It's just like how we once used UUCP and Fidonet for email / news / message boards to remote systems that only had intermittent dialup connectivity in the 1980s and 1990s. Pockets of local communities would pool together to share a single system that would make the long distance calls to another city to send and receive messages. That really helped when long distance cost $0.34/minute and could be shared by hundreds of end users.
This sounds like an idea borrowed from games or other media where doing certain actions results in an audible feedback. This is often done for the benefit of the audience, or to enhance the gaming experience, but I had an idea to implement this in my workspace to somehow influence my brain and make it more enticing to write code and somehow beat procrastination.
I wrote a Python daemon which on startup loads small .wav files into memory to make latency as small as possible, and listens for interrupts as well as reads from a fifo. Other programs can send commands to it to play certain chimes on demand. In ~/.vimrc I added autocommands on certain actions - buffer write, enter/exit Insert mode, enter/exit command line, text change, etc. to send commands to my daemon. Now, when I use vim, I get audible feedback of my actions during writing. Since this is all in a separate daemon done in an UNIXy way, adding support for this in other applications should be easy enough if I want to.
If there was interest, I think that I could clean up the project a little and publish it, including a set of free .wav chimes to use.
Recently I added sounds to a website that fall into this non-essential but experience enhancing (imo) category. I've had somewhat mixed response to this, from total annoyance to utter delight. I'm really not sure what the best approach is to take with sound on the web.
edit: Sounds are present when opening the console, or dragging a canvas around
The old SGI IRIX workstations had sound effects. (the OS is featured in the original Jurassic Park film with the very silly 3D file manager)
It was literally like the hacker movies and predated most of them. Keystrokes, button presses, everything made a little noise. My first boss talked about the horror of the university computer lab full of them before they turned all the sounds off (as well as the absurd cost of outfitting that lab).
With a daemon approach and clever integration within applications that handle missing fifo correctly, all you need to do to get rid of the sounds is just stop the service. And it's also configurable, so you can set what actions actually do produce sounds.
YAML, TOML and JSON can be ingested to represent the same data structures internally, it's just a few lines of code to decide which load() function should we use for a particular file. Why not support all three formats in your applications for configuration and just let users decide, which one they want to use? Put a 'config.json' in '/etc/app/conf.d/' and you get the same data, as with 'config.yml' or 'config.toml'. Then users can use whichever format they prefer for the input data.
I tried this, it significantly complicated documentation and support after release. Lots more logic handling conflicting cases in two otherwise identical files, etc.
I think R/V FLIP was also the inspiration for the Operation Hennessey underwater sea laboratory in Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou that Zissou's crew steals an espresso machine from.
