twmiller

That said, on my most recent trip to Paris, I actually found Parisians a lot nicer than the last time I was there (~1995ish?).

My wife and I had the exact same experience. We had been to Paris in the late 90s and when we were there a couple of years ago, we found people to be much nicer than they had been previously. Our theory is that it is / was a generational thing.

I pulled an old Kenwood HF transceiver my dad had given me about 10 years off of a shelf in the garage about a week ago. While I was digging around for the various pieces of it (long story short, it was broken, started repairing it, got overwhelmed, boxed it for a decade) I found a USB SDR in another box. I hooked up the SDR and checked out the FM broadcast band from the basement. The online radio guide showed that there were about 80 FM stations within 60 miles. In the basement, I could pick up about 35 of them. 1/5 were Christian stations. 2/5 were country (and/or western) stations, and the other 2/5th were interesting. A couple of 'adult album alternative' stations, a couple of Spanish stations, a few classic rock, a classic hip-hop, etc.

Once I got the transceiver repaired and functioning, I checked out the AM band on the Kenwood with a endfed shortwave antenna strung up in the back yard. between the local stations and the ones coming out of Denver, I think I could pick up about 20 of them with reasonable fidelity. They were, without exception, all talk. Some religion, some sports, a LOT of politics. Shortwave, which is arguably more dead than AM, seems to at least have more interesting content on it. (Still a lot of christian content, but also some propaganda / government news stations and some cool music coming across in languages I don't understand.).

Radio, as a hobby, requires a lot of poking around looking for signal these days.

Meh. The moment I, for any reason, cannot collaborate unless I get my hands on a computer it stops being collaborative.

Or not. 'Collaborative' doesn't mean 'accessible by anyone'. Collaborative just means capable of supporting two or more parties working together, and freeform clearly meets the criteria...

The same sort of people who decided it'd be interesting and/or fun to snag an extra phone line and set up a BBS back in the day, I suspect.

I think you're only half wrong here. The difference is that you can virtue signal to people inside of your own crowd without much consequence, but if you seek to offend them, they kick you out. There's definitely (a lot of) virtue signaling going on in the fediverse, for what it's worth. And I really don't see people on the left getting the same sort of kicks out of pissing people off that people on the right seem to enjoy. As you sort of pointed out, they're annoying in different ways. ;)

"Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the first place. Sure, leftist servers could have stop syndicating his posts, but this would not have had much more of an effect than individuals blocking him on Twitter if he had never been banned there."

My observation is that the modern right wing social media user only thrives when there are 'liberal snowflakes' around that they can piss off. Hence Gab, Truth, Parler, etc. being largely failures. They all miss the key ingredient that the right wingers need to really get their endorphin hit: people to offend.

It took me about 45 minutes last night to install a pleroma server and get it set up. Also as 'just an experiment'. This was on a server that had nginx running on it but not much else.

"Who would be a peer as an interviewer?"

Dick Cavett has forgotten more about the art of the conversational interview than most people have ever known. Intelligent, perceptive, and witty. I'll take his 40-year-old youtube clips any day of the week over the wannabe everyman that Joe Rogan pretends to be.

How is that “counter-balance”? Obviously the medical folks are only going to have talked to people who’ve had accidents, where as the bike forums are filled with people who’ve had accidents, who’ve had close calls, and who’ve had no issues.

For what it’s worth, I’ve got thousands of miles on a touring bike under my belt. I’ve had close calls…but I’ve also had close calls driving, flying, and boating. I’ve had close calls swimming and climbing, too. If the alternative is to hang out in my basement on the computer where it’s ‘safe’ all the time, I’d rather stick to the close calls.

It's also a bunch of horseshit, because the Acropolis museum in Athens is absolutely phenomenal and clearly shows that Greece is capable of caring for them adequately.

Best thing for you in terms of getting to listen to indie artists, but what do they get out of it?

I don’t think the modern mac is any more (or less) difficult to extend than windows or linux…

I've been playing Four Against Darkness. It's not really a solo roleplaying game out of the box, because the 'role playing' aspects of it are extremely minimal. In fact, out of the box it's really more of a P&P roguelike. Having said that, a fair number of people have written additional source books, blog posts, etc. where they tack on role playing aspects to the game. I did come up with little backstories for my four intrepid adventures (Bernice, Elsie, Mildred, and Evelyn: four 1950s housewives who inexplicably find themselves exploring a dungeon), so when I play it there's at least a little veneer of role playing involved.

I'm older than dirt.

Last week I watched 'Severance' on Apple TV. It was very good. Last night I watched the first episode of 'Tokyo Vice' on HBO Max and it was definitely good enough that I'll keep watching.

Sure, Billie Eilish sucks, but Wet Leg doesn't. (Apologies if you like Bilie Eilish, but art is subjective, not objective.) There's good stuff out there being made today, you just have to look for it.

I have a hard time taking anyone seriously when they drop something like this: "MacOS felt a kind of dumb, and does so ever since" ... I mean...MacOS is just *nix these days and has been for 20+ years. I jump back and forth between it and linux pretty much all day long and I see nothing that indicates that macOS is any dumber than linux.

I get 'No Results' when I type 'DVD Player' in spotlight.

I have a M1 Mac mini. It doesn't have a non-removable app called "DVD Player" on it. (Or, if it does, spotlight can't find it and I don't see it in the folder where I copied the 'apple droppings' apps to.)

Hrm. I dunno. I recently picked up a couple of old laptops to goof around on (a 2003 Thinkpad T41 and a 2005 iBook G4) and both of them (laptops!) have keyboards that are so much better than my modern keyboards that I was sort of taken aback. I think we’ve slowly been fed worse and worse keyboards for so long that we don’t realize what we’ve actually lost. I’d say the difference is more tangible than a $250 gold-coated cable.

Also own a Mac SE/30 and pretty much went through the hoops that the linked article did, only I did all of it myself. I also picked up an ethernet card for it because I had a retro-computer connection who got me one for a really good price (like, an AMAZINGLY good price). Otherwise, the network adapters for the SE/30's PDS slot are pretty rare and usually very expensive.

A far less expensive option is to get a Pi Zero, a USB-to-serial adapter, and a Apple-to-9-pin null modem cable. You can set up SLIRP on the pi running linux and then use a PPP modem driver to connect to the internet on the se/30. You're stuck at serial port speeds, but honestly for most of what you want to do on a computer this old (irc, bbsing, file transfers of se/30 sized files) it's actually pretty solid. I use the pi zero / serial interface for a bunch of my old computers that don't have proper network adapters.

...does the video of the guy in the coffee shop remind anyone else of Neil Stephenson's description of 'gargoyles' in Snow Crash?

It's really not. That was the concensus of many reviews when these things were new. I'm not (by any stretch) implying that DAC differences are 'audiophile snake oil'. There is a difference. It's just that the 'difference' is vastly overstated.

Yep. As mentioned, Apple Watch is the way to go if you're looking for a modern shuffle, and it does support offline Spotify these days.

The issues with using an older shuffle is that replacing the batteries on ANY of them is a massive chore, and none of them have bluetooth, which means you'd be back to dangling wires, which (imo) sucks when running. I believe the later generation nanos supported BT, though, so they might be a cheap candidate for a "music while running" solution.

I love how everyone is chomping at the bits to get one of those iPods with the Wolfson DAC when a) most people can't hear the difference and b) even among people who can, they're probably not using headphones* that are good enough to take advantage of the difference.

* and/but/also c) even if they can hear the difference, and have a headset that can express the difference, they're probably not using these in a quiet enough environment where it matters.

Sometimes I think that it might be good to ditch the smart phone in favor of a dumb phone. Then two things occur to me:

1. 90% of the ‘communicating’ I do with my phone these days is text messaging, and I almost never make voice calls anymore.

2. Dumb phones are terrible devices to use when it comes to text messaging.

The thing about Adams with regards to world building is that it was always story first. This is why he wrote four different versions of the actual Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy story. One for radio, one for the book, one for the television series, and one for the movie. There are differences, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, between all of those versions. Many of those tweaks were there to make the story fit the intended medium better.

He also wasn’t afraid to co-opt his universe and shoehorn in a story from a different source, if needed. I believe that the third book started life as a Doctor Who script.

You can still get software to do this. I think there's even an election app (!) for that. lol

"I personally don't know enough about mRNA to have a say, but what I can safely assume is that Malone knows more about mRNA than most people who are saying he is wrong."

Why can you safely assume that? Further, I'm less concerned about what 'most people' are saying about Malone, but more interested in what his equally credentialled peers are saying, which is that he's full of shit.

"He’s about as right as most media organizations."

Is this true? Do you have any analysis to back this up, or is it just something you made up because it makes you feel good?

How is 'we will hurt you with bad publicity' not part of the free market in action?

This is blatently obvious in America right now. A LOT of voices crying out against the 'cancel culture' are the first to line up when it comes to canceling something THEY don't like.