Lorindól

You are correct.

This anecdote is empirical, I know, but from my own experience I know how very hard if not impossible it can be to tell the difference between 320kbps and FLAC tracks, even with a high quality setup.

I happened to find excellent vintage studio monitors some time ago and with my music afficionado friend we wanted to try if we could tell the difference. We are no audiophiles, but we both can tell the difference between good and bad sound.

Both selected three favourite tracks from different genres and we converted the CD-ripped FLACs to 320kbps CBR and put them on a random playlist with the originals. Then we listened.

Both got a few right, but I couldn’t really say what it was that made guess the FLAC. It was more like a feeling in the back of your head than anything substantial. “This sounds somehow more alive” is maybe the best description I can give. Or it was just dumb luck.

Anyway we came to the conclusion that 320kbps can be enough to replicate an enjoyable sound, at least for us. Not one track sounded lacking and we had a good time with our little experiment.

EDIT: Fixed typos.

I will do anything in my power to protect my children from online ads. At home it’s very simple with your basic adblockers and Pihole.

In the 5th grade my daughter got a laptop from school, it was a quite decent Thinkpad. She brought it home to do some presentation and went to her room. After few minutes she brought the laptop to me and said: “Dad, I think there’s a virus or something like that in my computer.”

The only web browser installed was Edge, without any kind of ad blockers. My kid had assumed that the hideous intrusive ads were some form of malware attack. I installed Firefox on her laptop with all the proper tweaks and disabled Edge as best as I could. All the Windows ad and telemetry options were also on, I disabled everything that was possible. I also showed how different themes can be installed, we ended up with a classic Nyan Cat ;)

When she took the laptop back to school I told her that Edge is not to be used. Firefox can handle everything and if the teacher has some issue with this, I am happy to come and explain this in person.

Now my daughter’s laptop is apparently the only ad free machine in her class and the other kids have openly expressed their envy. Why the school IT-department had not installed adblockers and had left the Windows telemetry on is simply baffling. No one should have to watch ads, but kids in school should be especially protected from this crap.

This. I’ve been using a 2 Gen 8GB iPod Nano since 2008. They’re not hard to find and installing a new battery is not that hard, if you have any experience at soldering.

I also have a Sansa Clip+, it has a far better DAC than iPods and can take a 32GB SD card. Runs Rockbox without any problems.

There’s one for Firefox, too:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/microslop/

I felt the same. The actual detention got postponed for several weeks, since she had more important duties to attend to. When it finally happened, we played chess together and talked about movies.

She made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone, but since she passed away over 25 years ago I don’t feel binded by it anymore ;)

In the sixth grade I got my first detention ever because I picked up my baseball cap.

We were on a field trip and we went to visit some museum in the capital by train. While we walked back to the train station, our teacher stated that “no one is to step out of the train before her permission or they will get detention”. I was the last to get on the train and my cap hit the backpack of the classmate in front of me and fell out of the train doors. I instinctively turned around, leaned out whist holding onto a safety bar and picked my cap. And stepped back on board.

I was a calm kid and had never broken any school rules or gotten into any trouble whatsoever. So when my classmates saw me putting one feet outside the train they simply flipped: “TEACHER, LORINDÓL STEPPED OUT OF THE TRAIN! YOU’RE GETTING A DETENTION!”

I was utterly dumbfounded. My “friends” had betrayed me and the teacher was approaching and looking angry. With tears in my eyes I explained what had happened and reminded her that we still had more than 10 minutes until the train doors would even close. Her face went from angry to sad and she silenced my heckling classmates with a few strict words. She told me that we would discuss this when we were back at school.

When we got back, everyone else got to go home and the teacher asked me to our classroom with her. “Lorindól, I’m very sorry. I have to give you detention because you did step out of the train, even if it was for all the right reasons. I understand you acted instinctively and did not mean to break any rules. But I must keep my word or it will lose it’s meaning. As stupid as this sounds, the purpose of this detention is not to punish you. It’s purpose is to show the others that my word is the law in this classroom, with no exceptions. I hope you can understand why I must do this.” I thought about it for a while and said that I did.

When I told my parents about the detention my dad couldn’t stop laughing. “You finally get a detention and it’s for NOTHING!”

Mom was so angry that she wanted to call the teacher and make her call the detention off. I managed to talk her out of it and didn’t hold any grudge against the teacher. I learned a lot about the world of adults that day.

Lasr summer I asked ChatGPT about Liberty Caps - just to see how bad advice it would give me. It showed me pictures of Death Caps and Destroying Angels and claimed they were Liberty Caps.

After that I was certain that someone was going to die just like that poor guy.

I also prefer Lemmy. Reddit had a few niche hobby subreddits that I do miss, but the greedy pigboy Spez won’t be getting any contribution from me ever again.

Same.

I was on Reddit for 13 years. I scrambled every single post I had made before deleting my account when the 3rd party apps fell. Never looked back.

I remember reading that ammonium chloride / “sal ammoniac” / salmiakki was probably first discovered by ancient egyptians. They found natural deposits of it condensed in a ceiling of a cave or something similar. And naturally someone just had to taste it.

Primer is excellent low-budget hard scifi. Few years ago I read Shane Carruth’s script for his scrapped project “A Topiary”. It is wild, no wonder he couldn’t get the funding for it.

Jupiter Ascending is a remarkable achievement.

I’m a bit of a film freak and I have seen quite a few. The only things I remember of Jupiter Ascending are that Mila Kunis and Sean Bean were starring in it and that bee DNA was somehow involved with the latter. I think there were also lots of chases?

No. I shall thank you now.

How can one learn such power?

This is a classic.

A few years back in a HiFi - fair there was a seller who pushed these fist sized wooden blocks that were meant to raise the cables off the ground and therefore “prevent the Earth itself from tampering with the signal”.

So he was basically trying to sell very expensive magic wood.

https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/fantasy/good-omens-season-3-michael-sheen-teases-finale-newsupdate/

Yes and no. The third season plan was scrapped and reduced to one final episode to wrap the story up. We’ll see how it goes.

During my military service I constantly fought against idiotic traditions and doing things the stupid and inefficient way. I had read the regulations manual carefully to back me up and presented my cases respectfully with proper conduct.

I always started by quoting the relevant regulations, so they had to hear me out and could not officially punish me for my “disobedient queries”. This got many of the regular staff royally pissed off at me, some just found my resilience amusing and a few younger offiicers even showed occasional support for me. I knew very well that nothing big would change, but I actually did manage to get rid of a few small things that were just hassling disguised as training.

My service friends thought I was crazy for stirring things up in vain, but I took good care that I never got them in any trouble. The only “punishment” they could give me was that I was always given the assignments that were considered most unpleasant and I was regularly sent on long range recon excersizes with my men, so I would be out of sight for most of the time. I loved those long trips in the woods.

I also quit my first real and well paying job out of principle a week after we got a new manager. I had been there for 5 years and really liked the work, but after the new manager gave us a list of changes he wanted, it became clear to me that it was time to leave. It would have been entirely impossible to fulfill my duties properly with the allocated resources and time. I could have done the work badly, sure, but this would have led to the customer leaving us for other services. I did point this out to the new manager when I was cleaning my desk. “Just because you cannot do doesn’t mean that someone better couldn’t” was the only response. They promptly lost the customer and 3-4 others also quit the team in the same year.

With the help of an old friend I landed a new, little less paying job but with vastly better benefits. Been there since.

My grandma’s drunk cousin built an airplane from scrap wood and old farm machine parts in a barn in his 70’s. There were no suitable fields or roads to act as runways, so the crazy bastard installed skis on the plane, so he could take off and land on lake ice.

The plane looked like a real plane and eyewitnesses have confirmed that it actually rose to 1-2m height on short trial runs, but he never really got to fly the thing. His wife was rumoured to actively have been sabotaging the project so he wouldn’t kill himself, but I believe he just didn’t really trust the plane to be able to handle the stress of actual flight maneuvers.

In 2001 a girl said to me that my sports jacket “was the kind that girls like”.

It was my dad’s old jacket from 1970’s and it is the only summer jacket I have worn ever since. Luckily the base color is black and the cut is pretty timeless.

EDIT: Put back the missing “my” from the first sentence.