4grams

I mean, can always rip them to flak as well if you are worried about quality. Even still, a good high bitrate mp3 sounds perfect to me so I still use it too.

Working on reorganizing my old music collection to try to de-apple. It’s a bigger pain in the ass than I expected, and I’m missing so much that I’ve added via subscription. Gotta do it though, I’m sick of paying subscriptions for everything.

That is pretty much spot on to the real thing.

That is one of my most used phrases. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started telling someone something simple, 10 random side conversations later, maybe I’ll remember to get to the point. It’s there that I hit them with “short story long” and then finally wrap it up…

So it’s working as intended. It’s always been the Hotel Cloudifonia.

I never look at reviews, I just go in expecting to be disappointed and so usually am not. Even shitty movies are fun since I plan on them sucking…

Update- saw it last night. A bit of a mess, but interesting and enjoyable. I like how it was a retelling of the story but connected it with modern themes. I enjoyed very much the diverse cast, I like performances, and appreciate various takes on the roles from performers with different backgrounds. Dialog was a bit wooden in places, especially the last line, but it was a show, not a documentary so I don’t mind a little ham-fistedness.

The best part was the Trojan Horse portrayal. My whole life I’ve seen the cartoons of a horse rolled up to the gate, and a simple telling of how they were tricked. This put the human cost of it into perspective (the fictional human cost anyway), and the stuggle with how it unfolded by Odysseus. Made me think about it more than I ever have, and from a new perspective.

No, I think I can downgrade it, I need to find an older version of the firmware as they don’t have it available anymore. I think I need a 2024 version.

I do have auto updates turned off, I should just block it at the router.

I don’t know about brother anymore. I have one I bought because it would work with 3rd party ink. I updated the firmware and am now locked out from using anything but brother. I would up finding a hack to get it to stop checking the ink level, so I can at least print, but it’s a temporary fix (have had to do it a few times), and it makes it unable to tell me how much ink is left. No big deal, I just run the cartridges dry, but it’s less functional than when I bought it…

Nutshell, I used to trust bother, not anymore so an open option is a big desire of mine. If this is halfway decent, I’ll pick one up.

Same, I just figure if they want to use windows, then they need to accept all the work impacting problems and stoppages. Just like how they accept the security implications of an all windows network…

It’s so entrenched though, and the typical user doesn’t know any different these days so it’s all windows and cloud now. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for these things, but it doesn’t have to be the default all the time…

This and flannel was me in the 90’s; and everyone else. I loved the thermal under a t-shirt look, let me stay both casual and warm!

I’m convinced this has been the plan for some time. My kids don’t see the point of computers when they have their phones and school iPads. They dont understand the concept of data ownership and everything is temporary to them, whatever is fed by the algorithm.

They are better off that most, my hard core nerdiness has rubbed off so they at least know how to use a computer, have built one each themselves. I just hope it continues to be possible going forward, but I’ll be willing to bet, on the other side of the age verification crap, is even more restrictions. They plan a death by a thousand cuts, until it’s no longer feasible, then. No longer legal to run your own compute.

F’ing suck, used to be available to the masses. I hope it will again, but even a raspberry pi is a luxury good these days.

I have failing hard drives in my NAS but they are nearly 4x the price from when I bought them, so I’m struggling to save for replacements. I’m so pissed off that even used enterprise stuff that used to be cheap, is now also luxury goods priced. I will be paying 259.99 for a drive I used to pay 69.99 for.

I agree that the functionality is sometimes nice, but I would never keep data in just the cloud, at least anything sensitive or valuable. Beyond not trusting someone else with the integrity of my data, I also do not want to be subject to control of it or access to it. Lastly, my data is mine, and in most cloud providers, my data will also be used for AI training.

So, I enjoy using the cloud for some things, I still keep my primary data under my control, in my own known and backed up locations.

As for the forcefulness, there are a lot of us who care deeply about ownership and privacy, and there are a lot of those that dismiss our concerns as invalid or unimportant. Not that you are by any means, just that is what I see frequently.

Most of the time it does work, which is why it’s so goddamned hard to undo. I’ve been working on de-appleing, I’ve nearly completely de-Amazoned and am also working on de-googling. But these damn providers make it so difficult, they get in so deep. It’s not even me that makes it hard, I’m willing to make a little extra effort for a more privacy focused platform I control. No, it’s the family and friends that all are perfectly comfortable handing control of their data and frankly lives (everything is in these fucking things, schedule, contacts, financial stuff, all digital communication, photos, videos, etc…).

As long as you keep spending a lot of money, and upgrading to the newest devices, you will have a decent experience. As soon as you try to extend the life, find alternatives, look for ways to control your own data, then it gets real hard.

To be fair, it’s not just Apple. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, any of the big players are the same. They all manage to make it easy, so long as you are comfortable being captured.

I’m a big fat guy who sweats a lot. I’ve never cared about the sweat though only the smell. So my whole life I’ve used nothing but deodorant, NEVER antiperspirant.

I’ve never had problems with either pit stains, nor lingering odor. I’m pretty convinced that antiperspirant leads to more smell; I’m not saying I’m fresh as a daisy at all times, but even at my worst, my odor isn’t that bad, while drier people often stink to high heaven.

This shit drives me up a wall. I try to only buy peanut butter made out of peanuts, so for years now I’ve been buying “natural” peanut butter. I recently noticed however that 100% “natural” doesn’t mean shit as all the natural brands are loaded with palm oil. I honestly might have to start making my own.

It sucks because my family treats me like an insane person when I look at the ingredients and nutrition of the food stuff we buy. Food culture in the US is awful, just awful.

I don’t think it’s as hard to draw a line as you are portraying it. The hypothetical nurse and bread factory is a non-issue, we’re talking fractions of the bottom line of any of the involved parties. This mulvad thing is the majority of the financial backing of a party by one high level person, who’s made his money from this organization.

I’m quite comfortable putting them under the same umbrella, and quite comfortable ignoring the hypothetical.

But think there might be a philosophical question here, but I kinda think this is begging for one a bit.

It came to me last night, how all this AI and the difficulties obtaining hardware. This is all them trying to end the idea of ownership, at least of your data. They want to control all the data, so everything you do, every picture you take, every game you play, every essay you write, will be only available in the cloud. We are getting close to the point where are must pay for every bit of our own data that we access.

This is the inevitable result. I’m very glad I’ve spent years building my own library of content. I just hope I can continue getting replacement hardware to keep it alive.

I had a flight safe multitool, one that specifically had no blade, nor anything sharp. It only had tools for my camera. I also had a fisher space pen which they said looked too much like a bullet.

Both were confiscated, but they couldn’t figure out how to open the front flipper knife I had with me, so they let it through.

The TSA bullshit isn’t about keeping us safe.

Just had this thought, and realized all my backups had been through a flood. I wound up with several damaged disks, but was able to get all the content off of them, damage was to the outside edges, and most of them didn’t have much data written.

I have a Blu-ray burner, but I’ve never burned one (only a couple DVD’s). Probably never will.

In this insane world, I’m not so sure.