If you see me somewhere please let me know. I’ve no idea where I went.
Yeah I know a few people who swear by their Flips and Folds, and I really did like that phone, but the experience soured me (ha - lemons) on the folding screen.
I was considering moving to iOS for unrelated reasons anyway, so for an extra 200 over the cost of the screen replacement I just made the jump. Side note: after 13 years of Android, iOS sure is quirky.
My Z Flip 6 died after a year even though I babied that thing. The screen would freeze or fail to turn on unless you warmed up the entire phone. I tried the press-to-reseat-the-cable trick. Nothing worked. Samsung wanted to charge me $400 to repair the screen because it was a month out of warranty.
This is why I have trust issues.
Not especially niche (there are lots of people who fish) but a strange product/company optics disconnect. I’ve seen their products all over the place and my friends who fish swear by them. We drove past their corporate office once - it’s in a tiny town with a population of 300 and it looks like an abandoned auto repair shop.
Online dating
Yeah by the time you add effects, throw that synth into a full mix with other instruments, THEIR effects, and all the compression and EQing in a finished track, the only thing that matters is whether that single instrument adds what it needs to add to the whole.
Objectively, digital oscillators are better - they don’t drift unless you want them to, they stay in tune, and they can always be run through analogue filters to add imperfections (sorry, “warmth”).
But it still boils down to my first point: it’s a single part of a multi-part song. As long as it gets the job done, who cares whether it’s fluctuating voltage or zeroes & ones. It’ll be analogue on its way into the listener’s ear canal either way.
Ha ha then allow me to remind you of Sony’s pre-NetMD USB adapter that kinda turned a USB signal into either TOSLink optical or analogue stereo so you could play your files on a computer and record to MD in real time!
Yeah, their software was trash, probably written solely to support ad copy in an attempt to lure MP3 people to MD.
As someone who made mix tapes and wanted all of an album’s B-sides in one place, MD was amazing and I embraced it as a replacement for cassettes. No cassette wobble, hiss, or getting eaten, no LP warp, surface noise, or skipping. It was digital purity in the palm of my hand, and for a while it sounded far better than MP3s.
But LAME got better and better, we started getting more storage and FLAC files and hard drive MP3 jukeboxes like the Rio Karma and Creative Nomad…MDs could not compete no matter how desperate Sony got.
I still love my MD equipment and have hundreds of discs that all still play beautifully. But the format is a historic footnote that (sadly) really did lean into its own obsolescence.
The Dirtywave M8 handheld music tracker. It’s a studio in your pocket. It looks like a goth Game Boy, using only 8 keys to create entire songs. It has multiple synth engines, a sampler, built in limiter, compressor, and effects, an amazing sequencer, and it just sounds awesome. It can be an audio interface, it can control other hardware synths, and you can use it anywhere.
Once you learn the basic controls and navigation, the user interface is easy and consistent. I suck at making music, but I can do it so fast on the M8 because it’s always with me and I can grab random chunks of downtime to work on songs instead of wasting time doomscrolling on Lemmy.
….wait
Appreciate the MD love. Super fun format and slick tech. It’s over 25 years old and still feels like the future.
I am still very fond of MiniDisc and have all my old discs and equipment, which still works and plays just fine. But yeah, the 2000s were the decade of DRM and Sony’s tech side was constantly at odds with its media side. Limitations on optical recording & dubbing from MD to MD, using their horrible SonicStage software for NetMD, and horrible marketing overseas handicapped them constantly.
They finally got it right with their very last flagship NetMD portable (apart from its OLED screens dying after a few years) but by then Apple had made the iPod the default portable listening experience and Sony had very obviously lost.
They did make some excellent MP3 players, but once again: proprietary data connectors, restrictive media transfers, poor CODEC support, and freaking SonicStage made using those a nightmare as well. They never did learn.
Poorly.
I could last a bit. We have outdoorsy supplies and can do without electricity, but it’s probably inevitable I’d just wind down or lose focus once and that’ll be that.
I was gonna check my iPad 1 to see what’s still on it but it might finally have died for good. There were some fun time wasters like Ragdoll Blaster, Cube Runner and Robot Unicorn Attack, and if you create music there’s NanoStudio and BeBot. I think there was a solid video pinball game as well.
Willy’s Wonderland is a way better Five Nights at Freddie’s than the actual Five Nights at Freddie’s.
It’s still there so I’d call that a success.
I believe in you
Too lazy to keep scrolling but I haven’t yet seen mentions of Lilo & Stitch (the best movie Disney ever made) and Dark City (the director’s cut and if you haven’t seen it don’t spoil it, just watch it).
…and now I’m seeing a bit of a tone difference between them
So what exactly does he do that’s worth $300,000/hr? Or let’s say he works 10 hours a day, 7 days a week for the whole year (and you know he does not), $190,000/hr?
Clutch 100%. I’d see them every time. Flogging Molly were fantastic but the venue had awful acoustics which was kind of a drag, so I owe it to myself to see them again.
Okay it’s obvious I need to re-watch it. Thanks for putting this one back on my radar!
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