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.

Elder Scroll series. Skyrim for the modding and eyecandy potential, Oblivion for the madness that is spellcrafting (also Shivering Isles is the best ES DLC), Morrowind for the true alien fantasy.

Thief II is the quintessential first-person sneaker.
Independence War II still has one of the best flight models and a great story.

X3: Terran Conflict is the best first-person strategy game.

Half-Life 1 and 2.

Il-2: Great Battles is the best WWII combat flight sim.
DCS is the best jet combat sim.

Elite: Dangerous is the only space sim with actual 1:1 scale galaxy, including many real-life stars and is the best life-in-space simulator with flight model as good as I-War 2 and decent enough on-foot parts (even though there is some jank and glitches).

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.

Precisely. Headsets for simracing, flight sims or any other immersive entertainment—yay! Headset for an everyday task (recipes while cooking, weather display or whatever) that could as well be solved with putting a phone or a tablet on a stand on your table—why? And it gets worse if there are multiple persons who’d want to use that information display.

Only use case I could imagine is having a huge high res virtual screen for productivity while travelling. But the Apple Vision is way overengineered for just that. For immersive entertainment I’d rather have Varjo for the price.

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

StarWars Anarchists: Fuck 'em all! Power to the people!✊🏴

In 2006, it became possible for anyone to search WorldCat directly at its open website [REDACTED], not only through the subscription FirstSearch interface where it had been available on the web to subscribing libraries for more than a decade before.

So how is this “hacking” if the information is publicly accessible for all?

Pretty much any Batman movie. It’s subtle, because it’s not chaotic evil, but lawful evil—the status quo, established hierarchic power structures and systemic injustices that plague the city remain in place. In fact, enforcing and protecting status quo is the whole raison d’entre of Batman, who is an extremely priviledged rich individual benefitting and profiting from the status quo. And thus has no desire to enact real societal change, unlike eg Baine.

I’d argue James Bond is also the same. Yes, Bond villains are evil—irrationally and comically so—but like Batman, Bond represents, enforces and protects the same hierarchic power structures and systemic injustices that give rise to these villains.

Then there is Star Wars and all this light vs dark side. But if you stop and think about it, Sith and Jedi are just two sides of the same medal. Jedi mind trick that coerces someone to do something against their will is extremely evil by its very concept. Especially in how trivialized its use is in the movies. Also, there is nothing civilized about lightsabers. These are horribly dangerous to the wielder and their opponent alike, will easily cut through hull plating by accident (a bad thing when a cm of material is all that’s standing between you and hard vacuum). And would in reality not make a clean cauterized cut, but explosively flash boil the target with the end result like being blown from a cannon.

Lawful, systemic evil is the most devilish kind of evil; it’s so subtle it goes unnoticed and is even celebrated as good, no doubt in no small part due to the vast propaganda machine lawful evil loves to build up around itself.

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.

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).

the left are fearful of guns

Not the left. The centrists.

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

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.

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.