Shurimal

How does one find out what chips are in what USB sticks? Manufacturers don’t make this information available. At best you just find read and write speeds, usually just the max possible read speed and nothing else.

Since I mostly listen by dropping a whole genre into an ephemeral playlist, there is zero overlap. I rarely even hear a piece more than a few times a year, and sometimes the whole playlist takes more than a year to play from 0 to Z at an average of 1 hour play every day (eg I have pretty much the complete catalogue of Ektoplazm, including 575 goa trance and 377 downtempo albums).

Even if I have a few static playlists of random pieces, they’re also thematic (eg a bluegrass playlist as background music for dogfighting) and with zero overlap between them.

Come to think, of it, I only have two static, saved playlists—one for dogfighting and one with pieces that have subbass and ULF content down to and below 20 Hz. Playlists for me are wholly ephemeral, the default one that gets cleared and refilled as I go, acting more as a playback queue, and temporary ones that get deleted when I’m done with them.

Velcro, or maybe Van Der Waals force, or maybe whatever the hell makes gauge blocks stick to each other.

Anything that’s at least 50% cocoa.

Looks pretty and is stable, but two fatal flaws:

1. Browsing by genres displays individual pieces/songs, not albums. Browsing albums or artists doesn’t allow any filtering by genres, years or any other metadata. Haven’t found a way to change that behaviour and as someone who listens to albums, not songs, and has thousands of albums this is a complete dealbreaker for me.

2. No support for UPnP/DLNA to stream from my phone to my stereo (or, for that matter, any modern AV receiver/streamer/network stereo receiver all which support UPnP/DLNA).

Most entry level and midrange phones are still USB 2.0, even if they use USB-C physical port. USB 2.0 is 480 Mbit/s max, even old Wi-Fi 5 allows 1 Gbit/s speeds or even more. At this point the limit will be the writing speed of eMMC/SD card so even USB 3.0 becomes superfluous. After setting up my NAS, Jellyfin, Navidrome, Syncthing and Tailscale I haven’t ever connected my phone to a PC for file transfer—photos get synced automatically, music/videos get streamed and if I need to move files manually I can just do it from/to the SMB share over the network.

Counterpoint: my eyes are not what they used to be 20 years ago and 6,5…7" screens hit the sweet spot for useability. Especially since bezels are super thin these days so a 6,7" phone today is barely larger in total dimensions than a 5,5" phone 6 or 7 years ago.

I cut up pizza mozzarella so that each disk of mozzarella remains uncut. Sometimes it means extremely chaotic cuts. But the rationale is that cutting through molten cheese is extremely messy, so I avoid it if I can.

Also, Brussel sprouts are the best green vegetables.

Florisboard with no swipe, no word predictions, no autocorrection, no nonsense.

WPM? Fast enough. It takes more time to proofread, edit and attach files than to actually type, anyway, so I don’t care about words per minute. Never have.

Five minute stroll to the bus stop, 3 minute chillout there, hop on the bus, 10 minute ride to the destination and a five minute stroll to the office.

Another audio professional here. For line level analog audio (it’s different for guitar pickups and turntable cartridges) it doesn’t matter much at all unless we’re talking long cable runs (several tens of meters and more) or some badly designed equipment that can’t handle high capacitance cables (eg I’ve had crappy amps going into oscillations with certain speaker cables). What matters is shielding (in noisy EM environments) and reliable connectors.

Digital audio is a different kettle of fish, but it’s amazing what you can get away with when runs are a few meters or less. Consumer-grade equipment almost never has 75 ohm connectors for coax S/PDIF and no consumer S/PDIF cable is really 75 ohms. RCA connectors cannot be 75 ohms due to their geometry and BNC is a rare beast (I really had to go out of my way to set up proper 75 ohm cabling for digital audio in my home, and still am not sure the BNC connectors I use are actually 75 ohms).

I should also mention to all non-audio pros that you can’t measure a cable’s or a connector’s characteristic impedance with a simple multimeter. 50, 75 and 110 ohm cables/connectors will all show milliohms on a multimeter and are all fine for audio frequencies. Characteristic impedance only plays role at high frequencies—MHz, not kHz range and when we need to impedance match the whole transmission line to avoid signal reflections.

I would be more worried about channel crosstalk when using a multi-core cable where conductors are not individually shielded as is the case with USB cables, but even 30 dB separation is probably fine for casual music listening.

Set up Tailscale as exit node to your local network.

Make sure that your network is not standard 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x IP address range, but something like 192.168.101.x so you don’t have IP conflicts when accessing from a friend’s house or workplace wifi.

Set up Nginx to redirect your home server IP (eg. 192.168.101.5) to the correct port for your dashboard like Heimdall or Dashy.

That’s it. Works like a charm for me if set up this way.

Addendum: if you have trouble on Android, disable MagicDNS.

Do you have the Tailscale’s “Magic DNS” enabled? I had problems with Tailscale on Android, too, and disabling their DNS solved it.

Independence War and Independence War 2 remake by Aerovery Labs, or maybe Eagle Dynamics would be dapper.

Alien. It’s the pinnacle of horror movies. And what makes it so good is the believability of it all. There is no supernatural, no ghosts, no masked mass murderers, no silly “monsters” that defy all the laws of biology and physics.

Very niche, but if you ever need to decode a simple oldschool encrypted/encoded text (caesar cipher, reverse alphabet, substitution cipher, morse code etc) for an AR game or whatever, Canonn Decryptor is amazing, being able to decode most cryptograms virtually automatically.

Zero. Because it’s turned off when I’m away from home for more than a few hours or sleeping. It never gets more than 24 hours of uptime, ever.

Even if my home server is turned on 24/7 it still runs a chron job to do a weekly reboot on sunday nights to keep things tidy.

Forever War delved into the problems with super strength. The power armor took a humongous amount of training to be used finely enough in everyday tasks and not break something or someone. A simple handshake between someone in power armor and someone without could result in crushed bones or a ripped off arm. A great show of skill in using the power armor was the main character sitting down in office and writing a letter with pen and paper while wearing the armor!

Another great example of how dangerous superstrength is when dealing with non-superstrength people was in anime Beastars where one big carnivore accidentally ripped off the arm of his smaller non-carnivore friend. In-lore was said to be a very common thing to the extent that limb reattachment is a common medical procedure.

Winter:
-10°C outside, sometimes colder; comfy +22°C inside. Sun sets at 1600, but that’s what tea, candles and mood lighting is for. Everything is nice and quiet outside, with an occasional noise of snowplows after it snows.

Summer:
30°C outside, 30°C inside (aircon is not common here in older houses). Hotter in the sun in the middle of the sea of asphalt and concrete that is called “city”. Sun sets at 2200 and rises at 0400.

When the sun rises it’s like fucking Jurassic Park outside when all the birds wake up and start making noises. And by “birds” I mean not lovely songbirds like blackbirds and skylarks but pidgeons, crows and seagulls (and no, I don’t live by the sea; I live pretty much as far from the sea as one can in my country. The city is overrun with seagulls.). They seemingly love to scream right into the ventilation shafts of apartment buildings.

When the sun sets in summer all the inebriated revellers come out and start making noises including loud and off-note singing, loud laughing and loud inarticulate screaming. Add loud boomboxes to the mix and it’s one hell of a racket.

Also, mosquitos. Lots of mosquitos.

The Gingerdead Man