Posts by Havin_it

Re: On air compression

Wanted to mention you can also add ReplayGain tags (both track and album) to FLAC files, the command-line app "metaflac" can do it. My player supports it, but YMMV.

The loudness issue used to drive me mad on my phone, but after much study I managed to patch the old Android (ICS) Music app to support ReplayGain on MP3s.

Only problem was when Jelly Bean came along and I recompiled the app, it now has "gapless playback" (i.e. a slight crossfade/segue) which when fading from a song with lots of gain applied to one with none or negative gain, there tends to be a split-second burst of EXTREME LOUDNESS until the equalizer adjusts it to where it should be for the next track. I must try to fix this at some point but I fear by then the AOSP app will be abandonware :(

Re: Age verification

NGL, if they show me Ren & Stimpy I'll probably forget all about the porn objective.

Re: Faff

Most of the time Firefox binary release is fine, at times I've used that in preference to whichever distro's package, and that meant getting updates straight away too. I wish Libreoffice had a standalone installer as it's a nightmare trying to satisfy dependencies for Gentoo's binary package of it. I might give the Snap/Flatpak option a look.

@AC

Firefox accounts do use end-to-end encryption, so your 2nd and 3rd "rules" are moot. And if the data "being on someone else's computer" still bothers you that much in spite of this, the server software is all open-source so you can host it on your own computer if you want.*

* I did this myself and have to admit it is quite a battle to set it all up correctly, so in the end I asked myself why I was bothering and got a Firefox account instead. #NoRegrets

Re: Football field

Or the suitably-descriptive-while-retaining-brevity: handegg.

Re: This goes to show one thing

>We could vote for 59 fluorescent macaques and it would have no effect.

I dunno, might liven up PMQs a bit. Let's try it.

Good point. There's a large (and disaster-prone) chunk of the planet that wouldn't be too happy wearing a picture of a cowburger on their chest, and another that'd be equally unwelcoming of anything featuring bacon.

Re: There are some uses for that

Esoteric setup!

Windows might not have its own sshd, but it's been possible since forever to set up Cygwin's sshd as a Windows service. I dunno if it could handle the Kerberos tokens as well but I don't see why not.

>Nicotine produces the highest dependency score among common drugs, so one could argue that it is the most damaging, in an indirect way.

I'll hazard a guess that however this dependency score was arrived at, it involved study of smoking tobacco. There's recent research that suggests that nicotine by itself is far less addictive than other compounds found in burnt tobacco. (Sorry no citation, but you didn't give one either so yar boo sucks.)

Anecdotally, I've found I don't "crave" a vape in the way I very definitely used to go spare when denied the chance of a gasper.

Re: Problem with Anti-Virus

Having a prescribed dropzone for downloaded files would be a royal ballache for me a lot of the time, though I'm not against it as a default for new users. What would be more beneficial to my mind, would be if downloaded files weren't executable by default and had to be explicitly OK'd as such by the user.

I've tried in the past to make Windows systems live up to that philosophy, typically by revoking execution permissions on all but one of a user's folders (and crucially not the default download folder) but this just tends to hit problems. 1: some apps have installation/update routines that fail if your TEMP folder doesn't have execute permissions; 2: the stupid-ass Windows permissions granularity where the key permission is "Read AND Execute" whereby if you revoke this permission from a given folder, you can download shit into it and be sure it won't execute, but unfortunately nor can the shell navigate that folder!

In short, a setup whereby the user is required to manually bless the execution of a downloaded file is not a goer without training or seriously crafty system configuration.

Re: Yet another Windows 10 annoyance

>same reasons that UNIX / Linux systems still have a statically-linked (and therefore less dependent) subset of binaries in /sbin.

Mostly only true in the initrd nowadays, from what I've seen. And under systemd, you pretty much need an initrd if your system has any kind of mount that doesn't come up instantly :(

Re: what eurocrats dont understand is..

Enter key broken?

Re: An immutable record, you say...

Brill!

Re: @qwertyuiop

I struggle to believe Nicola Sturgeon said anything so contrary to the narrative on which she's basing her current manoeuvring. Got a source?

Re: The computer Tao

I'm with you on the "negative bubbles", in fact I think they are the true phenomenon here. I say that because I don't think I'm anything special or magical, just someone who spent a good amount of spare time methodically learning how computers and things worked and how to use and troubleshoot them (for myself, at any rate). The result is I generally have a nice time on a computer, and when things go wrong I patiently set about putting them right. No hammers required (well, rarely).

My GF, on the other hand, exhibits very much your "negative bubble" concept (which I myself named "technopathy" - linguists present may freely comment on how cromulent this construction is). If something can go wrong with a computer while she is using it, it will, whatever the odds. I will watch her like a hawk and not be able to explain what I'm seeing, nor be able to replicate it. It apparently happens to her at work as well. She is no ninja but knows her way around a computer as well as most who've used one day-to-day for as long as she has; I swear the things just don't like her.

So, yeah. Not sure about the positive, but the negative? Yup.

Pfft. Pepperidge Farm must be going a bit Nana Moon.

There were rendering inconsistencies between all browsers. CSS positioning rules, box model, link pseudo-selectors (shudder) without even beginning to think about the JS incompatibilities (my nurse says I mustn't do that any more) ... OK, IE gave us a lot more work to do than the others, but don't claim the rest were all singing from the same hymn-sheet.

Re: Safety issue

Ick. Thanks (not so much) for reminding me of that traumatic recollection of my last trip to The Smoke.

Looking back, I think that discovery of black snot after an afternoon's moderate tube travel was the pivotal moment at which I said to myself: I will NEVER live or work here.