s a much easier and more approachable and accessible way for a beginner to start playing recognizable music. They don’t have to learn musical notation, they don’t have to know what all the notes and lines and everything mean. It’s just pretty much a way of displaying ‘Put your fingers here and you’ll get a song out of it.’ So, I like it as a very accessible, kind of like an on-ramp to playing a musical instrument.”

The Cigar Box Guitar ($80)
“My favorite tool of all is the cigar box guitar. Because it’s both a tool that you make yourself and it’s a work of art that use to make more art in the form business. Or, business. In the form of music. And there are very few other tools that you can say that about.”

via Cool Tools
Ben Baker, Owner of Cigar Box Nation

You might be getting sick of all the solar eclipse articles, but in the aftermath of last month’s phenomenon we keep running across incredible new vantage points—from this amazing (and viral) climber photo to this footage shot from a weather balloon in the stratosphere. Here is one more jaw-dropping capture.

Photographer JunHo Oh shot this 4K close-up of totality from Warm Springs, Oregon using a Panasonic GX85 attached to a 2160mm f/12 telescope and a RainbowAstro RST-150H Harmonic Drive robotic mount.

In the video above you get to watch the eclipse reach totality up close before tracing the corona in all of its solar flare-fueled glory. In the zoomed out version below you can watch the full eclipse at once. Both are worth 3 minutes of your time… and a healthy shot of awe.

via News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Watch a real-time 4K close-up video of the solar eclipse at totality

It turns out we have highly compatible strategies. This video brilliantly compares our approaches. You can see more about my success strategies in my book.

—

via Scott Adams’ Blog
What Do Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Jordan Peterson, and I Have in Common?

Link

(Gore) “There is a man, somewhere in Edo, who will never die.” From highly prolific director Takashi Miike comes a live action adaptation of Blade of the Immortal. It’s about Manji, a samurai who’s been denied death – but not pain! – until he kills 1000 evil men.

via The Awesomer
Blade of the Immortal (Trailer)

via The Truth About Guns
Clint Smith of Thunder Ranch: Quit Bitchin’ About .223 and Don’t Build Your Own AR

Link

NightHawkInLight shows us how we can make a stove out of a soup can. All you need is a can tapper or can punch to create air vents and feet out of the can’s walls and base. Although in our opinion you should also have a pair of protective gloves.

via The Awesomer
How to Make a Can Stove in 5 Mins.

The Best Ways to Begin Marketing Your Startup

The entrepreneurial dream of starting a company or business is one that many people have from the time they’re very young. Once you’ve achieved that goal, it’s time to develop a clever marketing plan. Only then will your business achieve its goals and more.

Of course, the problem that many startups experience is that they don’t have much of a budget for marketing in the early days. However, some of the most effective marketing techniques don’t require much capital.

It’s also important to know what not to do. That’s why MDG Advertising created this informative infographic, 5 Big Marketing Budget Mistakes to Avoid. Here we offer some other tips for promoting your company in its startup stages.

 

RELATED ARTICLE: MARKETING FOR NON-MARKETERS: GET GOOD AT IT BY LEARNING TO LOVE IT

 

Understand Your Niche

No matter where you plan to market your business, there is little chance of success if you haven’t clearly defined the reason that your business exists. Just telling people that you sell this or that won’t cut it. You have to show why you felt the product or service was necessary in the current business climate. State clearly what the customer can expect to experience. Make sure you and others know how your business will become indispensable down the road. If you can do that concisely, then that messaging can become the basis for your marketing efforts.

 

Take Advantage of Cost-Effective Marketing Methods

The rise and reach of social media is an absolute boon to small businesses everywhere. You can now spread the word about your product with very little monetary outlay. If you do have a little to spend on your social media advertising, hire a social media professional. After all, in inexperienced hands, social media marketing can do damage to your startup. However, do things right, and your company will benefit greatly.

 

 

Be Proactive Early

The old adage, “Strike while the iron is hot,” is extremely applicable to startups and their initial marketing efforts. When you launch, your business will most likely get some good attention. However, another startup will be opening tomorrow. If you don’t do something to keep that initial attention, you’re going to lose it.

So try some aggressive tactics in the early days. Give things away. Send coupons out in the mail and through social media. Make use of cross promotions. While you’re at it, saturate traditional media outlets such as television, radio, and newspapers. Make an impact on your intended customer base, and you’ll have a better chance at staying in the forefront of their consciousness. When they’re aware of you, you have a better opportunity to forge an ongoing relationship with them.

So don’t just cry poverty and hope that customers will find your startup in the early days. Be creative and proactive, and you’ll find that marketing your company just might be easier than you think.

The post The Best Ways to Begin Marketing Your Startup appeared first on Business Opportunities.

via Business Opportunities Weblog
The Best Ways to Begin Marketing Your Startup

via The Truth About Guns
GLOCK Drops Presser, Videos for Gen 5 GLOCK 17 and 19

If you live on the West Coast, the company Tesloop can give you a ride if you’re traveling around California. As you can expect, the company’s cars accrue serious mileage in a short timespan—and indeed, Tesloop says its first car, a Model S, just rolled over 300,000 miles on the odometer. Here’s how it held up.

The vehicle, dubbed “eHawk,” hit the milestone on Tuesday. It’s the only Model S in Tesloop’s fleet, the company said in a blog post, and each car travels up to 17,000 miles per month in and around LA, San Diego, Orange County and Palm Springs.

Since the Model S was first deployed, Tesloop said it has been out of commission for only 12 days in a shop, and the combined maintenance costs were about $10,500. Tesloop can take advantage of the Tesla Supercharging network at a cost of basically nothing, so that figure breaks down to $6,900 for scheduled maintenance and $3,500 to repair headlights that were damaged while the car drove through deep water, Tesloop said.

Comparatively, Tesloop estimated what the costs would’ve been for a Mercedes S class or a Lincoln Town Car in that same timespan. According to the company’s analysis, the cost would’ve been $86,000 for the Mercedes, with 112 days of servicing, and $70,000 for the Lincoln, with roughly 100 days of servicing.

One question I had was over battery degradation. The company doesn’t clarify that in a post, and a request for comment wasn’t immediately returned.

When TechCrunch inquired about the eHawk, after it hit 200,000 miles, Tesloop said the Model S only lost about 6 percent—despite receiving a full charge every day.

“For your daily driver, you don’t fully charge unless you’re doing a long trip,” a company exec told the news outlet. “We’re doing a long trip every day. We save, like, three minutes in charging in Barstow if we fully charge beforehand. We decided that we’re gonna suck it up, fully charge, and let it degrade. We figured that if it degraded enough, we could take it off a Vegas route and put it on a local Orange County route.”

Here’s more from the piece:

Then, just as the car hit 200,000 miles, the range estimator became inaccurate. Though the car didn’t actually lose any range, the estimator would say it could go another ten miles—and then power down.

Tesla looked into the issue, and told Tesloop that there’s a battery chemistry state that high-mileage cars go into, and the software isn’t properly compensating for that change. There will be a firmware update in three months that will take care of the discrepancy, but Tesla just replaced the battery to solve the problem.

“We got our 6% range back with the new battery,” Sonnad said with a laugh. “But had the firmware been updated, we’d be fine and plugging along.”

The company feels the Model S can tack on an additional 900,000 miles over the next six years, while it remains under warranty. We’ll update this post with more if we hear back from Tesloop.

Update: You can read the service records for the Model S below.

Tesloop Ehawk Tesla Service Logs by Ryan Felton on Scribd

via Gizmodo
This Is What Happens When You Put 300,000 Miles On A Tesla Model S

 

The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

 

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

 

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. This is the ecosystem of the database manager and the back-end developer.

 

The challenge of modern web development is that the tools and technologies are constantly changing. What’s in vogue today may become obsolete in less than a year. What’s more is that web applications have become much richer and more complex. New uses of video, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence on websites will continue to define the developer of the future.

 

And, of course, today’s savvy web developer must continue to learn and grow, which is equally challenging because the technologies are constantly changing. The internet of 3 years ago, is very different from the internet of today, and so it will be in another 3 years.

 

In the following, we’ve put together a long list of useful tools that every back-end developer should have in their toolkit. Read on and learn about some of the best resources on the market today for the backend developer.

 

 

Languages & Frameworks

 

1. PHP

 

In the 23 years since its introduction, PHP has become the world’s most popular server-side scripting language. PHP is pre-installed on most hosting sites, is known to be easy to use, and has tons of support. What’s more, there are many very well established PHP frameworks on the market that make developing applications more intuitive and agile. Some of the most popular ones are Symfony, Laravel, Phalcon, and Yii Framework.

 

 

2. Python

 

Python has become an extremely popular language for building applications in recent years. With a reputation for being fast, easy to learn, and carrying wide support, Python has become the first choice for many new programmers. It’s also the language of choice for data scientists and engineers. A couple of the most popular Python frameworks out there are Django and Pyramid.

 

 

3. Ruby on Rails

 

Ruby on Rails is the popular open source web application framework that uses the Ruby programming language. Ever since Rails burst on the scene a decade ago it has continued to scale up as an elegant way to build dynamic websites quickly and efficiently. Rails has garnered a strong following, especially among tech startups. In fact, some of the best-known firms out there are using this framework to build their sites, including Airbnb, Bloomberg, and Groupon.

 

 

4. Node.js

 

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment for developing a diverse variety of server tools and applications. One notable feature of Node.js is that it contains a built-in library to allow applications to act as a Web server without software such as Apache HTTP Server or IIS.

 

 

5. Laravel

 

Laravel is probably one of the more popular PHP frameworks on the market right now. Known for its elegance and simplicity, Laravel meets a diverse range of programming needs and projects, from beginner to advanced, and is well suited for projects of all types and sizes – from basic scripting to huge enterprise applications. It’s built on top of several Symfony components that ensure a solid framework for producing well-tested and reliable code.

 

 

Web Server Technologies

 

6. Apache

 

Apache is an open source web server, created in 1999 and currently used by 50.1% of all websites. The numbers indicate the reliance that folks place on Apache to run their web services. It’s a proven, reliable tool that has stood the test of time, and really played a key role in the early growth of the internet.

 

7. NGINX

NGINX is open source software for web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, media streaming, and more. In addition to its HTTP server capabilities, NGINX can also function as a proxy server for email (IMAP, POP3, and SMTP) and a reverse proxy and load balancer for HTTP, TCP, and UDP servers.

 

 

Databases

 

8. MySQL

 

MySQL is the world’s most popular open source relational database. It’s easily accessible and is often known to be part of the LAMP web development stack, standing for the ‘M’ in the acronym of popular tools, along with Linux, Apache, and PHP/Perl/Python. The fact that MySQL is free, easy to setup, and scales fast are some of the main reasons why it’s the best match for many backend developers.

 

9. PostgreSQL

 

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system with more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness.

 

10. MongoDB

 

MongoDB is a free and open-source NoSQL database system. MongoDB saves data in binary JSON format which makes it easier to pass data between client and server. The platform is closely associated with MEAN ( an acronym for MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, and NodeJS), a JavaScript based set of technologies used for building web applications.

 

 

Git Clients & Services

 

11. SourceTree

SourceTree simplifies the process of how developers interact with their Git and Mercurial repositories. The easy to use interface makes managing repositories more intuitive so you can focus on coding.

 

12. Github Client

Github Client was created to minimize the cost of building apps on multiple platforms. By using the Electron software framework, developers can now easily write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Essentially, Github Client + Electron provides developers with the benefits of a unified cross-platform experience that’s completely open source and ready to customize.

 

 

Microservice Platforms

 

13. Docker

 

Docker is the open source platform that put microservices on the map by providing developers and testers with a fast and easy-to-use packaging, distribution, and deployment mechanism for building containerized applications. Docker also offers a formidable ecosystem of tools, such as native clustering (Docker Swarm) registry service (Docker Hub) and cloud service (Docker Cloud).

 

14. Kubernetes

 

Kubernetes is an open source container cluster manager that aims to provide a “platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts.” Originally designed by Google, Kubernetes has the advantage of 15 years of Google research. Because of that, Kubernetes also draws upon a robust user community and is one of the top projects on Github.

 

 

Local Development Environments

 

15. XAMPP

 

There are lots of advantages to setting up your own local test environment. XAMPP is an open source, cross-platform web server solution stack, which comes with the Apache distribution containing MariaDB, PHP, and Perl all integrated into one downloadable file. The XAMPP open source package has been set up to be incredibly easy to install and to use.

 

16. WampServer

Wampserver is an open source windows development environment. It allows users to create web applications with Apache, PHP, and a MySQL database. The platform also comes with PhpMyAdmin and SQLite to help easily manage your databases. Wampserver is known to be particularly easy and intuitive to use.

 

17. Laragon

 

Laragon provides a fast and easy way to spin up an isolated Windows development (like a Virtual Machine, it doesn’t touch your OS). Users can install it as a software, start it up, do their programming, and just exit when finished. The platform comes pre-installed with many popular applications like Node.js, PHP, Apache, Composer, and MariaDB/MySQL.

 

 

Collaboration Services

 

18. Slack

 

Slack is a popular cloud-based messaging & collaboration app that has revolutionized enterprise communications in recent years. Known for its fun and intuitive user interface, “slackbots” (AI personal assistant), and a robust and rapidly expanding user community, Slack is on a mission to make working life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.

 

 

19. Asana

 

Asana is a SaaS platform designed to help teams work more effectively by improving team collaboration. It focuses on allowing users to manage projects and tasks online without the use of email.

 

20. Jira

 

Jira is a web-based project management platform that uses the kanban and scrum paradigms for managing projects, originally popularized by Toyota in the 1980s for supply chain management. As its own website declares, “Trello’s boards, lists, and cards allow users to organize and prioritize projects in a fun, flexible, and rewarding way.”

 

 

Website Speed Test Tools

 

21. Google PageSpeed Insights

 

PageSpeed Insights is a helpful web performance tool that analyzes the content and speed of a web page. The output offers reports for both desktop and mobile versions of your site, along with a set of recommendations and metrics to make the page faster.

 

22. Full Page Load Tester

 

WebPage Test provides a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (IE and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds. The output offers a rich set of diagnostics including resource loading waterfall charts, Page Speed optimization checks, and suggestions for improvements.

 

 

Web Development Communities

 

23. Stackoverflow

 

StackOverflow is easily the world’s largest developer website with approximately 50 million visits a month by developers who come to learn and share their knowledge. Users are encouraged by Stack Overflow’s badge system, which enables them to earn reputation points for receiving an “up” vote on an answer given to a question.

 

24. Refind

Refind is a content reposting site that allows members (consisting of founders, hackers, and designers) to collect and share the best links on the web. In its own words, “Join thousands of professionals to discover, save, and read what’s most relevant to you.”

 

25. Hashnode

Hashnode is basically a social network for software developers where they can share and grow their programming knowledge by posting of articles and content. This allows them to build their portfolio and gain followers and votes in the process.

via Planet MySQL
Complete Megalist: 25 Helpful Tools For Back-End Developers