Hacker News: qbasic_forever

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Building a digital music collection in 2023"

qbasic_forever — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 20:16:17 +0000

git-annex is something to consider too. It's kind of like git LFS in that it doesn't directly store files in the git repo (so the files can be enormous or change frequently without all the overhead of commits in git), but it's more flexible and allows you to direct the files to be stored and retrieved from many different types of file stores (network drives, piles of discs/burned CDs/USB drives, S3 storage, etc.). Basically throw all your music files wherever you want, tell git-annex where they live, and then ask it what music you want on what machines and it will do the rest to go figure out what needs to happen to materialize those files in the right locations.

I'd be leery of storing the music files in a git repo directly as MP3 tags and metadata are a wild west and some music players do wacky things like update ID3 tags with play counts, etc. on every listen (which would require committing and pushing music on every listen!).

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Why bumblebees love cats and other beautiful relationships (2021)"

qbasic_forever — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 14:37:15 +0000

Mine has learned exactly what corners to yell into such that their cry/meow echoes and reverberates everywhere so it can't be ignored. It's kind of impressive how smart and adaptable cats are, lol.

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Data centres account for between 1.5% and 2% of global electricity consumption"

qbasic_forever — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:24:01 +0000

Hang a freaking painting or photo.

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Two men die in Ironman Cork competition in Ireland"

qbasic_forever — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 22:15:55 +0000

Is there some kind of bug or issue with HN comments? Maybe a bug in a client people are using? I've noticed over the last couple days what appear to be comments like this one above that are completely unrelated to the post. It almost seems like they were made in error or associated with the wrong post.

New comment by qbasic_forever in "VidCutter: A program for lossless video cutting"

qbasic_forever — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 21:53:43 +0000

I was trying to play it on Android devices and can't mount it unfortunately.

New comment by qbasic_forever in "VidCutter: A program for lossless video cutting"

qbasic_forever — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 21:47:52 +0000

I've also noticed playback of DVDs is terrible these days too. Long ago I ripped my DVD collection to iso files so I could preserve the full experience of the menus, etc. But almost nothing these days supports DVD iso playback and menus, not even VLC! The only software I can get to work to play them is Kodi. It's wild how much DVD software has disappeared, I don't remember it being this bad 20 years ago.

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Jazz² Resurrection: Open-source Jazz Jackrabbit 2 reimplementation"

qbasic_forever — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 21:14:33 +0000

There's mention of it in the DMCA if I remember correctly. It says DRM can be cracked if something isn't available to be sold anymore or something similar: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/dmca-game-preservation-exemp...

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Data centres account for between 1.5% and 2% of global electricity consumption"

qbasic_forever — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 20:38:45 +0000

You definitely should, I know some folks that keep their huge TV on 24/7 because they like the pretty screensaver and photos it shows when idle. These same folks take a lot of other steps in their life to try to help the environment (recycle, drive electric cars, etc) but simple stuff like turning things off completely confounds them.

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Welcome to Datasette Cloud"

qbasic_forever — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 14:03:26 +0000

Totally agree, so many things people get strong feelings about customizing workflows--note taking, todo lists, personal document management, inventory of goods, etc.--are really just a sqlite database with some nice custom views and interfaces. I could definitely see a future where datasette or similar tools can replace some of that stuff.

Access is probably caught in a weird spot internally at MS. If they put effort into it then it just removes some of the need to sell proper SQL server or azure cloud database tech. Better to just limp it along then start internal wars with bigger organizations/products.

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Welcome to Datasette Cloud"

qbasic_forever — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 13:13:44 +0000

I think of it more like MS Access but a sane backend of sqlite and python. There are thousands and thousands of critical business processes cludged together in Excel and Access--datasette could be a much better choice for those use cases. Something both devs and business people can use.

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Cellebrite asks cops to keep its technology secret"

qbasic_forever — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 03:39:27 +0000

WTF is with your account? Are you trying to impersonate dang, the official moderator?

New comment by qbasic_forever in "From Mechs to Mopar"

qbasic_forever — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 17:52:31 +0000

Yeah I wish more modern retro games would embrace the mostly flat shaded polygon aesthetic of mech 2 and similar games. There's a certain 80's future cool to early polygon graphics before it all became texture-mapped hyper realism.

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Twitter/X has removed all media posted before 2014"

qbasic_forever — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 16:45:58 +0000

I didn't say anything either way. I think everyone can agree that losing a huge record of how it happened is a big loss.

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Twitter/X has removed all media posted before 2014"

qbasic_forever — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 16:25:31 +0000

Wow I wonder how much record of the arab spring protests and uprising are now lost forever. Those protests were all around 2010 to 2012 or so and was in my mind what really pushed Twitter into the public consciousness. I hope the Library of Congress managed to archive all that stuff like they said they would years ago, it would be a big loss to historians for it to disappear overnight.

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Analysis: Health care CEOs hauled in $4B last year as inflation pinched workers"

qbasic_forever — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 00:14:50 +0000

Nope, I'm saying pharmaceutical companies don't need to be capitalist and profit driven.

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Analysis: Health care CEOs hauled in $4B last year as inflation pinched workers"

qbasic_forever — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 00:01:42 +0000

I agree, and to solve this problem I say we nationalize and socialize healthcare to provide it to all citizens free of cost just as they do in many African and other countries. This will remove the need to have any healthcare CEOs entirely.

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Boycott Systemd (2014)"

qbasic_forever — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:58:28 +0000

Distributed RPC, i.e. dbus over the network, is an incredibly complex and still basically unsolved problem. To really do it right and guarantee correctness across systems (which may be in different states of working or failed!) you need a perfect message queue with exactly once delivery... but in practice implementing that is incredibly storage intensive (you'd have to store every message forever). You're basically asking for something as complex and difficult to run as kafka--it's not as simple as just send dbus messages over a network socket.

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Boycott Systemd (2014)"

qbasic_forever — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:33:28 +0000

Systemd doesn't remove any control, and in fact gives a lot of extra control over things like process dependencies, environment, etc. The big complaint people had/have really just boils down to someone moved the cheese--your bespoke and brittle startup scripts are now declarative config files. Some people had to learn something new and that _really_ angered them.

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Boycott Systemd (2014)"

qbasic_forever — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:25:52 +0000

Unix domain sockets or FIFOs could be an alternative, but you'd have to do all kinds of complexity to support pub/sub style many to many communication over them (which is what dbus effectively does for you).

New comment by qbasic_forever in "Boycott Systemd (2014)"

qbasic_forever — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:14:08 +0000

Yes systemd can use dbus, but plenty of non-systemd systems use and used dbus.