_qbjt

No problem at all, I understand inbox fatigue. I just sent you another email so you don’t have to go looking for the others. Thanks!

I've had the polar opposite experience with the Nothing Ear 1:

- I can't seem to use them for extended periods of time without running into this issue where one earbud stops playing audio entirely and I have to fully reset them to fix it.

- The audio completely cuts out every 5-10 minutes for a brief (like under a second) moment, leading to these annoying gaps in whatever I'm listening to.

- After pairing, the audio will sometimes be extremely low quality, output in mono or not output sound at all; usually unpairing and pairing fixes this.

- Firmware updates have done nothing to resolve these issues.

I tried reaching out to Nothing support to try to return them but have been unable to get a response. These headphones are unusable and probably the worst tech product I've ever purchased.

I use GNOME + Wayland on desktop, with a few tweaks and extensions, and I'm totally willing to defend it. It's a lovely computing environment that just feels at home to me and I think it has a tasteful balance of modern and traditional UI patterns.

I don’t think the majority of people would be interested in a project like this.

Merry Christmas!

This collection of free SoundFonts might be of interest :) https://www.pistonsoft.com/soundfonts.html

I'm running Arch Linux with GNOME on Wayland. It's mostly perfect for me out-of-the-box, however I have customized it to my liking with the help of a few extensions:

- ArcMenu: https://gitlab.com/arcmenu/ArcMenu

- Dash to Dock: https://micheleg.github.io/dash-to-dock/

- Lock Keys: https://github.com/kazysmaster/gnome-shell-extension-lockkey...

- Tray Icons Reloaded: https://github.com/MartinPL/Tray-Icons-Reloaded

I also change a few things using GNOME Tweaks; namely setting the application theme to Orchis-grey-dark-compact (https://github.com/vinceliuice/Orchis-theme), icon theme to Flatery-Dark (https://github.com/cbrnix/Flatery) and system font to Inter (https://rsms.me/inter/).

I've been using this setup for quite a while and I've been very happy with my computing experience, both in terms of aesthetics and overall UX. I tried tiling WMs for a while (first KWin and then i3 / Sway) but I found that I'm just a messy person who tends to be more productive with a floating WM.

What’s the accessibility story for these kind of mobile UIs?

Puppy Linux has this feature and it’s pretty cool. Upon logging out you get a prompt asking if you want to save your session to a virtual disk file, and you can save it to any writable media (including the USB drive you’re booting Puppy from).

To be honest, I can’t say that this has been an issue for me on the Framework with Wayland and GNOME. Or at least I haven’t noticed it. My external monitor is 3840x2160, not HiDPI so maybe the issue is with multiple HiDPI displays of varying pixel density? I’m also using 1x scaling on both displays which perhaps simplifies things.

Oops, nice catch. Fixed.

I'm typing this on my Framework now and I have to say it really is a special device. The prevailing culture of treating technology as disposable is something I personally don't vibe with - I always keep all of my tech and have collected machines over the years that most people would probably consider obsolete and uninteresting (there's an Amiga 1000 and iMac G3 currently in my field of view). Having a fully open machine that I can customize, upgrade and repair for the foreseeable future is just so cool and makes me feel like this is my personal computer in the truest sense of the word!

A few takeaways from using it for around a month now:

1. This is the most "premium" feeling non-Apple laptop I've ever owned. Most of the laptops I've ever daily driven are Macs or Thinkpads so take that for what it's worth, but I think most people will be happy with the fit and finish of this device.

2. The swappable port system is actually a lot more useful than I expected. I initially thought it would be something I set up once and didn't bother with again for a while but there are a lot of random moments where it comes in handy. I'm kind of a messy, hyper person that periodically reorganizes my desk and I like to move between different workspaces when I need a different setting to feel creative. Being able to move my HDMI or USB-C ports around for better cable management is so nice and yeah I could use an external hub but I've always found those to be annoying on-the-go and just "feels bad man". Also I don't use Micro SD cards as much as other people but there are times when I do and being able to swap that in is really kewl.

3. Linux support is amazing but there are still a few hiccups. I use Arch Linux and everything works perfectly except for one minor inconvenience with Bluetooth: on a soft restart, the Bluetooth is disabled and I have to do a hard restart to restore it (can be mitigated by a kernel downgrade and should be fixed in a future update). It's not a deal breaker for me as I usually just close my laptop and put it to sleep, but just know that it's like running Linux on most other computers - you're going to have a much better time if you're fluent in tinkering and configuring your OS.

4. The 3:2 display is awesome for programming and content creation, and I don't know why more devices don't adopt it. My only criticism is that it's not a touch screen but with how modular this laptop is it's only a matter of time before that becomes an option.

This is exciting! I do wonder how Framework will handle some of the logistical challenges associated with running a hardware company, namely distribution. I’ve been waiting on my Framework DIY Edition for several weeks now - it was estimated to arrive a couple of weeks ago but seems to be stuck in the purgatory that is Portland / Troutdale FedEx. Of course everything is kinda upside down in the world at the moment and Framework is barely a year old at this point, so I can’t really fault them here. That said, I really hope Framework is able to successfully scale in this regard. Like it would suck to order a replacement part you need only to have to wait a month or longer for it to arrive in the mail.

More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28770590

Most of the people I see making LGBT “political” are people outside of our community who feel the need to constantly tell trans people how they feel about us - our pronouns, what gendered bathroom we should use, who we should be able to compete against athletically, whether we were lying as kids, whether or not they would date us. Like ugh, stop. Then you have the daily /r/Cringetopia or /r/HolUp thread that makes it to the front page when the only point of the thread is for grown ass men to take the piss out of some random gay teen on TikTok or no-follower account talking about pronouns on Twitter. What do we have? Selfie threads on /r/lgbt? Threads about how to come out to your parents on /r/asktransgender? Are you serious right now?

The harassment doesn’t even stop when these trolls and communities are banned. They will literally mass create fake accounts with hateful usernames and follow trans users in an attempt to harass them via the notification feed [0]. It’s scary when this happens to you and I think it’s the reason why you mostly see activist types from the trans community on these platforms, because they’re the only people who are willing to put up with this.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/oi4cmn/tran...

That’s cool but I’m not a lesbian. I’m a straight trans woman who just wants to live her life and not be bothered.

Some of the comments in this thread seem intentionally bad-faith or ignorant to how much hate and abuse actually exists on these platforms. The Internet fucking sucks. I stopped using social media because I'm trans and I don't feel like there's a place for me online anymore. No matter where I go, including large platforms like Reddit and Twitter, I'm inevitably subjected to someone expressing their grievances about trans people or the LGBTQ community. There's a part of me that wants to reply and give my perspective, but it's like I can't even have a voice online without the fear of people belittling and harassing me, sending me abusive messages, trying to doxx me, telling me to kill myself or scouring through my profile to try to find whatever they can add to their "cringe compilation" or Kiwifarms thread about how degenerate and disgusting trans people are. My mental health is more important than participating in the shitfest that is online discourse so I just avoid it. I post on Hacker News and a few other places where people are generally respectful, but other than that I've given up on having conversations with strangers online.

I'm an artist and a software dev, I have a lot that I want to share with the world but I don't think I'll ever get the chance to. This world is cruel and these online platforms and social media algorithms amplify that to the point where it feels like the only way to win the game is to not play. Personally, I don't feel one way or the other about online censorship at this point. I think social media has ironically ushered in a culture of anti-social behavior and maybe it's time to move on to something else.

Some of the reasons Apple comes up with for rejecting developers’ apps are such bullshit. Like I can understand trying to stop scams, malware etc. but this gatekeeping based on Apple’s subjective evaluation of the quality of your app when you have no other option for shipping on iOS is the reason why I just don’t consider it a serious platform. iPhones and iPads are more like iPods to me at this point; cool toys with overpowered hardware that do a few simple things well.

There’s also a lot of irony in Apple judging whether or not your app is good enough. Like does anyone actually think Apple is cool in 2021? To me they’ve just become another boring, stuffy corporation like Dell and HP. The iPhone 13 is so incredibly uninteresting and inconsequential that I couldn’t even remember what number they were on when I was typing this comment. That whole launch just came and went.

Those weird brand names have actually become a problem for the US trademark system. The sellers are basically just algorithmically generating company names that haven’t been trademarked yet in an attempt to fill the Amazon marketplace with as many fake brands as possible [0].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...

Sorry, looking back at my wording I can see how that's confusing. You are correct. PipeWire replaces the standard JACK libraries with its own ABI-compatible implementations. This allows any JACK-compatible application to support audio through PipeWire using the same APIs it would normally use for JACK. This is also how PipeWire handles support for PulseAudio, ALSA and other multimedia libraries; it kinda reminds me of Wine for Linux audio protocols, if my understanding is correct anyway.

To use PipeWire in place of JACK, you have to install a specific package (`pipewire-jack` on Arch Linux) and run all of your audio applications using a wrapper command called `pw-jack`. You can update the `.desktop` entries for audio software on your system to automatically run this command; I've done that and everything I use launches correctly, tbh I forget that PipeWire is there. I just use Bitwig, qjackctl, Catia, etc. and they all think they're using JACK but really everything is being handled by PipeWire. Pretty kewl and it's been working perfectly for me for quite some time. :)

For a more "contemporary" workflow you might want to try zrythm¹, it's getting better and better.

Oh wow, Zrythm looks awesome! Thank you for the suggestion, I'll be taking this DAW for a spin sometime soon. :)

Ardour is really great for recording and mixing.

Yeah, I'm actually warming up to Ardour as a general mix & mastering environment. It reminds me of Logic Pro in that sense, being more suited for final touches than composition (in my personal workflow).

If you exclusively make electronic music you could also look into LMMS², it's more of an electronic-music-toy than an actual DAW but thats not necessarily a bad thing.

How is LMMS these days? I tried it sometime last year and had a lot of fun but it crashed too much for my personal comfort (tbf that could have just been whatever buggy LV2 / VST plugins I was testing). It comes a bit closer to the "look and feel" I look for in a DAW - kinda reminds me of older versions of FL Studio which is kewl because that's the software I learned how to produce music on.

The point is that "trying to make music" isn't much of a description: people's workflows for "making music" vary dramatically. Not many years ago, more or less the only way to do this was to record yourself playing one or more instruments and/or singing. These days, there are many fundamentally different workflows, and countless minor variations of each one.

Excellent point and apologies if that comment came across as inflammatory. I really respect the work you and the Ardour team have done even if it's not for me (and infinite thanks for your work on JACK, it truly is a special piece of software). My frustration has more to do with there not being a FOSS DAW that gives me that true Ableton-like experience. I understand why though, this stuff is hard to build and one workflow does not fit all as you point out.

I am a software developer and musician who uses Linux and I do care about this. I run headless, and control my audio software through custom logic and hardware while playing live. I ended up writing a custom synthesizer and see because I couldn't find anything that works well for my use case

That's pretty cool. Most modern DAWs allow you to define per-controller triggers for custom logic in the form of MIDI events. I guess you could write a CLI that maps custom commands to MIDI events and allows you to send those events to your DAW when they are called. It's not exactly what you're describing (and maybe it doesn't fit your use case) but is that something you've considered?

I don't run a2j or even have it installed so in my case it doesn't seem to be a problem. My audio production setup isn't highly complex FWIW but with the following configuration I have had no issues with audio or MIDI input and output. All of my devices are just plug-and-play for both Bitwig and qjackctl:

- Distro: Arch Linux

- Audio backend: JACK2 and PipeWire

- USB Audio Interface: Behringer U-Phoria UMC404HD

- USB controllers: Akai APC 40 mkii, Casio CTK-6200

- Microphone: Zoom H6

I run this exact setup on my Ryzen desktop and a Thinkpad T480 with no problems. I've also tried routing the audio output of various software directly into my DAW using qjackctl, works perfectly fine.

Also consider that there are no good audio drivers for Linux (like Asio for example) so you're almost forced to stay in windows or Mac...

ASIO, really? Sorry but you couldn’t pay me to go back to that broken piece of crap after switching to Linux and JACK2. I’m actually traumatized by that piece of software, thinking of moments where ASIO would just break and cause my Live session to collapse into a glitchy cacophony of latency-induced noise. I’ve seen this happen on several computers with different Windows installations and external audio hardware and the problem always ends up being ASIO. Some of the producers I knew swore off anything that wasn’t a Mac because of this exact problem.

The problem with audio production on Linux in 2021 isn’t the audio protocol. It’s that most free and open source audio production software for Linux is dreadful to use. UX is actually very important for DAWs. I want to like Ardour but it’s a miserable piece of software to try to make music in. Feels like a chore to perform any action, kills my vibe, would not recommend. After trying really hard to become comfortable using it, I finally gave up and bought Bitwig. It’s a proprietary DAW and kinda expensive but I’ve been producing music with it for a couple of years and it’s a dream to use - sort of a spiritual successor to Ableton IMO.

No plug-in or DAW has a CLI…

Most people who make music don’t care about this. I’m a software developer and musician who only uses Linux and I don’t care about this. In my opinion, Linux developers of free and open source creative software should spend less time building these features for other developers and focus more on making their software feel good to create with. If I feel bad trying to use your clunky-ass UI to make my art / music / whatever then I’m not going to hold myself back because it has a free software license. I’m going to find a piece of software that gets out of the way and lets me make what I want to make.

The author says not to use email encryption but what is the case for sending email in plain text? Is encrypted email detrimental to my privacy in some way that unencrypted email is not? Or if the argument is that encrypted email is useless and no better than unencrypted email (since it is always unencrypted at rest) then what is the point of avoiding it in favor of the alternative? Aren't they equivalent, making the distinction meaningless?

This is my problem with the article. It feels like it suffers from a bit of zero-sum fallacy. The statement here is, "it can be broken therefore it's fundamentally broken." I think it's more useful to think in terms of probabilities. If I disable password authentication for SSH and require public key authentication on my web server, an attacker can still get in by stealing my private key. That isn't a reason to take the opposite approach however - botnets commonly employ password-guessing attacks against entire IP ranges so you're not actually safer by avoiding this practice just because it isn't a perfect solution. There is no silver bullet for security, only endless layers of strategies and adaptations to edge cases.

I did enjoy some of the points about the limitations of email encryption (the email chain example is a great reminder of how security is often more about human behavior than software). But I think the article could have been more compelling had it presented a less dogmatic thesis - perhaps "Email Encryption Won't Save You" or something like that.

My bf loves vaporwave and is sharing new artists in this genre with me all the time. 3D BLAST, Mélonade, Death's Dynamic Shroud and Runners Club 95 are a few of the producers / bands I like the most. I don't understand the fuss about labels; it's all electronic dance music to me.

Oh wow, thank you for this. :) I was just restoring an iMac G3, the Flower Power edition, and ran into more trouble than I expected trying to transfer data via a USB flash drive. Filesystems that Mac OS 9 should support were either not mounting properly or causing errors during file transfer when formatted on a modern Apple or Linux system (exFAT was the only one I could get to work for some reason). I’ve been casually looking around for some sort of NAS solution that would be compatible with older versions of Mac OS, but with native scp I can just download files from a Linux box (perhaps a dedicated Raspberry Pi) and skip right to the fun part: exploring all of the weird, cool and charming software and games from this era. So cool!

Inter is probably my favorite font for desktop user interfaces. It’s always one of the first things I setup on a new Linux install.

I’ve been using Arch as my only OS on desktops and laptops for years now. Maybe I’m just lucky but in my experience it’s been incredibly stable. I’ve only run into one issue with updating packages using pacman and it was a Postgres + PostGIS conflict caused by my own configuration mistakes (easily fixed). I imagine most updates for the Steam Deck will either be from the core repositories or through Steam itself though, so the same issues you might run into when installing bleeding edge packages from the AUR shouldn’t apply.

As far as why Arch, I think it’s a great “build your Linux OS” distribution that gives you a solid foundation to expand into the bespoke system of your dreams. On my desktop, I have a personalized computing experience using Wayland + Sway, PipeWire and only the software I use. That same DIY principle makes Arch a compelling option for anyone looking to build their own distro; Manjaro is one such example and it’s the distro I used before making the full dive into Arch.