I stopped drinking soda regularly decades ago and went through the same thing, drinks I once enjoyed were now either “meh” or way too sweet and acidic to be able stomach more than a few ounces. Cutting out soda also meant cutting out a lot of artificial sweeteners (because I was never very picky about diet or not, I just wanted the bubbly sweet. That meant that when I did try diet sodas after having quit for some time, they tasted even worse or sometimes even made me feel worse. This is all anecdotal obviously, but it seems like you’re experiencing something similar. It’s not just you. There’s nothing wrong with you.

It’s more than simply unfair. It’s theft, wage theft, plain and simple.

You want mpd to server and play the music, connected with a web front end (there are a few to choose from) accessible on the private store wifi. You should probably serve this frontend only to a certain machine on the network (like the managers computer in the back) and lock everything else out. The last time I ripped CDs on Linux I used whipper, which I believe was the successor to morituri. This is all only legal if the CDs they have already included the licensing fees to play them publicly or are themselves freely licensed. There are sources of freely licensed music out there that you can play publicly without paying.

Jeff Beck and Johnny Depp

I’m not complaining, just thought you knew something that I didn’t. That’s why I asked.

Ok, but I can also just choose the color directly and not set an image as a wallpaper. I appreciate your effort, but what is the advantage here to tiling a PNG?

The first Addams Family movie starts with a Christmas scene and so is set during the Christmas season, but clearly has Halloween vibes throughout. The sequel, Addams Family Values, gets even weirder in this kind of holiday mashup vibe. The kids get sent off to a summer camp, where they are doing a thanksgiving play for some reason. So it’s Halloween vibes throughout, with turkeys and pilgrims, but it takes place during the summer.

At work, all black, because I prefer working in a darkened room and sometimes I need to use the laptop in sunny conditions full of glare. I have no need of any extra light getting blasted at me not directly related to something I’m working on. Also, I get a kick out of the “Why are your other monitors off?” comments. Also, IT tends to clutter my desktop with a bunch of shortcuts with a hodgepodge of icon styles, it’s a lot easier to visually parse these on a black field.

At home, the media server is directly connected to a TV with HDMI and has a desktop environment. My distributions default wallpapers always come in two varieties, colorful or greyscale. The server automatically logs into a restricted user account for family access to Kodi, retro arch, web browsing, etc., which has the colorful wallpaper. If for some reason I need to get into the admin account with a GUI, the desktop wallpaper is grey. It’s like an always-on simplified color coded whoami. Since I almost never interact with this machine except through ssh or the services it hosts, this is the most amount of ricing I’m willing to do.

They work great until they don’t. I’ve had the same experience, be prepared to replace it occasionally because it’s usually near impossible to disassemble and clean the pump mechanism completely.

We figured it out in the last millennium, I think we can figure it out again.

The real reason would probably be that you’d need to make the soles out of rubber again instead of the cheap foam that almost all modern (fast fashion disposable) shoes are made with these days.

• Kashmir - Led Zeppelin. Really anything from Physical Graffiti or by John Bonham.
• Caravan - Buddy Rich
• The Blues Walk - Max Roach & Clifford Brown
• Tom Sawyer - Rush. Or really anything else with Neil Peart.
• John the Fisherman - Primus. They won’t be the same since Tim “Herb” Alexander left the band, but I’m sure he has his reasons.(also: Hamburger Train, Over the Electric Grapevine, Tommy the Cat, Mr. Knowitall, Harold of the Rocks)
• Discipline - King Crimson (also: Thela Hun Ginjeet and most of the rest of the album, which seems to mostly treat the guitar as a percussion instrument more than most.)

Sorry if these are cliche.

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Either way, you can put passengers in the back of an SUV, but not in the bed of a truck (without breaking laws or being totally unsafe).

Agreed. 90 minutes to go 2.3 miles sounds like a snails pace. That works out to just under 40 minutes to walk a mile. Most healthy adults should be able to jog or fast walk a mile in under 15 minutes. A 5k is about 3.1 miles and most of the slow runners finish in 30-40 minutes. I would consider 25 minutes per mile a leisurely pace. 40 minutes per mile must mean a lot of signalized intersections. I’ve found a mile or two is the perfect distance to walk home from the bar after a night out (weather dependent obviously). Maybe Google thinks they’ll be walking drunk?

There is a reason that I have fallen asleep during the extended 3rd act fight scene in every single god damn marvel movie since Mark Ruffalo became the Hulk.

They all turn into the same movie, with the same fight. And these super long fights all seem to be surprisingly light on showing any of the actual real world impacts of such violence. Nobody ever gets seriously hurt unless the plot needs more sacrifice. But even when they do, the injuries mostly happen off camera and the blood never flows or spurts, it just instantly appears as makeup. It’s really giving people a deep rooted and totally unfounded sense that violence both solves every problem (it doesn’t) and does so bloodlessly (it doesn’t). At least Batman knows he’s not a hero.

But really, the DC universe isn’t much better. Think about how shocking a little bit of blood at the beginning of the new Superman movie was, before they basically destroy metropolis (which was rather expected and mundane). And then they only show the tiny fraction of people personally saved by Superman, not the countless mangled corpses buried under rubble. This may be why the public has trouble confronting the realities of war and violence.

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That’s not very helpful for connecting family, friends, and especially grandma.

Jellyfish cannot to setup to securely and safely be exposed to the Internet. It is only safe to access through a VPN. That rules it out as an option for sharing with friends, family, or even my own spouse. You call it phoning home to the mother ship; I call it paying Plex to manage user authentication for me. Until Jellyfin’s security holes are patched and it becomes clear that the Jellyfin developers actually care about security, it stays locked down to my LAN. Setting up a VPN is difficult for the average user on a good day, impossible in some circumstances on even the best of days, and is not access I want to hand out (and support) to all the people I share my Plex with anyway.

So edgy.

If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.