Paolo Bacigalupi is to the climate crisis what William Gibson is to cyberpunk. Stories like The Water Knife and The Tamarisk Hunter feeling a lot closer to reality everyday. But then again, fighting over access to water is a tale as old as time.

That’s the part that confused me. Doesn’t seem particularly useful or wise to equip a helicopter with a nuke. Seems kind of suicidal actually.

According to the article it was royalty free and published open standards, but they do not make any claim to this being an FOSS system.

Where? Everything everywhere seems to be a mix of clear channel, church broadcasts, or the rare public radio station that isn’t classical music 24/7.

Lol, this was a thing that every grocery store in my area would do every couple of years. I remember my mom making this same complaint with some regularity as we grew up. Sometimes they’d circle back around and hit a configuration from days long past.

They seemed to have calmed down on the bi-decade reorganization that moved entire isles lately. But there are still about 3-4 different places (spread across the store) that I’d need to check if I was looking for a pickle or some cheese. This ruined their delivery services because practically every item I’d order during COVID would be an unacceptable substitute because the “pros” doing the shopping were clearly children that had never done grocery shopping for themselves before.

Some company has recently been stocked the impulse buy areas around me with something they brand as retro sours. They are packaged to look just like Altoids Sours and I assume they are also trying to mimic the flavors. I wish I could tell you they taste the same, but they never seem to have the one flavor I’m interested in (tangerine) so I haven’t tried them.

Yes

When I need to soak some things outside of the washing machine, I just use a mop bucket. Lately that soaking has been whites in oxyclean to get them looking more white again. Oxyclean (or any similar non-brand name oxygen based agent) is great for organic stains (blood, sweat, oils, grease, food) and smells, but bad for wool. DO NOT USE OXYCLEAN ON WOOL. For my wool stuff I just use regular detergent in cold water and hang dry. If you’re trying to get smells out of wool you might try drying them in the sun. Wool also doesn’t do great in hot water, but that’s okay. Just trade heat for time, i.e. letting something soak in cold water instead of a short wash in hot water. Same principal used to make cold brew coffee.

If there is a filter to be cleaned on a public machine, you can probably check it before running your own through. At the very least give the machine a sniff first. Sometimes a quick rinse cycle with an empty machine is all that’s needed to clear out the lingering funk from the last load. If not, the machine needs maintenance.

Laundry advice is weird in that it can be very broadly applied and general (the actual chemistry and fabrics are pretty similar everywhere), but also hyper local. What works in one region might not it another because the water is different, chemicals have different and confusing names, etc. The best advice is really to read the clothing tags (and learn to interpret those laundry hyroglyphs), read/research the detergent ingredients and instructions, group like items together, and test new tips and tricks on less critical pieces of wardrobe before doing an entire load.

Oh yeah, gambling ads are the worst. That’s like a whole other can of worms. I feel the same way about them, predatory and exploitative. They shouldn’t really be allowed anywhere. But I feel the same way about ads for casinos, day trading websites, Bitcoin, predictive markets, state lotteries, managed stock market funds, short term loans, multilevel marketing schemes, etc. The all prey on the same ignorance and insecurities.

If we’re going to make a rule about legal advice, it should simply be “Don’t ask for legal advice.” Then again, it’s really against rule 5 anyway. This is not a support community.

Speaking from experience, storing batteries or a battery operated device in a car is just asking for a bad time.

I just bought a bicycle foot pump. Sure it’s slightly inconvenient and requires some leg work. But, I’ve gone through one about every other decade. Also, I’m not tethered to a car with a working battery.

My related hot take: If I’m going to be subjected to Ads, I’d actually prefer to see relevant Ads (generally demographically, geographically, etc. while retaining some anonymity) than ads for products and services I’m never going to care about.

Semi-related, on my language learning journey I’ve discovered that as I watch more things in the language I’m learning via YouTube, Netflix, and other ad supported streaming services I see more and more ads in the language I’m trying to learn. And surprisingly (even to myself) I genuinely enjoy these ads because the language is usually simple and without much idiomatic use, it’s all clearly enunciated, and it’s directly related to the action on screen. Of course, everyone else in my household is now also getting those kinds of ads and I can’t help but be amused.

Ads in real life spaces though? Unless it’s telling me about some specific local thing or place, it is just ugly clutter on the scenery and architecture.

Could they not think of an original name? Calling it YouTube-dl is just unnecessarily lazy and confusing. This appears to be mostly a docker image of yt-dlp, which is itself a fork of youtube-dl.

For normal albums: Artist/Year - Album [release ID if necessary for ambiguity for various versions of an album]/Disc-track - title.extension . Compilations (soundtracks, promo mixes from shows, etc.) get “Various Artist” as the album artist and sorted under “Various Artists” of the top level of my albums directory. Stuff from other sources would sometimes get their own special directory at the top level outside “albums”.

Tags are everything, that’s where the in-depth data is. album folders hold extra art, inserts, metadata, etc.

I don’t really make manual playlists using relatively pathed m3u anymore because support is inconsistent across the apps I’ve used to listen to my library. These days Plex, jellyfin, ncmpcpp (tui front-end for mpd) all handle their own playlists. Those are mostly just spontaneous groupings or automated shuffles I don’t really keep track of.

Back in the day I made mixtapes on actual cassettes, recorded from the radio, my CDs, and later tracks I found on Napster and soulseek. Later I moved on to making tons of playlists in foobar2000. Some of those playlists probably still litter my hard drive (now dead text because the files having long since been reorganized and moved). For the really good tight playlists I made of that era, I’d make physical mix CDs that I would master with sound forge. Had a few people that would trade these around. Make a mix, master, make many copies, distribute. Those CDs often died in cars and turned into coasters, so I’d keep the bin and cue files of the masters to make replacements. Those tracks would ultimately get turned back into mp3 or flac depending on quality and tagged with my own title, cover art, etc. and get filed away in the Various Artist folder. Then I got an mp3 player and it’s been either full album listening or dynamic playlists for me ever since.

I still make yearly playlists in Spotify as I discover new stuff or rediscover old stuff, like a musical diary. Those playlists inspire library additions via the artist directly, Bandcamp flac files, or other means.

Dead or damaged media can repurposed and sold as an new thing. Art and craft items using old vinyl, cassettes, floppy disks, etc. as a medium to create something new is growing in popularity too. If you can find someone making that kind of art at a show, I’m sure some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement could be made so that you both can profit off that dead media.

So much safer to go one album at a time using Picard. Picard makes it easy to go down the list of a disorganized directory, identify most things automatically, allow in depth review and modifications to what Picard came up with, and standardize file naming. I’ve tried to let programs like Lidarr and beets automate it, but they always ends up causing more and more complex problems to discover and solve after awhile. Music releases are complex and sources are diverse, using distinct standards of form and format. It’s not a problem that can realistically be solved for my entire music library without the guiding hand of a librarian. I could listen to my library for over six months without repeating, even 1 album out of a 100 mis-tagged or misidentifyied could take me years to discover.

I do like to automate the less critical and more machine oriented library tasks like adding genres tags, replaygain, and lyrics as you do. Just not things like the metadata tags, file naming, or album art (embedded or otherwise).

I don’t want to know about Sam Neill’s controveries.

This is a non-sensical question. On a social media service YOU are the product. You’re characterizing the content as the product. But the content is merely the advertisement or bait for users, who are the real product, being sold to advertisers and countless other organizations. Why do you think reddit started charging for API access? Same goes for ads on Facebook, Google services, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

These days I try to buy either DRM free flax files. If I really like the art or the artist in addition to wanting to regularly actually listen to as an album, then I may try to buy vinyl + flac files. If it’s at a show I’ll buy whatever is available that I can play because at that point it’s more about the merch than music. I’m probably going to pass on the wax cylinders and I may think long and hard before buying a cassette.