beezischillin

I might be alone here but I still have Winamp on my Windows computers. From my 100 MHz pentium 1 to my bazillion core Ryzen, the only constant has been Winamp. Whether it was playing back mp3s, internet radio or ripping discs, it worked. I like the familiarity. Foobar and Clementine just feel so alien, I could never get used to them. Maybe it’s the compact, floaty UI, which first hog the entire screen.

I’ve since switched to mainly macOS but iTunes feels awful and sluggish in comparison, especially with Apple Music, I hate even starting it.

This is the only platform I frequent where I read more than I comment and I learn a lot from people, too. I always come here to find interesting takes on things and I'm very rarely disappointed. A lot of times I delete my comments instead of posting because I worry ot might not be a good enough contribution and that I might sound dumb. That's very humbling.

Happy Thanksgiving!

It's not really worth it for them to make dumb TVs either, I assume, since that implies they can't shove ads and telemetry into them.

I'd love a feature that would allow alphabetical sorting of channels. It's kind of ridiculous that this isn't possible on a 'smart' TV today.

I mean if the goal was to hide bad reviews they could've done so already like they did when Robinhood pissed its users off. There has to be more to this than just wanting to improve the score of a built in app.

I always use handbrake to optimize video for embeds, whether it’s to remove audio, reduce size or simply resize, it works well. I’m so grateful to have discovered it years ago.

I don't mean to jinx myself here but I really hope this is part of the beginning of an industry-wide trend (after-all, Microsoft already talked about making their gear more repair-friendly) and if it is, then I'm really happy. I'm thankful for all the people who poured tons of money and countless hours of their lives into activism to make progress happen because the state of things is rather depressing when it comes to actual ownership of products.

As an example, in my country all Apple repair is done by certified 3rd parties and in 2/2 cases the repair work I got back was less than satisfactory. My 2017 MBP arrived with broken speakers after a keyboard repair (obviously) and the iPhone X I sent in for a battery swap started to bulge at the top after less than a month.

If I have the choice to order the components myself I'd rather lose my warranty when I'm close to losing it anyway and just bring it to a person whom I trust with doing a good job.

I grew up very poor and I always get this awful feeling when something costly I own breaks - and that's consistently been my experience with Apple and Beats wireless headphones and earbuds. The batteries simply went from good to barely holding a charge or not even charging within a year on four pairs so this a major negative to me. I've had better luck with my Sony 1000XM2, which is still fine, thankfully.

The other downside is the volume, I like to be able to crank it up and listen to music louder sometimes.

Apart from that it always felt to me like it mostly depended on the situation, at home when I can lay in my bean bag and listen to some vinyl I'll always prefer my wired Sennheiser through my Schiit amp. When I do some yard work I go for the Sony and when I'm on foot taking care of business in the city I'll go for the AirPods because they're good enough and convenient.

And a side note: A really cool audio discovery to me was the existence of Chinese hi-fi brands like TIN Audio. Their wired IEMs are pretty nice. I'm looking into getting one of those MMCX bluetooth DAC AMPs to give me the option to use them wirelessly, too, when I want.

A lot of mainstream media sites have removed comments sections from their articles, there's no user interaction left on those.

I wouldn't necessarily say that it was the worst video, but the response to it was a response to YouTube's general direction, in my opinion.

https://www.polygon.com/2019/12/6/20998648/2019-youtube-rewi...

The interesting thing about that video was that the Internet took it as a win, YouTube apparently took it as a learning opportunity.

This is part of a wider trend in the corporate internet of getting rid of visible user interaction to stop publicising user opinion. News publications have slowly gotten rid of comments sections, Google itself (an entity quite close to the USG) is following suit. Of course I suspect that the idea here is less about creator choice, since they can already hide and filter user interaction to their hearts content and more about some high profile channels of some importance being able to save face since manually disabling interactions looks worse for them.

I’ve seen some interesting projects in the past that were browser based and made the entire Internet be equipped with comments sections, including YouTube. I wonder if something like that would be viable, maybe with the addition of a like dislike bar.

It's interesting that the Internet took the YouTube Rewind dislike thing as a win, meanwhile YouTube themselves took it as an opportunity to learn about the negative side effects of their users' free will.

A small anecdote: Back when I was still a little kid I had an awful music teacher in school. He would throw all the theory on the whiteboard but never explained how it actually relates to the music itself. I would've loved to know so I asked how this strange mathematical stuff of 4/4ths makes music and he told me to learn it or I'd fail but nothing actually relating to my question. So I always had a bit of antipathy towards the subject and never looked it up or even asked somebody afterwards, even to just satisfy my younger self's curiosity because the whole subject's been tainted.

If those classes ever even mildly resembled even how well this little interactive tutorial presents and explain thing I probably would've joined the school chorus or learned to play instrument in an extra-curricular fashion. Which I regret never doing.

Eventually when I got my hands on a copy of Reason at age 11 or 12 (can't remember) and started messing around with it, I got to a point where I kind of understood the concepts -- the whole process was kind of similar to how this tutorial is put together, it just took way longer to figure out. :)

Can I migrate my purchases over and get rid of my extra Faceborg account, then? I don’t like the threat of getting banned and losing all my purchases hovering over my head constantly

We have an official reseller but it’s been out of stock for months unfortunately. The making a quick buck on other people’s misfortune thing is widespread here. PS5s still cost upwards of $1000.

Has anyone ever done any studies on the effects of long, daily exposure of the eyes to a vr headset’s optics and screen to the human eye?

They also said they're open to opening it up to 3rd parties in the future.

I wish this had more RAM and at least a USB-C to boot off of: it'd be pretty nice for singular use cases.

I'd replace the Pi 4 in my 3D printer controller with one and use that Pi 4 for a bunch of other things since they're impossible to find outside of scalpers in my country now. :/

I genuinely struggle to imagine what taking on China would be like with so much economic dependance on their exports and manufacturing. Can anyone please explain? Especially in the with the current economic outlook in mind.

Oh, don't worry, I assumed that you weren't, I just realised that I wasn't too specific so I just specified it. Sorry if I accidentally implied that you were, I wasn't trying to.

Still, I learned about micro-distros which was quite an interesting thing to discover :) I might try and mess around with some on the Pi Zero I have to see if I can figure out a cool use for something like that.

As long as you use something like the official PSU and don't connect particularly power-hungry USB devices to it you should be fine.

As far as the SD card goes you can boot off an external hard drive or SSD via USB and that should guarantee longevity.

My biggest problem with headless Pis was that they would randomly disconnect from the wifi network and disappear, turning off power saving on wifi didn't solve it. In the end the real solution ended up being to just create a 2.4ghz-only network and connect them to that. Somehow they just don't play well with networks that have the same SSID for 2.4 and 5ghz on my Ubiquiti gear.

I ended up Tailscale for Wireguard myself. I was really worried about letting all these server software out on the wide open internet because I can't guarantee I'll be around 24/7 to monitor in case of a security problem and this way I can be lazier. :)

The added benefit is that I can force all devices to use PiHole while connected to Tailscale and have DNS-adblocking on the go!

I migrated away from cloudflared to dnscrypt-proxy because cloudflared didn't start up properly for me. On each reboot I had to manually stop and start it otherwise it was flooding the logs with failures. It was a bit weird and frustrating to diagnose.

I should’ve been more specific! I meant Raspbian Lite :) That one certainly doesn’t boot in seconds off an SD card.

It’s a small Laravel app my friend wrote for himself and shared with me.

Tom Lawrence (YouTuber who makes networking related videos) uses the open source one called InvoiceNinja. Apparently it’s pretty good!

The Pi4 is an amazing piece of hardware. While relying on sd cards is a sure way to get a disappointing surprise, they now support booting off a USB drive, which is amazing. Couple it with even a sata ssd and a USB adapter and you’ll be amazed how fired up it becomes. A Linux without a GUI boots in mere seconds. My biggest complaint really is the availability, especially now. I had to buy one of those mini Intel Atom PCs because I just couldn’t find a Pi4 anymore at a reasonable price.

I run an invoicing tool off mine, PiHole, NextCloud, UPS monitoring and HomeAssistant to control lights and heating in my home.

I have one serving as a controller and monitoring server for my 3D printer that I turned into a chunky little tablet with a 7” touchscreen and OctoPrint.

And another one for backups at the office.

I loved the video game SOMA which played with this idea in its story and environments.

I just tried this and it's pretty nice. It's still not perfect but it's getting there.

I ran the theme song from the credits of Cyberpunk 2077 and the resulting vocal has tiny bits of instrumental elements in it every now and then but in parts it's perfect.

That song turned out to be a pretty good benchmark (plus I kinda wanted the vocals anyway), because it has a lot of reverb, stereo imaging trickery and various other effects on the instruments and the vocal. The instrumental didn't really come out too well, sadly. But the vocal is very usable! The Deezer one was noticeably worse on the vocals but to be honest even that one was amazing to see in action.

Compared to an AI like this the way people used to sweat blood to try to get something usable for a remix or a sample out of a song seems so archaic.

I might reinstall my DAW and instruments and play around with the extracted vocals now. :)

I’m not going to deny that their cars are standout and that they sell well, if you wanted to collect a lot of data you need a good and hip product to piggyback onto. But I don’t necessarily think the car is the end goal. If they manage to crack autonomous driving fully first thanks to collecting all that data it will be such a product that it makes the car irrelevant and it will genuinely change the course of history. Of course that’s just my gut feeling about it. It’s not all that unlikely if you look at the extent of what Silicon Valley is willing to go to just to show you ads, from creating the world’s most popular smart phone OS to a giant video sharing site to voice assistants to pioneering vr to creating the world’s most popular web browser and I could go on :)