I found ~15 of these while hiking on the Appalachian Trail in the last few weeks. It was interesting to learn they've been distributed for a number of years now, including within store-bought food packaging.
Its implementation may be a bit academic for what you're looking for, but Watson Beat (https://github.com/cognitive-catalyst/watson-beat) can generate music given a seed melody a number of configurable parameters.
All output is in MIDI files, and by default need to be glued together manually (though I suspect this could be automated).
I've also wondered how interesting this could get if it could be configured to dynamically feed the generated melodies back in as the seed, effectively evolving the music over time while remaining somewhat familiar from one adaptation to the next.
This is closely related to the idea of being "penny wise and pound foolish." For instance, you are actively depriving yourself a $5 coffee per day (or substitute your vice of choice) but you're leasing a new car every 2 years. In this case, you are not only cutting the wrong indulgences in the name of savings, you are giving yourself a false sense of accomplishment when there are much more beneficial steps that could be taken.
Finances are a hard thing to recommend to anyone else, as there are so many variables in personal finance. But very generally, it's worth considering where the largest single expenditures (or categories) are, and looking at how to lower those numbers first.
I assume that the Suze Ormans of the world would tell you to be not just pennywise but poundwise as well. The $5 latte is emblematic: once you start thinking about that $100 monthly expense, you sit and look at your $90 cable bill or your $200 car lease and think whether there are ways to cut back on that as well. The value of cutting out lattes is that it's easy to ask, on a regular basis, "is this making me $5 worth of happy?", whereas a big car payment you can more easily justify as "I need it to get where I'm going", even though a cheaper vehicle could do just as well.
I agree it's more efficient to start with the big expenses and work your way down, but it's sometimes easier, especially if you're just starting to turn your finances around, to start with the little stuff and build your way up.
Getting your car and house right makes up for many, many latte-level mistakes. And this is what Suze Orman misses.
It's like Ahmdal's law for finance: Don't sweat the small stuff until you have optimized the big stuff, and even then, the work to fix the small stuff might not be worth it.
The device uses strong encryption (where legal), and goes beyond U2F to include password management, certificate storage, OTP/Google Auth, and plausible deniability. The hardware is teensy-based, and the firmware is open source. The devs have released fairly regular updates, and even encourage hacking on it to meet custom needs.
I love the feature they keep passwords in fact on the device itself, not as a key to enable password manager. I was looking for something like that. If only they offered strong encryption for Europe!
They have an international version that does not ship with encryption of the data stored on the device, to deal with the various laws around encryption in other countries. However, there's no hardware difference, and since it's all open-source, there's nothing stopping you from loading the "US" firmware on the "International" version.
I think for international customers it's better to buy a working product with international support like yubikey rather than a crippled product like this.
The app is up and running great here, not experiencing any of the referenced performance issues (so far).
Support for the PGP portion that is available on the web would be great as well, maybe with a "Copy to Clipboard" after encrypting so I can drop the ciphertext straight into an email? Or (with a few more permissions), using a Share feature to write the email/chat in the app of my choosing, and I just have to choose the sender.
If this catches on like I hope, I can see a grand future where Keybase is how I can contact almost anyone I know through almost any means (FB, Twitter, etc.), but until then, it would be cool to have support for "legacy" addressing such as email, but still with strong encryption.
