hmstx

"Why so many brands change their logos and look like everybody else".

In the past year(s) I have noticed a few icons in my Android phone turning into the same thing.

For a long time there was Uber, white on black. And then others thought white on black was the cool thing to join in on, making the reduced icons of the following look the same : Uber, Soundcloud (they kept their sigil at least), Swile, Qobuz, myNoise. I'm sure if I installed more junk I'd have seen more.

Even myNoise who goes against tech grain! To their credit, they added an orange circle background to it sometime this spring. Soundcloud execs woke up and went back to their trademark orange. But, heck.

Hey, just what you see, pal.

Anecdata: Every time over the years that my parents (now in their 70s) have purchased a new mac, software updates only ever happen if I run them. I don't visit all the time. They run outdated versions of everything until I hear "we need to buy a new mac because we can't use this website for some administrative thing", which is caused by not updating the os and the browser becoming unsupported over time.

Also account for i.e musicians (I hear there's a few of them in Apple-land) who seem to keep getting bitten by Apple somehow breaking compatibility with a bunch of audio software/equipment even with developer release, time and time again.

Multiply by real world amounts of people.

Would be a good explanation...

But some sneaky, cowardly bastards sucker-punch you with their dickbars only after you have started reading, and begin to scroll down the page.

Yeah, about that, news websites who want to sell me a subscription. I appreciate what you are trying to do, but can you please wait until I've read at least one or two sentences (let alone the short preview of your paywalled articles) BEFORE you dickoverslap me to consider subscribing?

By the time the thing comes up, I haven't even been able to tell whether your writer can form a coherent sentence. "Subscribe PLZ" at that point will make sure I barely even consider staying for the rest of it.

Dammit. I got an IdeaPad of similar price in december 2024. It didn't have one of the fancier displays from the era but still a decent option, it has 16Gb and I thought I'd try a Ryzen mobile thing that time. Wish I'd gone for the Thinkpad E series had I known about it then : that lower-end IdeaPad feels like trash.

SSD IO is sluggish, fans always spin when plugged in, audio crackles if I so much as scroll a page while a youtube video is playing, the keyboard might be the worst I've touched in many, many years, the 3.5mm audio jack wore out into intermittent connectivity within a couple of months. At least the display still looks good. Went through the windows optimization motions with it too. My x230 with an i5 still has lower and more stable DPC latency and has remained my DJ laptop.

Heh, haven't heard of this but as a frenchie who sometimes hears swedes over the internet, I find that the permanent snus makes it sound like the person can't stop keeping some gum in their mouth, refilling mid-sentence because they really, really can't help it and it's more important than your interaction.

And so, having grown up hearing "audible gum chewing is rude", that sometimes feels rude to me. And it's not even in person!

Looked at the headline, no prior knowledge of this. "New Mozilla product, okay. Must be... something AI?"

click

"Ah, of course it is."

In an interesting twist of fate, one of the master copyists featured prominently in the Scener section of that site has come back in the last few years to win graphics competitions again with both

- directly ripping newer, lesser known artists instead of the classic Vallejo/Sorayama from the 90s. https://ibb.co/GpDVf2r

- switching to midjourney from ~2023 to now, so the sources are near untraceable (this was also supposedly leaked).

It still takes some talent to do a good looking copy, but it's not the same talent - and very dishonest when such literal use of reference is not credited.

In fact it's been an issue in the 16bit demoscene with graphics (standalone and in demos) suddenly getting more plentiful, with subjects constructed and lit a lot better, etc. and people being called out for suspicious works (and usually getting away with it, "because the whole point was to support our insane image compression code with a ton of images" etc.)

Well that's a pompous headline from the author's PR dept. "Europe" as in, "The European Union", or just some marketing trick based on making you believe it is to give it more weight?

I'm european and can still easily confuse the "European Union" and "Europe the general area" when context is lacking, it's not a big stretch of the imagination for me that people _anywhere_ could construe this as "official" as well.

All that it looks like is backed by some emanation from the city of The Hague. No mention of the EU proper. It's european owned and backed, sure, but not EU owned and backed.

Tsh, marketing. (see Bill Hicks on marketing).

It doesn't. I "worked around" that by setting a 5 minute daily timer for youtube on my phone - just enough to mark a few regular videos as "Watch Later". Gives me an incentive to scroll past the shorts.

Funnily enough, from one engine with runtime portal culling to another :)

I have this on my backlog of Jams to go through, but peeked ahead hoping to see Alekswithak in there, and indeed, it's him. He's already scored a few great SP mods : Alkaline, Dwell, Dwell 2 - which should also be checked out - and some of his tracks have been featured in various map jams as well. He hasn't published the soundtrack for QBJ3 yet, but I assume he will eventually. Until then, enjoy the rest at https://alekswithak.bandcamp.com/

[Pre-Chorus]

I think of all the education that I missed

But then my homework was never quite like this

[Chorus]

Got it bad, got it bad, got it bad

I'm hot for teacher

Got it bad, sooo bad

I'm hot for teacher

Wow!

[Scorching guitar solo]

Wish someone would try to create native MacOS classic on x86 hardware.

Apple worked on this themselves - and then they canned it.

https://lowendmac.com/2014/star-trek-apples-first-mac-os-on-...

Pioneer DJ, I mean AlphaTheta, probably don't even know MusicBrainz exists. They're too busy selling subscriptions for RekordBox. And they do nothing to help you with the metadata on your files, besides filtering in browser mode.

I can relate to the problem of revising genre or energy ratings over time. I've gone with custom genre tags for ages, ie "dub/house/techno" or "funk/disco/edits" with a sprinkling of extra qualifiers in the comment field and do bulk updates from MP3Tag/Foobar2k. The extras only really help when preparing "crates" for export to USB for outside use, or when just playing off the entire collection at home. I'm fast, but still not much time to read the comment fields when browsing on the players, much less input any words with the scroll wheel.

I keep every purchase around in FLAC, and the part I might realistically play out stays in AIFF, for minimum fiddling of tags (ie stars map a bit differently between Traktor and Rekordbox) - because of course Rekordbox will warn you you're exporting files you can't play anywhere, but won't do anything to transcode them.

Lossless whenever possible because I just want to give the sound quality as much of a chance as I can when recording sets, especially if they might get posted online and getting lossy-transcoded multiple times. I've tried the mp3 of mp3 thing, and you do hear it at home (out at a gig, most of the time, probably not).

I don't suffer from track bulimia, so the numbers work out - and disk space has gotten a lot cheaper in the last 20 years.

Most of the CDs we burned at home in the 1998-2005 era were still good in recent years, some DVDs in there too. Luck, I guess. No delamination or rot. Really, my main problems were figuring out file types without extentions (burned on classic Mac OS) and... appropriate programs to open them (old Painter limited edition from 1998 needs... the same thing, pretty much).

OTOH, some 12 years ago I worked IT at a newspaper and we were moving offices. The archivist got an intern in a room in our section of the building and together they spent a month or two scanning, then committing whatever physical media to burned CDs (maybe DVDs) before chucking the former to the bin. Maybe a year after the move, a ticket was opened and I went to check the disks. None of them worked, CRC failures all over. I don't think they even considered testing them, or burning duplicates, or maybe they used a really bad drive which would produce media unreadable by anything else - although I'm only aware that this is a thing with floppies for example.

The best way to experience this is at one of the top festivals. The second best way is at a club.

I would respectfully disagree and swap these, unless the festival is something like Freerotation. Festivals tend to bring out the more consumer friendly, hands-in-the-air side, and more often than not, force everyone to condense their sets, losing a lot of the "storytelling", risk-taking and deeper cuts.

What remains of techno has largely rotted in the last 5+ years due to the high-visibility, high octane arms race "business techno" festival energy, for example.

Elon Musk famously got an access denied there once.

Also wasted Richie Hawtin, IIRC. And of course, as I'm sure he asked, they knew who he was :D

Someone in a past thread here mentioned how they enjoyed the help of LLMs to generate all their PR marketing nonsense blurbs, because they looked just as good as the real thing. It might have been 2-3 years ago but I still joke about this with coworkers when the conversations shift to "AI".

Might be a Monty Python joke, as in "fetchez la vache!"

Seems like it's,

- "good job on the acquisition and maintaining some kind of product" - how many of these are users?

- "this is now dead and completely useless to me, I am switching to something FLOSS this instant" - I'm betting v2-decayed-for-a-couple-years still beats GIMP/Inkscape from the future in at least UX for example, and it certainly does now)

- some "it's all a scheme for AI training" which would be more of what I'd expect, although for the time being, appears to be FUD when it comes to local files (surely Lord Vader will change the terms further as well)

For me it took a bit of self-discipline watching the video announcement first, before checking any comments anywhere.

I'm glad I got my v2 licences a few years ago, they've allowed me to dabble in graphics again without losing my mind to other even more affortable products. The strings that come attached with this and the potential lack of options for some workflows later down the line bother me. Just hoping v2 doesn't get too much more unstable with time.

In retrospect, it seems almost nuts that appliances from the past came with not only a block diagram, but a schematic. Especially now that everything is not only too complex to be documented "for your own good", and even potential repair techs, and now with DMCA protected software locks.

I still sometimes use the old Scott amplifier my parents got 50 years ago, with manual - and it has everything you need for a repair (besides a list of modern day replacement for some of these, of course). Same with the ol' Amiga 500 in a box over at their house. A lot of tinkering you could scheme on your own without going online (my quartz oscillator overclocking replacement never materialized, but hey).

Never seen wire wrapped boards besides photos of this and maybe some other early micro. So of course I had to do a little search and one of the first results has Bil Herd from Commodore (Plus/4, C128...) explaining it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXvEDM-m9CE

Dale Luck (from the original team) is preserving it, apparently.

Q3test came out in 1999 - on the classic Mac OS he despised, even a bit before its final OS 9 incarnation. This was to get the biggest bugs ironed out on the most restricted hardware scope available as they were going HW accelerated only during a bit of a wild west period when it comes to that. We were all only reading about OSX in the press at the time - and when Q3 first made it to OSX proper, it was through a third-party (Omni Group).

JC did however switch to OSX as his primary development environment for some time when Apple was the first to ship the Geforce 3 in 2001, which was really the generation of hardware needed to do Doom 3 justice. A year later, it was all about ATI's new flagship card which pushed things further for his needs - back to windows, and I can't rembember from his .plan files whether he moved back before getting access to that hardware.

Oh, that reminds me of a similar experience with Facebook video. Did a live DJ stream a few years ago but only recorded the audio locally at max quality. Back then, I think I already had to use the browser debugger to inspect the url for the 720p version of the video.

When they recently insisted by email I download any videos before they sunset the feature, their option only gave me the SD version (and it took a while to perform the data export).

I only recently read Philip K.Dick's Ubik and this headline alone sounded oddly familiar. At least, your smart locks aren't requesting payment ... yet?

DPIV user (A500/512+512k) as a kid/teen in the 90s, been testing things out in pixels again recently.

For a more modern substitute with layer support, GrafX2 is often mentioned. It's a pretty damn good indexed color pixel tool, sort of a child of DP and Brilliance. Still has the brush and foreground/background color essentials and other things.

- By default, it shares a lot of keyboard shortcuts with DP, with a few key ones being replaced by more modern conventions (you can change them all, apparently).

- It'll open HAM and half-brite images, but will just essentially consider all of the colors as independent (ie instead of automatically deriving the last 32 from the first in H-B), so beware when doing some back and forth.

- It has layers / can handle animations as a result. If you save an image as a gif, all layers become independent frames when the gif is opened somewhere else. Conversely, give it an LBM animation, and it'll load it in the layers, and you can play it back.

- You can start it with a commandline argument to limit its bit depth, so `/rgb 16` will get you to the Amiga's 4096 colors. Apparently dpaint.js can reduce to Amiga colors, but I haven't found where it is and have had colors display wrong in Amigaland in my tests (one doesn't simply reduce to a few colors!). I might have to ask the author about that.

Back then I filled most of my floppies with Star Wars spaceship animations made by combining the perspective and animation tools (as explained in the very thorough manual) - until I ran out of memory and couldn't finish a lot of shapes. People have posted legacy VHS video tutorials, basic and advanced, for both DP3 and DP4, up on YouTube. A lot of what's in there is in the OG manuals, but it's quite a different perspective seeing it in motion, explained by a real person.

- DP3 video guide with insights from Dan Silva - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qTv8qnTzYU

- DP4 basic video guide - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=973fiFaSXqw

- DP4 advanced video guide - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KybIkyilCQI

Anyway - In DP4 at least, an animation would be saved into a single file, which I found out in some recent exploration gets tricky if you never stuck to a naming convention as a kid :) DP4 doesn't care about the extensions and will happily load an animation as a still image (and just show you the first frame), although it might complain in some other directions (image as anim, brush as image...). Thankfully, GrafX2 can tell the difference! You open the file regardless of it being a picture, brush or animation and it does the rest.

As for doing stuff in emulation, for sure turn up the emulated hardware specs, good call from the author there. Don't even really have to step away from cycle-exact, just going up to a 030+FPU or 040 is already a big relief. Mounting part of the real filesystem is great too ; and since you're emulating a faster machine, I'd just upgrade from 1.3 to 3.1 too for a bit more creature comforts (3.1 is rough enough as it is, but it at least allows you to list files without icons in the GUI...). On that front, I would also suggest maybe using noicons in DP - spamming the host filesystem with .info files (icons - also IFF/ILBM and viewable in Grafx2!) gets old fast IMHO.

Used my Wacom tablet a bit as a dumb pencil mouse through the emulator, and even without pressure sensitivity, it was already so much better ; although the "right click to paint in background color" thing is really awkward there. I had to make sure windows pen input was disabled, and that was it. It's possible to get pen pressure in the amiga with DP5 but... that's quite the can of worms, and I wouldn't even try this on emulation.

As for alternatives on Amiga, I also tried PersonalPaint (got the actual licence in my AmigaForever package some years ago), but besides color reduction, error-diffusion dithering and other effects, I couldn't jive with it. Newtek Digipaint was interesting to play with ; you always work in HAM there and have interesting brush expression parameters. It really makes it obvious that you have to plan your piece and pick your base 16 "real" colors before you start doing anything. Haven't found a copy of (True)Brilliance to play with.

Go for it, you might be surprised! In the last 6 years or so, I decided to poke at my childhood Amiga 500 again when visiting family (which is where it still lives) and I wasn't sure how many of the errors I saw came from a dead disk drive or fading floppies. Last week, enraged with disk/drive issues, I rushed a poor man's drive cleaning with 90 proof alcohol on the heads (99.9 IPA much preferred), and WD40/90 proof in the disk presence switch (again, proper contact cleaner and IPA much preferred). Most disks behaved well after that - original software or user written, a few of my own disks had errors, and a couple sound like they need gluing back to the center spindle. These are all disks from 90-98 and I was able to move data back and forth through the serial cables I'd finally acquired for that purpose.

This machine now has more problems with flaky IC connections and wonky caps than disks. Given the visual glitches in some of my old DeluxePaint files viewed on the actual machine, I'm surprised the circuits didn't mess up any of the transfers, because I didn't get the glitches in the emulator afterwards..

Fun fact - I just found out Netradiant Custom, a fork of a fork of GtkRadiant, moved from GTK to Qt. So, all in all... :)