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.

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. :)