Lorindól

Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of science?

Winamp is one of the few things I really miss from Windows.

This young woman is an exceptional writer. Not many her age can achieve such coherency and well laid structure in longer essays.

I hope she will continue using her skills and keep fighting against this new rise of misogyny.

My favorite is when people get picky about cabling for digital transfer. The ones and zeroes either get there or they don’t, nothing in-between. They work or they don’t.

Around the time when HDMI was released my friend bought some "super-high-end "cable that cost over 200$, since he wanted the "best possible performance " out of his system. I tried to explain that the cheapest cables would give the exact same results if they’re not faulty from the start. We had a loud argument about this, even though the guy is a goddamn tech PhD. He just could not admit he got scammed and tried to give me a lecture about “how the gold plated connectors make all the difference”.

You are correct.

This anecdote is empirical, I know, but from my own experience I know how very hard if not impossible it can be to tell the difference between 320kbps and FLAC tracks, even with a high quality setup.

I happened to find excellent vintage studio monitors some time ago and with my music afficionado friend we wanted to try if we could tell the difference. We are no audiophiles, but we both can tell the difference between good and bad sound.

Both selected three favourite tracks from different genres and we converted the CD-ripped FLACs to 320kbps CBR and put them on a random playlist with the originals. Then we listened.

Both got a few right, but I couldn’t really say what it was that made guess the FLAC. It was more like a feeling in the back of your head than anything substantial. “This sounds somehow more alive” is maybe the best description I can give. Or it was just dumb luck.

Anyway we came to the conclusion that 320kbps can be enough to replicate an enjoyable sound, at least for us. Not one track sounded lacking and we had a good time with our little experiment.

EDIT: Fixed typos.

There’s one for Firefox, too:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/microslop/

No. I shall thank you now.

How can one learn such power?

I got the same thing. In the army I realized that I was the only one in my platoon who was able to read maps clearly at night without lights. And I never needed a flashlight to navigate the woods in the dark.

My night vision started to wane clearly in my early thirties, but being closer to 50 now I can still see a lot better at night than my friends whenever we go camping. Still, I bought my first headlamp a few months ago ;)

Back in the day my not-so-tech-savvy colleague bought a Windows 8.1 laptop that had a touchscreen. After two days she brought it to me and asked me if I could “rip this hellspawn out of this computer”.

Before wiping it we checked if there was anything to backup and the ~30 minutes I spent using Win 8.1 were hideous. It was the only time I ever had to use it, of which I am very grateful.

I did exactly this, quit after 15 years.

Lemmy has a tiny fraction users compared to Reddit, it took me a while to get used to the new rhythm of things here. But after a few weeks, I realized that this is actually much better for me.

In 2 years I have encountered only one troll. There’s a lot less content, yes, but I’ve learned that it’s still more than enough. I do miss some of the active niche hobby communities, but I fixed that by digging up my old hobby forum site profiles. The old school forums are just as active as they ever were and I don’t have to expose myself to Reddit’s neverending stream of garbage anymore.

The transition was actually pretty painless and I wouldn’t go back, even if they magically decided to clean the platform and restore the 3rd party apps. This is a smaller world and it fits me very well.

I’ve had my Amazfit Bip (the original) for 6 or 7 years and the only complaint I have is the shitty original non-breathing silicon strap. After I replaced it with nylon strap, it was pretty much perfect.

The battery still lasts over three weeks. The display glass only has a few tiny scratches on it, despite that I’ve worn the watch basically 24/7 all these years.

It has all the basic functionalities I need built in and the not-so-important-but-nice ones I can get via Tasker.

And it was really cheap, I originally bought it just to see what the fuss about smartwatches was all about. But it’s been so damn useful and trustworthy that I won’t even consider upgrading until it fails someday.

I have a battery operated tube radio from mid to late 1940’s. It even works, but the battery it uses is getting rare and quite expensive. And my country doesn’t really use AM radio broadcasts anymore, so it’s more of a curiosity nowadays.

I also have a lot of working stuff from the 1950’s, mostly radios and amplifiers. Great gear, and much easier to service than their modern counterparts.

Farscape is excellent, but it’s very trippy and the heavy use of Muppets may be offputting to some. And it’s far from harder scifi like the Expanse.

That was pretty wild development, yes. But still, we will not make any territorial claims. Doing so would effectively render the protection provided by NATO’s Article 5 null. We would once again be alone against a nuclear power with much larger resources than we could ever have.

So we won’t be doing that.

Finland won’t make any claims. This much is certain.

The only way we would even consider restoring the stolen lands would be IF the Russian Federation falls and IF the initiative for reunification would come from the Karelian Republic.

One would assume that Sony Pictures’ vast catalog of flops would have taught the mother corporation to license the money machine IP’s to a more capable studio, but no.

The inescapable corporate interference will prevent any singular vision to prevail and these will be messes with lightning fast cuts to serve the Tiktok generation.

I wish I am wrong.

The intranet at my work is a near-useless dumpster fire. Everything is disorganized, all the important documents and instructions are hidden behind completely chaotic branches and layers of creatively named folders.

I have used the wretched thing only once. I instantly downloaded everything I thought I would ever need to an encrypted USB stick, so I would never have to use it again. This was 7-8 years ago. Everything important is always delivered by email and apparently stored to the intranet afterwards. The intranet has been hacked at least twice, but the real number is most likely much higher. For “reasons”, all the personnel info has also been kept stored on the intranet, despite the successful hacks.

Yes! I bought mine in 2004, it was the only proper steel string guitar that I could afford at the time. And it is a really good guitar. There has been zero need for any adjustments, the only replaced part (excluding strings, of course) is a single tuning peg. I was drunk and slipped while I was playing, the guitar hit the floor first but miraculously there was no other damage.

A friend of mine was a guitar tech/roadie for Dio and Metallica in his youth and when he tried the F310 his opinion was that “This isn’t a bad guitar at all, actually it sounds a lot like my own Martin back home. You really might want to hold on to this one.”

Living in the same latitudes I could only take it as a compliment.