If we’re going to make a rule about legal advice, it should simply be “Don’t ask for legal advice.” Then again, it’s really against rule 5 anyway. This is not a support community.

Speaking from experience, storing batteries or a battery operated device in a car is just asking for a bad time.

I just bought a bicycle foot pump. Sure it’s slightly inconvenient and requires some leg work. But, I’ve gone through one about every other decade. Also, I’m not tethered to a car with a working battery.

My related hot take: If I’m going to be subjected to Ads, I’d actually prefer to see relevant Ads (generally demographically, geographically, etc. while retaining some anonymity) than ads for products and services I’m never going to care about.

Semi-related, on my language learning journey I’ve discovered that as I watch more things in the language I’m learning via YouTube, Netflix, and other ad supported streaming services I see more and more ads in the language I’m trying to learn. And surprisingly (even to myself) I genuinely enjoy these ads because the language is usually simple and without much idiomatic use, it’s all clearly enunciated, and it’s directly related to the action on screen. Of course, everyone else in my household is now also getting those kinds of ads and I can’t help but be amused.

Ads in real life spaces though? Unless it’s telling me about some specific local thing or place, it is just ugly clutter on the scenery and architecture.

Could they not think of an original name? Calling it YouTube-dl is just unnecessarily lazy and confusing. This appears to be mostly a docker image of yt-dlp, which is itself a fork of youtube-dl.

For normal albums: Artist/Year - Album [release ID if necessary for ambiguity for various versions of an album]/Disc-track - title.extension . Compilations (soundtracks, promo mixes from shows, etc.) get “Various Artist” as the album artist and sorted under “Various Artists” of the top level of my albums directory. Stuff from other sources would sometimes get their own special directory at the top level outside “albums”.

Tags are everything, that’s where the in-depth data is. album folders hold extra art, inserts, metadata, etc.

I don’t really make manual playlists using relatively pathed m3u anymore because support is inconsistent across the apps I’ve used to listen to my library. These days Plex, jellyfin, ncmpcpp (tui front-end for mpd) all handle their own playlists. Those are mostly just spontaneous groupings or automated shuffles I don’t really keep track of.

Back in the day I made mixtapes on actual cassettes, recorded from the radio, my CDs, and later tracks I found on Napster and soulseek. Later I moved on to making tons of playlists in foobar2000. Some of those playlists probably still litter my hard drive (now dead text because the files having long since been reorganized and moved). For the really good tight playlists I made of that era, I’d make physical mix CDs that I would master with sound forge. Had a few people that would trade these around. Make a mix, master, make many copies, distribute. Those CDs often died in cars and turned into coasters, so I’d keep the bin and cue files of the masters to make replacements. Those tracks would ultimately get turned back into mp3 or flac depending on quality and tagged with my own title, cover art, etc. and get filed away in the Various Artist folder. Then I got an mp3 player and it’s been either full album listening or dynamic playlists for me ever since.

I still make yearly playlists in Spotify as I discover new stuff or rediscover old stuff, like a musical diary. Those playlists inspire library additions via the artist directly, Bandcamp flac files, or other means.

Tech company surveillance and data collection is government surveillance and data collection.

I guess we’ll all find out exactly what that loophole is soon enough.

Dead or damaged media can repurposed and sold as an new thing. Art and craft items using old vinyl, cassettes, floppy disks, etc. as a medium to create something new is growing in popularity too. If you can find someone making that kind of art at a show, I’m sure some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement could be made so that you both can profit off that dead media.

As if that stops police from using it to target randos or prosecutors from using it in court. The executive branch REALLY loves its junk science.

So much safer to go one album at a time using Picard. Picard makes it easy to go down the list of a disorganized directory, identify most things automatically, allow in depth review and modifications to what Picard came up with, and standardize file naming. I’ve tried to let programs like Lidarr and beets automate it, but they always ends up causing more and more complex problems to discover and solve after awhile. Music releases are complex and sources are diverse, using distinct standards of form and format. It’s not a problem that can realistically be solved for my entire music library without the guiding hand of a librarian. I could listen to my library for over six months without repeating, even 1 album out of a 100 mis-tagged or misidentifyied could take me years to discover.

I do like to automate the less critical and more machine oriented library tasks like adding genres tags, replaygain, and lyrics as you do. Just not things like the metadata tags, file naming, or album art (embedded or otherwise).

I don’t want to know about Sam Neill’s controveries.

These days I try to buy either DRM free flax files. If I really like the art or the artist in addition to wanting to regularly actually listen to as an album, then I may try to buy vinyl + flac files. If it’s at a show I’ll buy whatever is available that I can play because at that point it’s more about the merch than music. I’m probably going to pass on the wax cylinders and I may think long and hard before buying a cassette.

Wow, if the demo was too much for the developers to maintain that doesn’t inspire confidence in my patience to maintain it on my machine.

Wanna listen to a Midwestern nerd talk at length about how awful these kinds of devices are with respect to efficiency? I got you…

Technology Connections - Thermoelectric cooling: it’s not great.

If you haven’t grown up drinking it, coconut water tastes a bit funky the first time you try it. The first time I tried it, it was kind of funky and I didn’t care much for it. The second time I tried coconut water was after hiking several miles in high heat, sunshine, and high humidity, it still tasted a bit funky. It tasted exactly the same actually, but this time, being quite dehydrated and nearing heat exhaustion, it tasted fucking amazing. Now I love that sweet coconut water umami, so much better than Gatorade or any other sports drink.

The real hack is (almost) always social.

If I encountered someone I thought was bullshitting me about some Gen alpha Internet micro genre, I’d probably just roll with it too while admiring the improv.

I was just saying that your own description of events made you sound like a troll. I don’t know the truth of the matter and frankly it’s irrelevant. If they are working closely with Apple, those kinds of comments on what I assume was their own public forum are an unhelpful distraction at best and potentially detrimental to their corporate relationship with Apple. You could be %100 correct about Apple and the devs could %100 agree with your sentiment, but that doesn’t mean that the social media forum they host is an appropriate place for that kind of discussion. It’s not helpful for them and only has the potential to make their situation worse. They blocked you and moved on so they could focus on the project instead of the noise. Even if your intentions were good (and I do actually believe you meant well) I understand why they did what they did.

This sounds like you were harassing a volunteer dev that had an actual direct interaction with a corporation based on hearsay and they rightfully blocked a troll that wasn’t contributing anything meaningful or constructive to the project.