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stuart78

975 karma · joined October 6, 2013

websites: > www.signalfunctionset.com > samplestack.app
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stuart78··on The Milwaukee Brewers win the first World Series title in franchise history
I (an extremely casual fan) forgot the series was on until yesterday's game but enjoyed the final two. I think it doesn't help that these are two 'regional' teams (compared to the Dodgers or Yankees). Good baseball just the same.
stuart78··on Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
From a visual perspective I miss some of those more esoteric symbols, but the current Apple (US) keyboard gets it right. Symbols with text labels for modifiers and clear pictographs for the function keys (though the F3/Mission Control icon is a bit unclear until you click i and the behavior of F5/mic seems unhelpful). I just remember a few too many family tech support issues trying to help a struggling relative understand that command and 'open apple' are the same thing.
stuart78··on Suzanne Ciani's Buchla Cookbook
Some people have more or less fixed-patch instruments which might be up your alley. Definitely not that type myself (things are always changing and getting swapped in and out), but there are a lot of fun ways to use them.
stuart78··on Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
This video linked from the site is quite good at adding a sense of scale to the undertaking. I also love that Roman will be supported by Hubble and Webb.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDwemQH2zDU

stuart78··on App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours
I've been waiting for several days on my MacOS app review. After many successful releases, somebody has decided to nitpick the App description. Fixed and resubmitted. Then, another rejection for some other related aspect of the description. Fixed and resubmitted, now waiting on next review.

I'm good to make the description complaint, of course, but it seems the reviewer immediately halts as soon as they encounter any issue. Would have been nice to get both feedback points on the first response, especially given how long it can take to get back to the top of the queue.

At the end of the day, I regret my choice to use the App Store at all.

stuart78··on The lost civic life of movie rental stores
I worked in a small, independent video store in my town during college. It was the only place locally where you could get art house, a wide selection of classic movies and other odd-ball tapes. During my time, there was a fair bit of the 'helpful advice' this article focuses on, but I think the bigger loss is due to licensing.

At Morris Video, our tapes were available as long as they played (we never switched to DVD). There was no option for the distributor to pull inventory and there were no contracts between Morris and the studios. We bought the tapes for a fixed fee, we rented the tapes as long as we could.

The result was a library that included material that was (at the time) impossible to access anywhere else in town, and that could survive the collapse, acquisition or whims of Hollywood distributors.

Today, the studios can and do change the content of films you have 'purchased' digitally (The French Connection is the best recent example) and our access to the material is governed by some impenetrable and revokable contract, and the catalogs on offer pale in comparison to Morris if you're looking for older outside of the mainstream.

There are benefits to the new mode for sure: Radically lower barrier to entry for independent creators, instant access to quite large libraries, lower priced films than peak physical media.

I don't really want to go back to having a huge wall of DVDs or tapes, but I would prefer to live in the world of simpler licensing and ownership.

stuart78··on Cyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
This is a bit of an idiosyncratic list. Two of my favorite additions from my own youth: Hard Boiled by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow and Batman: Digital Justice. The latter now reads like a bit of a corny cash grab for the early '90s cyber fad, but I still love the time capsule of some if its art.
stuart78··on Why are US consumers so angry? It's not just high prices
Please read the fine print before use. The steak knives are not to be used with animal products and poster will not be responsible in case of cracked blade.
stuart78··on Mouseless – keyboard-driven control of macOS/Linux/Windows
A while back I had to install a bluetooth mouse on a Mac mini with out existing mouse attached. It was a nightmare only reserved after lots of searching on my phone to enable the accessibility mode setting allowing arrow-based mouse movement.

The System Settings app seemed so incredibly hostile to keyboard navigation. I was able to start it, but tab only moves you in and out of the search window. From there, you can search for Bluetooth, but there seems no way to move from the left-hand menu tab the main contents. Within the main window, there are no buttons unless you hover with... a mouse, and no way to traverse the list via keyboard.

It'd be great to bring back some basic standards for how tab and arrow keys should aid in situations like this. I don't need them all the time, but they'd have saved me a real headache had they been there then.

stuart78··on Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
The article mentions that 'most' translations soften the book. It looks like the recent Penguin edition attempts to present the original tone in English and there are several much more contemporary translations from the late 19th century which apparently don't attempt to pull back. I'm tempted to give it a shot, maybe see if the kids can handle it.
stuart78··on Write some software, give it away for free
I just interviewed somebody who works for mac productivity app that has been around forever. For many years it worked as a simple one to two person operation and then they took some money and started to try and scale the business. But it is an idiosyncratic product that has a small number of highly passionate users. They tried to make it a platform. They tried to sell it in bulk. None of this makes sense for the product and the team responsible for it knows it will never work.
stuart78··on Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game
This doc is great, I love this game. So much so that I built a Tempest-insipred audio visualizer [0] for the EYESY platform as one of my first projects on the platform.

[0] https://signalfunctionset.com/projects/tempestuous/

stuart78··on Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser
Very pleased to see Abuse in there, but unfortunately it didn't load for me. I spent way too many hours in that game back in the day.
stuart78··on How "Night of the Living Dead" Accidentally Became Public Domain
The Best Years of Our Lives is a genuine classic. Complex narrative, brilliant cinematography and performances. It is a much more difficult film than It's A Wonderful Life, and absolutely worth watching.
stuart78··on DJ With Apple Music launches to enable subscribers to mix their own sets
FWIW, I've never had an issue with playlists synching between mobile and desktop. I have had other issues in Apple Music, most annoyingly when tracks are randomly replaced by other versions of the song, but you might reach out to Apple support on this one if it happens regularly.
stuart78··on Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar
I would guess this is, to some degree, a generational shift. The Animated category has only existed for ~30 years and was born from the resentment many in the academy felt toward Beauty and the Beast being nominated alongside supposedly serious films for Best Picture. Each generation following that one has grown up with a more diverse slate of animated films available.

The Oscars are the slowest possible reflection of social change, and I’m sure the perspective you share is still held my many members, but this win holds out some hope for sure.

stuart78··on The True Costs of Being on YouTube
I don't know her or her content, but the theme that comes up over and over in that post is the elusive 'big deal' from a streamer or network. I get the impression that she thought this production approach would lend itself to that kind of transition. Her background seems more 'traditional media' than 'DIY native', and I would guess that framed her perception of what a production looked like.

In contrast, somebody like Maangchi took the opposite approach. Her earliest videos are still up and you can see the truly homemade approach. Granted, she was in early and it is surely massively more competitive now.

stuart78··on How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop
I think it say something about the relatively low-effort nature of this genre that it could be so easily codified and displaced by AI. The human-produced examples in the article follow simple and predictable rules and already sounded pretty artificial before the robots got involved.
stuart78··on HP Tries Desperately to Make 'Printer as a Subscription' a Thing
There are so many other good printer alternatives. Brother has been brought elsewhere, but I recently bought a Canon laser printer which has been fantastic. Great color reproduction, fast, easy. And, you know, I just own it so I can do whatever I want.
stuart78··on The Cassette-Tape Revolution
I grew up with tapes and have reconnected with them in recent years. I have plenty of vinyl as well, but tapes have a nicer nostalgic feel for me (and don’t require as much careful handling). I particularly like shopping for tapes. In most shops used vinyl is many times picked over and overwhelming. But tape sections are smaller and more efficient to browse. For me, there is a certain feel to the old tapes I want (and certain labels, particularly Moon Glyph, for the new stuff) and finding a fit has a very specific thrill I don’t get elsewhere.
stuart78··on Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it
Commerce led by mega aggregators has a long history in the US. Walmart and Sears to name two that were dominant in earlier generations. Both of those companies pushed suppliers to adhere to high / punishing standards as well. While those companies were dominant in their time, a key part of the reason all three have done so well is that they serve the actual customer better than the alternative. Sears was like the internet on paper. Walmart radically expanded the inventory available to shoppers across the country. Amazon does both of these things 10x more efficiently.

I am not naive to the many valid critiques of all three, but the customer benefit is an important part of the discussion that seems consistently forgotten. It is so critical because customer preference and changing market dynamics are what ended the reign of both Sears and Walmart and they are what will do the same to Amazon. But until then, Amazon has figured out how to deliver stuff to my door quickly and inexpensively.

One small example. When I was young I loved music and in my medium sized town there was one record store with two locations. It was fine, and they would order in anything you asked for, but limited inventory available browsing. In the 90s Best Buy, Barnes and Noble and a few other now-forgotten big box retailers came to town. The impact was immense. Inventory went up ~100x over this period and price went down. And the breadth was amazing. Huge classical and Jazz sections, neither of which had much presence at the independent shop. The independent shop survived too. They had Ticket sales, hippie merch and a more specialized catalog. Wonderful differentiation in offerings. Now markets have shifted many times over since those days. Some retailers (including the record shop) have adapted others have not. So it goes.

stuart78··on Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it
The Amazon case in this article seems to fall flat in the same way the Apple as Monopoly argument does. It works only if you ignore the fact of categorical choice (Android in the case of Apple). No seller is forced to sell on Amazon, as demonstrated by the thousands of Shopify and Etsy-hosted sellers out there. Yes, within the world of Amazon, Amazon sets the rules, but if the users leave, so will the sellers.

Shopify, Instagram, TikTok, Magento and the dozens of other ways to sell goods online offer an alternate path, and while Amazon may dominate today, tomorrow is never certain.

(Edit: spelling error)

stuart78··on The MP3mobile (1998)
I used a series of those for iPod for the first few years, but lived in Los Angeles, so there was a ton of interference, both from radio stations and other devices broadcasting on the same frequency. It created some pretty chaotic drives from time to time...
stuart78··on Goodreads is terrible for books – why can’t we all quit it?
I entirely agree, and that is how I use it as well. Really it is just a log of the books I've read and my progress against my annual challenge. I appreciate that I can see the opinions of others, and I ignore 100% of their recommendations.

I don't want or need it to do more.

stuart78··on Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK rather than break encryption
The FBI has a history of illegal wiretapping as old as the organization itself. To keep it relevant to one of this weekend's big film openings, you can read all about how illegal recordings fed the hearings that stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance. And the tradition extends to many other prominent figures including Martin Luther King. And today, this kind of surveillance continues through through more modern guises [0]. The volume of these 702 searches is dramatically down, which is good, but there is no reason to assume that it will stay that way.

Point being, one shouldn't assume that government agencies will adhere to the standard we might wish them to when choosing means of investigation or surveillance.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/fbi-warra...

stuart78··on The end of the magic world’s 50-year grudge
This article was so bad. The comparisons to AI were forced, and the idea that tricking mining companies out of millions is somehow morally superior to tricking individuals is ridiculous. Both involve the exact same deceit and poor character.
stuart78··on Half of vinyl buyers in the U.S. don’t have a record player: study
It’s great that musicians can sell a high cost item (vastly greater revenue vs streams per customer), but I do worry the labels are over-indulging here and heading the market towards a Funkopop like crash. Most record stores I go into have reoriented towards very mainstream new releases and overpriced ‘rare’ vintage albums. Meanwhile the more serious collectors market has moved to Discogs and Bandcamp/direct. So when the market turns on vinyl, physical stores will be the biggest direct losers. And even an average shop in the neighborhood is better than none at all.
stuart78··on Paper Models of Vintage Computers
Oh that is awesome, must have missed it, thanks for the catch!
stuart78··on Paper Models of Vintage Computers
Love these, but wish they weren't posted to Scribd. I'd rather pay $0.99 each than have to sign up for whatever that product is trying to sell me.
stuart78··on FCC Considering Banning Transfer of Online Consent Forms
There is an ethical way to market products which relies on transparency to the audience and not tricking or repurposing leads for secondary purposes. Blocking more of these shady tactics makes it easier to do the right thing and requires you to build marketing programs for and around people who actually want your offering.
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