Well most of them were, but not all. Notably the last three nuclear power plants in Germany were shutdown on 15. April 2023, while the last coalition was in power. At that time there was a big discussion whether the shutdown could be postponed due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a measure to curb rising electricity costs in Germany, but ultimately it was decided to go through with the shutdown. It was a largely symbolic move, but carried a lot of emotional weight since it put last nail in the coffin for nuclear energy in Germany. Hence people now blaming the Ampel government (and Habeck in particular) even though it wasn’t their decision to shut down power plants in the first place (with people of the party who made the decision openly criticizing them as well). Just to add a bit of context as German…
What imo doesn’t get mentioned enough about the music on the (German, can’t speak for English) Tonies is the recordings themselves: They are recorded with real musicians and natural postproduction, not like most kids songs found on YouTube nowadays which are heavily compressed and edited. My kids love using the Toniebox and I am happy they do. For me the quality of content outweighs the negative aspects.
I really enjoyed http://www.emulator101.com/. It is a hands on tutorial on how to write an emulator for an Intel 8080 CPU that can run the original Space Invaders. The code examples are in C, but you can find implementations in other languages on GitHub as well.
The barrier of entry is much lower than back then, so there probably just isn’t that much demand. These days you can record a whole album at home on your phone or computer and that can already sound very professional.
Some places like you describe do exist though (e.g. here in Berlin [1]), but I wouldn’t consider them cheap and the one I linked to is geared more to rehearsal than recording. You can rent equipment and rooms per hour.
Another thing that comes to mind is the recording booth at Third man records [2], although it is more of a retro novelty.
Unfortunately it's how I found my ISP, Three in the UK, now blocks archive.org because of "adult content". (In Firefox the block makes it look like a server configuration error on archive.org itself, but it's an ISP block). I'm pretty sure I was able to look at archive.org a few months ago.
That seems silly. I certainly don't think of archive.org as having adult content. If they do, perhaps the easy thing to do is to have archive.org and adult.archive.org that way it is easy to distinguish for people and entities that want to know/filter. Also, what is adult content to one person is nothing of consequence to the next person. So, yes I disagree with the censoring like that; glag you found a ISP that is not censoring. Also, one can use a VPN or tor; so they are not stopping one unless they also disable VPN and tor traffic.
