I'm working on a simple electron based launcher app for my XReal Air2 Pro AR glasses, which are the display for my Raspberry Pi cyberdeck. Nothing fancy, just an easy touch interface that uses luminosity-based transparency to make a goofy little cyberpunk HUD.
I switched to Qobuz a couple of weeks ago and I think I'm gonna cancel my Spotify subscription soon. It's got a better catalogue for the slightly obscure stuff I like and they pay artists much better.
Aside from that, I've got my entire music collection backed up on multiple drives (mostly by accident) and I bought an iPod Classic last year, upgraded the battery and storage, and I've got it all on there too, and it'll play for like a month straight on one battery charge now. Standby was six months easily.
I'm actually gonna turn a Pi Zero into a touchscreen Winamp clone by using Audacious or another app that uses Winamp skins. The main benefit of this is that I can connect it to my Bluetooth home speakers and use it.
My current Samsung doesn't have an SD card, but for my old phone, I just copied all my music to a 128GB micro SD and played it using BlackPlayer.
I'm thinking of getting a newer, cheaper music device because retrofitting Bluetooth into an iPod Classic is a bit of a bitch.
I sync my history between Fire/Waterfox on my phone and laptops, and since almost anything I wanna copy and paste is in the browser, I just open whatever it is from Other Devices. For files or images, I use LocalSend now for everything.
Which is not to say there's not a big use case for this, but speaking only for myself, it's not a pain point. But it looks cool!
There is absolutely room for improvement in the culture of FOSS, and absolutely a gaping hole of UI/UX focus that I don't think anyone except the most deranged "hrm just recompile the kernel, I did it three times already today" forks would argue. But my dude is not the guy to fix this. He has no answers, just complaints.
I think what he's missing is that most FOSS development goes unfunded or underfunded; complaining about it is like complaining that the local soup kitchen doesn't offer paleo options. Feel free to roll up your sleeves and get to cooking, my dude.
My personal FOSS project isn't in public beta yet, but when I'm reading the docs and forums for other people's software, it's absolutely astonishing how entitled some people are. They show up being pissed that this thing you made for yourself in your spare time and then decided to very kindly release into the world for anyone to use and improve isn't tailored to their needs or running on their particular goofy ass rig (it's amazing that people can buy a whole ass Chromebook and then ask if you can run something like Blender on it and get mad when you tell em you can't without doing chroot or whatever the current way of getting Linux up and running on it is.)
He's right about the community as a whole being less than enthusiastic about inclusivity, but he doesn't actually sound like the guy to fix that either. And that problem is tons more complicated to solve than he probably understands it to be.
But in the same way you can fork a project and fix it and submit it to be merged into the main branch, he could also do what I did and take his ass to the developing world to see how to fix that problem too. If he did, he'd probably discover that people outside the global North-centric tech culture are more than used to solving problems without help and that us middle aged middle class white guys have more to learn from them about working around limitations and solving problems than we do to teach them. That's my experience anyway.
It's funny that these null nodes get so obsessed with declining birth rates whilst doing everything in their power to make people not afford to or not want to bring a child into the hellish world they're creating. But of course they're not worried about the birth rates in Africa or Asia... just that their employees and customers aren't reproducing fast enough to maintain that growth curve for their investments.
It'd be funny if it wasn't so horrible, how obvious all of this is. "Effective altruism" my ass. I can only hope I convey a fraction of the contempt for these people that they display for everyone else.
I keep an entire electronics toolbench in one of those two layer travel cable organizers. I've got a Pinecil, flat metal folding stand, a 3D printed wire holder, a magnifying stand with three long Doc-Ock style helping hands, a box of six different color 22AWG wire, calipers, solder, a flux pen, three kinds of gripping tweezers, and an incredibly useful simple non-mechanical 3D printed round vise with different wedge-shaped parts to mix and match to hold stuff, a silicone workmat with molded screw trays, wire cutters, and a small flat cutting mat with a grid and ruler on it. I throw it in my backpack with a big ass Anker power brick that can power the Pinecil easily and a project box of whatever I'm currently dicking around with and go to my local cafe and do all my soldering at an outside table like a big ol nerd. It's all verrrrry tightly put in the case but it's still easy to carry, if not light.
(I have another identical one for all of my little Pi cyberdecks I like to build, the small touchscreen I use with them on the go, and various cables and adapters.)
But I just ordered one of these bags to put my actual tools in - screwdriver set, another wirecutter, the tiny adjustable wrench I got from Temu, my multitool, etc.
I have an entire low rent electronics/fabrication/3D printing/woodworking workshop mostly of Marketplace finds, but I dig being able to just throw this stuff in my old Boblbee backpack and go sit in the park and do nerd stuff. :D <3
Oh, I also have a copper wool cleaning pad in a round tin for my solder tips, and of course, extra solder tips. And electrical tape in three different colors. All of it in a nylon case approximately the size of a 1980s Stephen King hardback. :-D
In America the poor do straight up die when they get sick. I'm an American who wrote a book about medical tourism who now lives in the UK partially because healthcare is affordable and available here.
And I like Berlin personally, but I'd probably like it better if it actually was like the Sultanahmet district in Istanbul. Then I wouldn't have to go to the Turkish neighborhoods to find the best food when I visited there (sausages and pastries, as Weiwei says, being the exception). :-D
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