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.

The most dangerous meats are ones originating from wild animals. Eg there are all sorts of nasty parasite cysts in wild boar meat. Nature is brutal and there is no such thing as “clean” meat from wild animals. Human inability to deal with this and becoming severely sick without thoroughly cooking the wild meat is evidence that even if we technically are somewhere on omnivore spectrum, we’re not really good omnivores—certainly not as good as bears or even boars. Honestly, eating insects, honey and eggs in addition to plants (fruit specifically) seems more like what we’re evolved to do.

Vortex is not a launcher, it’s a mod manager. And you don’t have to use it, there are alternatives. But you should use a mod manager, manual installation/uninstallation is really bad practice that can and will break things.

This is good. Modding can turn into the deepest dependency hell ever and not having access to a specific version of mod A can make mod B that you really love unusable. See: Skyrim VR and Unofficial Patch.

Third party apps: “OK. We’ll show ads. Muted. Behind a black overlay. If we really can’t find a workaround.”

Saying that AptX is lossless since 2016 is blatantly false. And yes, just like with HDMI and USB, AptX standard naming and Qualcomm feature naming schemes are a misleading mess.

There are 4 flavours of AptX (linked article states this as well), and only the latest supports lossless, but is available only on very few chipsets and devices so I even forget that it exists, because for all practical purposes it doesn’t.

Denon Perl Pro, Bose earbuds and Cambridge Audio M100 are the only non-chinese earphones that I know of that support AptX lossless and the latter are not even listed by my local importer. Plus, you need a very specific (expensive) phone to use them because AptX Lossless is not available for all chipsets. Basically, Asus ROG 8 or Xiaomi Redmi K70 Pro for ones available to buy for me, and then it’s not available at every retailer, either, and the b2b wholesalers I have access to through work only list ROG Phone 8 (~1200€ retail).

In conclusion, to make use of lossless AptX you have to jump through many hoops and spend a lot of money—700+€ phone and the 200+€ earphones. The standard is far from being, well, a standard; common and widespread. 99,9% of devices on sale and in use by people only support older AptX standards, mostly AptX HD (which is not lossless!).

No, it isn’t. It just has higher bitrates, but still not enough for lossless.

Counterpoints:

1. Good IEM-s don’t really need ANC. If the silicone tip doesn’t isolate enough you can use foam tips that basically function like hearing protection earplugs.
2. No battery is even better than replaceable battery.
3. Wired IEM-s never get obsolete. At worst you’ll need to replace the silicone tips from time to time, or the cable and today even 20€ Chinese IEM-s have replaceable cables. With good care wired IEM-s can last decades.

Nothing to do with ADA conversions (and digital-to-digital, eg SRC or bitdepth conversion, is completely transparent if done even remotely adequately). Small drivers close to eardrum with good seal just seem to be easier to manage when it comes to frequency response and distortion. Most open circumaural headphones, for example, seem to have deficiencies in lower end no matter the price.

In-ear phones have the potential of having the highest fidelity of all headphone types. So, no, being a “codec snob” is completely justified. Though I personally won’t be using BT phones before we get lossless connection as a standard. Wired are cheaper, last longer and have less environmental impact during production and after EOL.

Writes a song at 115 BPM. Makes it use double time. Occasionally changes tempo to 161 BPM half-time. Adds three layers of polyrhythms to it. Spices things up with metric modulation between 4/4, 13/8 and 17/7. Hides a sample of the “trolololo song” somewhere in there.

Trollface.jpg

I find cartoonish moustache-twirling “evil” boring. Playing as morally grey characters is most compelling. Whether my character is a hero or a villain depends on whom you ask and at which point in history. Damage one faction and help another, when it’s ambiguous who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are. Steal, rob and assassinate for what you believe is a “good cause”. Set up dictators to avert death and destruction, then betray and terminate the them with extreme prejudice when they have served their purpose and become a liability. And so on.

Or just go full mercenary; everyone hates you, believes you have no principles and thinks they have the moral high ground, but at the end of the day everyone needs your specialist expertise. Every client is one missed payment away from becoming a target and every target is one bribe away from becoming a client—unless the target is eg slavers or pirates, because you actually do have principles.

For example, in X3:TC I single-handedly brought peace and prosperity into the universe: fought off Khaak threat; contained Xenons and completely denied their incursions into human and alien space alike; set up industry that boosted the economy at large for everyone; hired a lot of people for very good salaries. But, I had the monopoly in most industries; a fleet of warships capable of steamrolling everyone else if I wished so; literally owned a whole sector; controlled trade routes via the Hub; set up alliances with the pirate factions letting them roam free, trading illegal goods with them, building infrastructure for them. In short, very much a shady dystopian megacorps🙃

Guess it’s time to dust off those VOR navigation skills, then…

And, as ususal, fuck Putler and his cronies.

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).

Oldskool FPS. There. That’s the correct term. Now, who’s up for some DM-Morpheus with instagib mutator?🤘

Just getting a session orchestra in to riff on Holst and Wagner is boring.

Most often it’s not even a real orchestra, but Vienna Symphonic Library.

But on the contrary some games have adaptive music, and interestingly it’s a bit more like John Williams’ view on movie soundtracks : it’s made to adapt to what’s happening in real time. When it’s done right it’s everything but boring.

Elite: Dangerous does this extremely well (IMO it has some of the best sound designs out there, not only music but everything else, too, including the dynamic range). The music is never this generic bombastic horn sections, and it’s different in different environments and situations, always somberly haunting at the edge of consciousness and enhancing, not overpowering, the gameplay.

Hiram claimed that his troops felt in danger due to intelligence that Hamas had a network of tunnels under the university

You’re fucking soldiers in a fucking war zone. You’re always in danger, there is no way to be safe in a war. If you think that the enemy is upon you, you change your position—do you even tactic, wimps? Did you learn anything in your basic training, maggots? Fucking cowards, go back home and play counterstrike if you want to feel safe.

Every female character in The Expanse. There simply were no non-badasses in that show🙃

Yeah, Hollywood has become even more risk-averse than in the old days and boring. There used to be a new original Hollywood film coming out every month. Now all you have is reboots, rehashes and sequels. Avatar 2, Barbie and Oppenheimer are an exception. Even though technically Avatar 2 is a sequel and the Manhatten project has been covered very well before—the TV series Manhattan was exceptionally good and in 1989 there was Fat Man and Little Boy which was OK.

Netflix used to be the risk-taking innovator for a while (Okja, Birdbox) but that has died, too.