Shurimal

How does one find out what chips are in what USB sticks? Manufacturers don’t make this information available. At best you just find read and write speeds, usually just the max possible read speed and nothing else.

E2E encryption is the public protection measure.

Third party apps: “OK. We’ll show ads. Muted. Behind a black overlay. If we really can’t find a workaround.”

Saying that AptX is lossless since 2016 is blatantly false. And yes, just like with HDMI and USB, AptX standard naming and Qualcomm feature naming schemes are a misleading mess.

There are 4 flavours of AptX (linked article states this as well), and only the latest supports lossless, but is available only on very few chipsets and devices so I even forget that it exists, because for all practical purposes it doesn’t.

Denon Perl Pro, Bose earbuds and Cambridge Audio M100 are the only non-chinese earphones that I know of that support AptX lossless and the latter are not even listed by my local importer. Plus, you need a very specific (expensive) phone to use them because AptX Lossless is not available for all chipsets. Basically, Asus ROG 8 or Xiaomi Redmi K70 Pro for ones available to buy for me, and then it’s not available at every retailer, either, and the b2b wholesalers I have access to through work only list ROG Phone 8 (~1200€ retail).

In conclusion, to make use of lossless AptX you have to jump through many hoops and spend a lot of money—700+€ phone and the 200+€ earphones. The standard is far from being, well, a standard; common and widespread. 99,9% of devices on sale and in use by people only support older AptX standards, mostly AptX HD (which is not lossless!).

No, it isn’t. It just has higher bitrates, but still not enough for lossless.

Counterpoints:

1. Good IEM-s don’t really need ANC. If the silicone tip doesn’t isolate enough you can use foam tips that basically function like hearing protection earplugs.
2. No battery is even better than replaceable battery.
3. Wired IEM-s never get obsolete. At worst you’ll need to replace the silicone tips from time to time, or the cable and today even 20€ Chinese IEM-s have replaceable cables. With good care wired IEM-s can last decades.

Nothing to do with ADA conversions (and digital-to-digital, eg SRC or bitdepth conversion, is completely transparent if done even remotely adequately). Small drivers close to eardrum with good seal just seem to be easier to manage when it comes to frequency response and distortion. Most open circumaural headphones, for example, seem to have deficiencies in lower end no matter the price.

In-ear phones have the potential of having the highest fidelity of all headphone types. So, no, being a “codec snob” is completely justified. Though I personally won’t be using BT phones before we get lossless connection as a standard. Wired are cheaper, last longer and have less environmental impact during production and after EOL.

Looks pretty and is stable, but two fatal flaws:

1. Browsing by genres displays individual pieces/songs, not albums. Browsing albums or artists doesn’t allow any filtering by genres, years or any other metadata. Haven’t found a way to change that behaviour and as someone who listens to albums, not songs, and has thousands of albums this is a complete dealbreaker for me.

2. No support for UPnP/DLNA to stream from my phone to my stereo (or, for that matter, any modern AV receiver/streamer/network stereo receiver all which support UPnP/DLNA).

Oldskool FPS. There. That’s the correct term. Now, who’s up for some DM-Morpheus with instagib mutator?🤘

The perfect catch-22. Carrying a smartphone? It will be seized, searched and used against you. Not carrying a smartphone? This fact itself is used as evidence against you. This is something straight outta NKVD playbook, Beria would be proud.

Set up Tailscale as exit node to your local network.

Make sure that your network is not standard 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x IP address range, but something like 192.168.101.x so you don’t have IP conflicts when accessing from a friend’s house or workplace wifi.

Set up Nginx to redirect your home server IP (eg. 192.168.101.5) to the correct port for your dashboard like Heimdall or Dashy.

That’s it. Works like a charm for me if set up this way.

Addendum: if you have trouble on Android, disable MagicDNS.

Maybe I’ll give it a retry at some point in the future. If I can recall my forgotten Epic login credentials, that is. Too busy with the thargoid war for the next few years, though.

Control. Liked it despite being in 3rd person view up until the mezzanine fight an hour or two in, then realized that the enemies are just dumb high DPS bullet sponges, the PC is a low DPS squishy and fighting from a cover or any other tactical approach I’m used to doesn’t work.

EDIT: There was also a spellcrafting mod for Skyrim where the endboss was immunebto all magic and would teleport away as soon as you got too close while summoning a bazillion powerful minions. At level 50…60 it was litwrally impossible to figjt the bastard. After many tries I just console killed the bugger and was done with it.

exception of GPUs

To an extent, motherboards, too, and even before the GPU prices went ballistic. I bought a Z87 mobo back in the day for 80 or 90€ and the most expensive mobos were around 300€ or so. The X570 mobos in 2019 started at 250€ and 550 mobos didn’t even get released until at the end of 3000 series Ryzen. Who in their right mind would pair a 200€ R5 3600 CPU with a 250€ mobo?

I bet most of the budget-minded people who bought a R5 3600 CPU never got to use PCIe 4.0. And to add insult to injury, budget GPU-s started using PCIe 4.0 x8 (or even x4) instead of x16, effectively gimping them on budget mobos.

Good studio headphones are around 200€ and you can get decent ones for 100…150€. And generally they are closed back, not open headphones.

I’d take a proper lavalier mic with proper studio headphones over an unwieldy and crappy gaming headset with boom mic any day.

Or better yet, a proper THX reference level capable surround sound system and tactile transducers over any headphones.

And this is why I don’t read opinions from general review/gaming sites. For example, I judged whether I’ll play Starfield purely on overviews from YouTube creators who focus on Bethesda RPG-s (Camelworks, Fudgemuppet et al) and space exploration games (Obsidian Ant). The opinions of FPS folks, Fromsoft freaks and D&D diehards is irrelevant🙃

Or, as I’ve always said, if 2001: A Space Odyssey was made today, it would score 4/10 on IMDB and people would complain that it’s a slow slogfest with no action and boring dialogue.

I’m not an expert in security cameras, but don’t they only use IR at night?

Precisely. And good security cameras with Sony sensors only need IR when it’s pitch black. During dawn, dusk and summer nights at Nordic latitudes they don’t even switch to night mode, showing sharp full-color image almost 24/7—watching that footage you wouldn’t even realize that it’s taken in natural light with sun below the horizon.

And facial recognition is a standard feature these days. It’s become so good that you can have two pictures of the same person, one taken at age 15 and the other at age 95, and it can still say with >95% confidence that it’s the same person. And that’s the prosumer-level stuff available to every Jack and Joe to install to their small business or suburban house. I don’t even want to think about what the alphabet soup orgs could have access to.

I have some experience with Dahua cameras and NVR-s. Their technical capabilities are both amazing and scary at the same time.

This seems to be one of the rare times these days that google actually does a pretty good job getting you the result you seek for without clutter and ads.

Also, use bangs to search on a specific site. If I want to search for an article on Wikipedia, I just type in "w ". d for DuckDuckGo, g for Google, b for Bing etc. I default to Brave primarily and DuckDuckGo secondarily.