If you have a YTM subscription, it does not make sense to play in Outer tune. Any YTM Streaming client streams in 128 kbps whilst YTM Premium streams at 256 kbps when set at High.
One can download songs at 256 kbps though if they have YTM Premium via yt-dlp using setcookiesoption. This is useful if someone has large custom playlists where searching via Soulseek is a chore.
Kissinger is easily the worst example to give the Peace Prize to. I think Anthony Bourdain wrote about Laos( correct me if I am wrong about the country) that you will wish to beat Kissinger with your bare hands after you have visited the place and see what he had done.
Satire died the day Kissinger was awarded the Peace Prize. Someone said famously as well. Even if Trump gets it, I will still argue that Kissinger remains the gold standard for being bad.
I remember using Cent OS (dual booting it alongside Debian) multiple years back. I think it had more or less feature parity with RHEL then and meant for personal use case unlike RHEL.
Too bad it was discontinued. I think the closest fork of it is Rocky Linux.
Nobel Prize committee made quite some blunders over the years but they really swapped war crimes and peace tables that year.
Whilst YT-dlp supports many sites, it’s primary function is still downloading from YouTube and that doesn’t have flac. Even YouTube Music Premium only streams at 256 kbps Aac when set at high, I think.
Using one of those deezer or qobuz bots might be better incase someone really wishes for flac. Or if one wants to invest time, then Soulseek is always there.
Reminds me of the quote Political Satire became obsolete when Kissinger was awarded the Peace Prize. But over the years, there have seriously been multiple controversial candidates who got the prize.
Listenbrainz is good. I scrobble to both there and Last.fm, there was librefm as well but it is in maintenance mode now practically with no new sign ups.
Not a perma ban but still.
Back when I used to be on Reddit much, I got auto banned from r/latestagecapitalism for having too much karma on certain subreddit they disliked. They weren’t necessarily political in nature (I think I only frequented couple of political subs then and they were non US in nature) but apparently the concept of not breaking any rules on your sub but still being banned just because I participate in some place they dislike was dubious.
Not related, but I think I was very active on reddit from 2016-2021. I had gone through couple of user IDs then (stupidly forgotten the 2FA mechanism for both and never backed the recovery code :p) and had a decent curated feed. I still sporadically open it but hardly participate / post. The only thing worth keeping me there is old Reddit and RES which makes keyboard navigation a breeze.
If one donates to Soulseek( on their official website a certain amount), they get privileges. If you have privileges, then your downloads will be queued ahead of other users (basically you side step a long queue for downloading).
I use Nicotine, and when I open the client, it shows for a couple of seconds at the bottom/tray No active Soulseek privileges before vanishing. That’s the only clue.
In practise, my downloads usually go through normally. The 5 days I had privileges I honestly didn’t notice much difference. Some users have an automated script that crawls one’s folder whenever you download from them, so as long as one has decent amount of shares, it’s alright. (I only have shared 40 odd gigs but it’s decent enough).
The chat is useless most of the times. The users troll each other and the unmoderated nature means racism is quite common as well. That being said, there are the odd decent folks as well. I had a decent conversation with a guy once there and he even donated 5 days of Soulseek privileges to me; sadly these type of conversations are forgotten in the cesspool that is the chatroom there.
When I was listening to obscure krautrock bands which were nowhere to be found on Spotify or YT Music, Soulseek came to rescue. Also, funnily, it is easier to get flac from there than 320kbps mp3 of various albums. The former is more ubiquitous there.
I use RedReader sporadically for browsing Reddit. I like it’s compact UI style and customizability. Even when I had proper paid Boost for Reddit back in the day, somehow, the UI of RedReader made it more intuitive for me to use it.
I think one can technically use Boost still via patching it, but it’s a grey area and not worth going after when RedReader exists.
Either case, the official Reddit app has to be purposefully coded to be as unoptimized and useless as possible. The bloat, the wasted white space; it all stands testament to the travesty that is modern software design.
Discord reminds me they are introducing ads to their mobile platform right?
As for the article, one of the reasons for the demise could be that instead of signing up on dozens different forums, users now just do it on Reddit. I don’t appreciate it, because Reddit’s conversations only focus on newer active threads and even if one replies to older ones, it does NOT bump them. This isn’t the case with forums, where usually you can respond to old conversations and it gets bumped up.
Haven’t Spotify mods already been clamped down in one way or the other(in terms of having a trimmed down feature set)? I used to follow Balatan’s mod from Mobilism and last I saw, Atleast some stuff was server sided.
Either case, mods can only go so far. I only used Spotify Premium once for a short while before returning back to YT Music and one of the things I liked was third party clients on desktop. ncspot is a terminal based client for Spotify that rakes in one tenth of memory requirements but sadly requires Premium and I don’t think there is any way to bypass that as of now. (though of course, most users won’t even care about such a niche client)
But if someone is serious about music, then Soulseek is the way to go. It has most genres of music, usually in flac and locally stored music is any day superior to cloud.
He was the frontman for Motorhead. Though he started his career in Hawkwind in the 70s, I think.
Today Weather is decent otherwise, has multiple sources as options and a clean, somewhat customizable UI. It also has a proper Wear OS app with complications support.
I honestly don’t know what Pocketcasts folks are working on. Their forum has lists of issues where the official Wear OS app lacks so many features, doesn’t sync properly and apparently can’t run fluidly on my Galaxy Watch 6 even [Like how much memory does it need? Gnome on Linux probably is more resource efficient than their Wear OS app].
I use Obtanium actually since my main mobile browser is Iceraven which isn’t on F-Droid by default. [It supports sideloading extensions that official Firefox doesn’t].
IIRC, Pano Scrobbler is free but has a premium version as well on Google Play. I scanned through their Github and as of August 2024, the dev was working on implementing payment features without Play integration [like donating to the app and then getting a key for it which will be validated against license servers]. I used to sideload Premium variant of Pano Scrobbler before from Mobilism.
Reminds me somewhat of the Pocketcasts app. It had a one time purchase option once but then switched to a subscription tier instead. Ironically, if Google Podcasts were alive and being developed, then no one would have any need for Pocketcasts since the former had desktop playback and Google would have developed a first party Wear OS app as well(like Pocketcasts).
However, as is evident, Google killed the app and YT Music is not at all built for podcasts. If it categories as a podcast app, then it is the single worst I have seen for podcasts.
I don’t understand why Mozilla is so smitten with this extension. They already removed it from AMO, why are policing it now. A tiny minority of folks use Firefox(as a percentage of market share) worldwide and only some part of it use this extension. Why go after it so hard?
They are policing it today, tomorrow they may say uBlock Origin violates our policies as well. Sure, technically one might be able to install via changing about:config toggle but that’s a bridge too far for most users.
It might seem I am making a huge mental jump for equating a paywall bypass extension to an adblocker extension, but in the eyes of corporations, both kind of users are equally loathed by them.