Thank you for your sacrifice

If you grew up with commercial TV, not only is the frequency of ads on youtube bad, but the placement–in the middle of a sentence or a scene–is mentally and emotionally destructive.

Seems like youtube forces sign-in using Unwatched on iOS? An alternative is Vinegar which replaces the video player in Safari, and skips the ads, mostly and usually (until youtube updates some things then vinegar needs to catch up).

People aren’t just objecting to the quality of the software, and even more than objecting to the relentless commercialization at every opportunity in the ‘smart’ features, they are rightfully worked up about the firehose of surveillance telemetry these devices are feeding back to the manufacturers.

So slightly better ping than my ISP, then.

adj.

…

6. Showing or requiring great precision or sensitive discernment; subtle.

The Neo is similar to the 2020 M1 base MacBook Air but with less effective multicore performance and endurance at higher temperatures. What you can do fairly easily with an 8GB M1 Air:

• edit limited length multilayered HD video without hiccups
• edit short 4K video
• Develop websites up to intermediate complexity
• install homebrew and go to town on the command line and server stack
• manage 40,000+ photos
• run photoshop on average sized RAW files
• a hundred tabs each in firefox and safari
• run old school gaming emulators
• admin of any kind
• hook up a big external monitor
• and a lot more.

(Source: personal experience and many clients doing all of that.)

Not all at once, of course, but macOS swap is fast enough that you can run a lot more of that at once than the limited RAM would suggest. I’d definitely strip down memory usage for A/V production.

The Neo should be pretty close to that, which is a LOT more than basic web and email.

Best I can do is the SE/30, in peach, tangerine, and cerulean.

OK, well, you have a lot more tolerance for tape hiss and compression artifacts and muted highs than I do, the only quiet tapes I’ve heard were big fat studio tapes when I had access to a research studio.

I spent so many years trying to get a decent field recording out of the best portable recording (cassette) decks that I may be a little traumatized. DAT recording was a revelation, even with horribly unreliable decks.

That narrative does not align with the lived experience of Tibetans. It does align with Beijing.

Lived with a family in Ladakh for a month. They have an interesting perspective… and a society that presents a way forward from the medieval semi-feudalism you call slavery. They are also living under colonialism but with very different outcomes than Tibet.

I lived in Dharamsala for six weeks. I have talked to a lot of other Tibetans from the refugee diaspora. Their proposed modernization would look a lot like Bhutan. Are the Bhutanese slaves?

Tibetans were invaded in an act of colonialism and live under colonial occupation. If you don’t think so you haven’t talked to many Tibetans about it.

This is a rare setup. Kind of vintage audio unicorn.

You still have a noticeable noise floor and medium limitations as equalizer, though (“warmer”).

99.999% of decks and surviving tapes do sound like dogshit.

I call this “road tinsel”, there used to be a lot of it strewn along highways.

It’s usually not. I have one old car with a CD player and a less-old car with a USB stick loaded with media. The flash storage is better.

But if you have nice speakers and listening space, the quality of the DAC matters, and a real CD player would probably have a better DAC and sound better than compressed audio on a flash drive sticking out of your receiver. Unless you have a fancy audio server/DAC setup, in which case it’s moot.

I have lots of playlist cds, same thing. Better skipping function.

age old

Yeah for sure. I have to deal with a lot of tech-support and similar scam victims, and I always wind up explaining that this con is as old as civilization at least, it’s just the location and props that are new.

Lure you in with a benefit or problem solved, ensure that you get lost or disoriented, manufacture fear/uncertainty/doubt, offer a way out, trap is set.

Once upon a time I had someone try to run this same scam on me in meatspace, a big ancient city. Offer a solution to a logistics problem, get me lost in the maze, create new problem of changed conditions, intimidate with new people arriving, and pressure with intense sales tactics on a bullshit product. I wasn’t actually lost so just walked away, curiosity satisfied, but some people would have lost a lot of money.

Yep it’s more work upgrading components than people like to admit, if you want to be frugal.

Best way to upgrade the RAM in your old computer is to install Linux.

It’s 13 inches and full macOS, can edit HD video without choking. Not a netbook.