pixelscript

I keep my 160GB iPod Classic on life support.

I think the clickwheel design is, in my view, the single best one-thumb no-looking-required input scheme for an MP3 player I think anyone has ever made. Plug it into, say, my car stereo AUX port and I can pick it up with a free hand to control volume, select tracks, and even navigate mostly by memory without having to look at the thing. I can just tell where I am based on the feel of the control. Infinitely better than a featureless flat slab of a touch screen that gives you no sensory feedback.

I like its solid build quality. Full metal chassis with that sexy anodized aluminum finish. I miss that. Despite having a spinning disk hard drive, it never skips, and I've never had read or write issues. Though I'd probably try to mod it over to some kind of flash NAND storage someday. There's also a USB-C mod available that I'd like to do someday, since Apple 30-pin connectors are an endangered species now, and even then, carrying around an outdated proprietary cable for only one device is something I'm eager to never need to do again.

I'm also pretty heavily conditioned to not have tens of gigabytes of music stored on my phone eating up all the precious space. But that's mostly a holdover from my previous phone, which had a 32 GB onboard memory limit and no SD card expansion slot. I guess now that I have a proper memory expandable phone and, and now that half terabyte microSD cards are relatively inexpensive, that's no longer a huge concern...

Also, Rhythmbox can sync to it. Maybe other software too. So I don't even need iTunes to use it.

When it comes to closed-source software developed opaquely by for-profit corporations, particularly the huge, monolithic ones like Microsoft, I generally have the attitude that, if I do discover a problem:

1. They won't take my detailed report
2. If they do take my report, it goes straight into a shredder bin (or a massive queue where low priority problems go to die, which may as well be the same thing)
3. If they do read my report, then it's likely something they already are aware of
4. If they don't know about it somehow, the issue is probably so low-priority and niche that it wouldn't escape the backlog anyway

Probably not nearly as bleak as I make it out. But when you can't see the process, how can you tell?

With open source projects, these things can all still happen, but at least the process is more transparent. You can see exactly where your issue is, and what's been done to it so far, if anything. Other users can discover and vouch for your problem. And if the dev team takes pull requests, and you are willing, able, and permitted to contribute, you can make the fix yourself.

It's not quite what you're asking, but I have had my perspective on a lot of songs changed once I actually looked up their lyrics.

My listening comprehension for music lyrics is piss poor. For any given pop or rock song I'd hear on the radio, maybe 70% of the time I find lyrics unintelligible. Clearly it's skill issue on my part, as the body of music listeners at large seem to have no problems understanding what they're hearing. I don't know how people do it.

Sometimes I'll catch enough words to throw into a search engine and get the song's title and lyrics, and maybe even a short blurb of context. That knowledge alone can make a song go from irritating noise to something I find rather pleasant.

I believe the most recent song I looked up and learned something about was Even Flow by Pearl Jam. It's a song about homelessness. Who knew? Fucking everyone, probably! But not me. For fifteen years all I heard was "FREEEEE-ZIIIIIN'..." and the rest just goes to mush. I also learned Even Flow is a completely different song from Plush by Stone Temple Pilots. The damn radio kept bamboozling me with that similar vocal progression they both have!

Ah well. Better on the bus fifteen years late than never on the bus at all. They say ignorance is bliss, but it's also the source of a lot of undue hatred. I find I hate far fewer songs when I actually understand what they're trying to say (if anything).

Of course, knowing doesn't magically fix all stinkers. I Love It by Icona Pop didn't get any better in my eyes when I found the lyrics for it. I find most pop country songs (which I am unavoidably subject to, living in the American midwest) don't have much novel or interesting to say, either. The closer I look, the more accurate Bo Burnham's Pandering becomes, and I hate it.

I guess the silver lining here is I get to lucky 10,000 my way through many of history's greatest hits. I'm sure many people would give a lot to experience something they like again for the first time. By virtue of my being absurdly late to the party, I get to do it every day.

Finishing up harvest!

If the current tools work fine, have decades of historic support and battle testing, and the alternatives offer little to no net benefit, uhh, why?

Lemmy not pulling in Reddit's general audience and Lemmy having a better user experience than Reddit are highly correlated.

Idk, crusading against common myths is something that's pretty hot these days. Stuff like:

• Christopher Columbus didn't actually discover America, and he was actually kind of an asshat
• Bell didn't invent the telephone, he was simply the first to patent and subsequently litigate
• "Frankenstein" is the name of the scientist, not the monster
• Many modern tropes about Christian Hell stem from a 17th century political satire novel

Crusading for truth in easily verifiable matters feels very on-brand for the kind of people who use Lemmy. In that light, reclaiming a negative term that's only negative because of a false premise to describe ourselves doesn't sound so bad. At worst, we become a little insufferable as we have to introduce the term with a "well, ackshually", which a lot of us would probably do anyway.

I only use Reddit for two things these days. Practicing my technical writing skills by offering answers to ELI5 posts, and silently doomscrolling though US politics.

Both of these are theoretically on Lemmy somewhere, but this place really doesn't move fast enough to be fulfilling.

That said, I only access Reddit on desktop PC in old.reddit mode. The third party appocalypse did not make me leave completely, but it did kill off all of my time using it on mobile, at least. The day they take old.reddit from me and force me to use that miserable card view, though, I'm checking out for good.

When that inevitable day arrives, I will not have FOMO over it. Anything positive I'd hypothetically be missing out on would be canceled out by the abysmal way in which they expect me to consume it. I will miss what it was, though. Lemmy just isn't a substitute for it. The Lemmy experience right now is the Miracle Whip to Reddit's mayo.

I can't fathom how anyone would enjoy being on a Discord server with more than a few dozen active users, and even then, more than a dozen or so active users at any given time. Above a certain threshold it just becomes noise.

Unless 97% of them never speak. Which, in my experience, is totally plausible.

Still. Weird way to do socials with schoolmates, imo. I would have expected students to self-select into smaller friend groups on Discord or TikTok or WhatsApp or Snapchat or whatever the hell people use now. Not coalesce into one giant digital town square. Not knockin' it, though. Seems like a neat idea.

I garnered a very low opinion of pretty much all vegetables during childhood that persisted well into adulthood, because I grew up in a household that only ever prepared them one of two ways: raw, or boiled.

Doesn't matter what it was. Carrots, peas, corn, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, green beans... the two exceptions being onions (which may have been fried on occasion) or potatoes (which culinarily aren't in the same category). If it was boiled, there'd be a half-assed attempt to make it taste like something again by melting a knob of butter on it and salting it. That's it.

When that's the extent of your culinary range, cabbage has no reason to enter the house, so for us it never did. We just assumed it would be shit if you prepared it that way. And we were probably right. Boiled cabbage is what the poor Bucket family was said to have eaten every day in Willy Wonka. Doesn't paint a glamorous picture.

I'm only just now coming around to the concept of vegetables tasting good when you, like, y'know, actually cook them well. Haven't given cabbage a fair shake yet, though.

My sticking point with Discord in particular is that, at the moment, it's allergic to file drag and drop under Wayland. If I want to drag and drop a file attachment, I have to open the file explorer dialog and drag onto that.

This is more of a Discord being sluggish to update problem than a Wayland being unstable problem, but it's still extremely irritating.

The original definition of "magazine" was simply "warehouse". A place where you amassed a bunch of stuff. This usage is still around, but it's rare.

At the time, the military was perhaps the most prominent entity creating these well-stocked warehouses, so the specific linking of "magazine" to "military warehouse" was a natural progression. And as we all are familiar now, it later morphed into a word to describe a chamber of bullets. In a sense, a tiny little military warehouse you attach to your gun.

The definition referring to a paper catalog getting mailed to your house full of random written articles comes from one very specific one, named Gentleman's Magazine. It was named that because it thought itself a magazine (a warehouse) of information.

I assume kbin was thinking of the latter when using the term to describe its communities. Though, considering the right-wing bias of its target audience, I expect the wordplay with the ammunition definition was also intended.