Quantising the oscillator pitch into discrete steps like this is pretty common when it comes to synthesisers. Generally there is also a fine-tuning control that allows the user to offset the output by up to an octave. Makes it easier to not be out-of-tune with other instruments.
About a year ago I stayed in a hotel and the door lock started misbehaving one morning while I was at breakfast. Went to the front desk, got a new card, went back to the room and discovered it still didn't work. After doing that two more times, someone was sent up to the room with a mysterious, palm-sized device with a USB cable hanging off it, which they plugged into a well hidden USB port on the bottom of the lock. The device performed some black magic, and after about 30 seconds a light on the lock changed colour from orange to red and it started functioning correctly again.
I use `ts` quite often in adhoc logging/monitoring contexts. Because it uses strftime() under the hood, it has automatic support for '%F' and '%T', which are much easier to type than '%Y-%m-%d' and '%H:%M:%S'. Plus, it also has support for high-resolution times via '%.T', '%.s', and '%.S':
Assuming semi-recent bash(1), you can also get away with something like
while read -r line; do printf '%(%F %T %s)T %s\n' "-1" "${line}"; done
as the right-hand side/reader of a shell pipe for most of what ts(1) offers. ("-1" makes the embedded strftime(3) format string assume the current time as its input).
I started running some games of Paranoia last winter, and found this tool to be quite useful for generating layouts: http://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/dungeon/
