My smartphone isn’t a phone with “extra” features to me. My smartphone is a portable personal computer with extra sensors, a GPS receiver, and wireless internet, which also happens to have a phone app. I don’t want to carry an extra “dumb” phone. I would prefer my smart watch to be the communication and identity hub for me and my devices: holding the SIM card, acting as a wifi hotspot, routing calls and internet to my handheld brick or laptop, etc. Instead of acting like a third party add-on, it would be a mostly distraction free core. Let me use a smartphone, laptop, steam deck, cobbled together cyber deck, or whatever else have you as my local screen, storage cache, and/or proper desktop. Then I can put the screens down or leave them behind without feeling cut off or potentially stranded in a world that practically requires it to navigate with any ease. I want a smart watch that enables me to leave the house without car keys, driver’s license, and credit cards; essentially with nothing but my watchphone. I want to be a cyberpunk Dick Tracy. What I want, with the freedoms and open standards I want, with the privacy I want, without being locked into a single monopoly walled garden, is probably a pipe dream. I want what is probably the next evolution of the “year of the Linux desktop”. But a kid can dream.

That’s not very helpful for connecting family, friends, and especially grandma.

Jellyfish cannot to setup to securely and safely be exposed to the Internet. It is only safe to access through a VPN. That rules it out as an option for sharing with friends, family, or even my own spouse. You call it phoning home to the mother ship; I call it paying Plex to manage user authentication for me. Until Jellyfin’s security holes are patched and it becomes clear that the Jellyfin developers actually care about security, it stays locked down to my LAN. Setting up a VPN is difficult for the average user on a good day, impossible in some circumstances on even the best of days, and is not access I want to hand out (and support) to all the people I share my Plex with anyway.

So edgy.

If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.

This is garbage. What are you on about? It is art as an affection. Style as an algorithm. It’s got no sense of balance or intent. It looks like what it is, a copy that doesn’t actually understand what made the original great.

Maybe, but they’re paying attention to the task of scanning items, running the register, and the customer at the front of the line. I don’t really think it’s reasonable to expect them to keep an eye on that moving target as well. I’ve seen the very thing happen: Loading my stuff on to the belt, trying to leave a space because there is no divider available, the cashier is busy concentrating on the other things they are doing and the customer in front of them (not me and my stuff), they grab the last item of the other person’s stuff, scan it and bag it, turn back to check for more stuff (by this time and while the cashier’s back is turned the void I’d left is gone because the belt doesn’t stop advancing until a divider or product blocks the sensor). They may not ever see a gap (only the next item to be scanned).

There’s no perfect solution here, but I don’t see any reason to heap any more responsibility or blame on to an overworked, underpaid, daily abused retail worker just trying to stay sane in one of the most soul crushing and mind-numbingly repetitive jobs I’ve ever known.

The belts usually move forward automatically, eliminating any space left intentionally between two groups of things on it once the first group has been removed from the belt.

I’d ask a couple thousand people to guess in private. So the most popular answer would probably be either surprisingly close to correct or Cuppy McHazelnutface.

Wait till they hear about the people farming, harvesting, and shipping the vegetables.

A fucking Members Only pizza.

It’ll destroy all your painstakingly crafted and curated ID3 tags much faster than Picard. I’m not salty or anything. Anyway, the lesson for me was that music is simply too complicated from a library perspective to trust to highly-automated tools like beets. Picard kind of encourages you to go directory by directory and release by release, and that is a good thing. These days so are does most of the library stuff for newly added things, but I usually end up fixing it all basic to my standard with Picard later.

Plexamp has gotten better lately. It can save your progress on audiobooks now. It’s a per library feature, so I have one library of music (that does not save progress) and one for audiobooks (that does save progress). I used to have trouble with some audiobook formats (M4Bs needed to be converted (really just renamed) to mp4s, but that wasn’t necessary for the last few I loaded. Plex still has a little trouble with standards around multiple authors and different productions (and different readers) of a single book, but that’s more of an ID3 tag problem and is resolved if you’re consistent in normalizing the tags on your library. I’ve also used the syncing features a bunch for offline time (like on a plane or on long trips). For a large library, I see syncing offline files as a necessary feature.

And before the Jellyfin fanboys chime in, if Jellyfin could match these audio and syncing features (and be easier to setup for access outside my LAN and sharing with family), I jump ship in a heartbeat.

Properly designed speed tables should be able to be safety traversed at speed. Speed bumps force you to slow down to under the speed limit, sometimes far under, in order to traverse safely. That said, I’ve seen many many many more examples of things like: speed bumps with signs for speed tables, poorly designed humps that are neither speed bumps nor speed table, poorly designed speed bumps that are dangerous at practically any speed, or speed bumps without proper warning signs or paint to warn drivers, speed bumps in parking lots that just encourage people to drive wrecklessly around them. The absolute worst are those bolt-on DIY atrocities. Really, I’ve only ever seen properly designed speed tables in the richest of neighborhoods. All the other HOAs and towns seem to think they can get away with just hiring an asphalt guy or sending out a road maintenance crew to throw a speed bump and some paint down without any kind of survey, design, or traffic study.

Just a reminder that everyone is a criminal, but only the out group get the punishments. It’s practically impossible these days to do anything without running afoul of some law somewhere, especially when the new fascist regime is turning your old civil rights into new felonies every day. Fed the homeless? Criminal. Shelter an abused person? Trafficking. Give water to a protestor? To an immigrant? Aiding terrorists. Exercising your right to protest? Actual terrorist. Be a librarian? Obscenity. Report facts and statistics? Treason. Give medical care to the wrong person? Felony. Fail to pay debt? (often debt you had no choice about taking on, like debts to courts, medical, and school debts) Criminal. Insist on a separation between church and state? Hate speech. Resist a kidnapping by anonymous men in an anonymous van? Resisting arrest and deported, yes even the legal citizens. These are just the spicy examples. There are plenty of other more mundane crimes that everyone commits every day. The system is too corrupt and complicated to completely avoid breaking the law.

“pretty easy” is a bit of a stretch

Yeah, I’d say they should only have shared it with the news if the news also named and identified them clearly every time the photos are shared. Corruption dies in sunlight. The dangerous ones already know, might as well hang a lantern on any attempts at retaliation.

I can tell that this particular port is more or less from the same time as the PS2 ports in the post’s photo because of the color. The standardization of this port happened long before the standardization of colors to indicate the capabilities of said port. We mostly only see this in variously capable USB ports today. If I remember correctly this yellow color would have been used for a joystick or controller of some kind, but there may have been other ports with the same shape and pin configuration that would have different purposes.

I want the word “unalived” to be killed or murdered in the most vile and explicit way possible for a word.

You don’t get to make that determination during the stop, that’s for the court to decide after the fact.