Oh the PROFANITY!

Thankfully, I don’t use Tidal for music discovery. I luckily have a lot of people I’ve met over the years that love music, perform themselves, work for venues, or are crew for artists. That plus indie radio like KEXP and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts has kept me exploring for new music via recommendations from those areas.

I use Tidal for high fidelity music with a more acceptable artist payout than Spotify.

That said, I’m slowly working towards going back to the old days where my massive CD collection rips (i still have those binders too), direct purchases of high fidelity content sitting on my network share, and records aremy primary source of listening pleasure. The only problem here is acquiring the hardware to scale thanks to the AI boom buying up all the production lines of consumer grade hardware, and business class storage drives having gone up in cost. Technically I can afford it, but I could also spend that same money and buy tickets to several local shows for both my wife and I, which will support the live music industry and artists more directly.

You also have to remember that Google has been switching their search tools over to AI search tools and the results have degraded as a result.

Even before then, there was manipulation of the search algorithm by content creators, even on the YouTube side.

It’s probably a combination of all factors tbh.

• Google is slowly pushing on the scale of authoritarianism.
• Search changes being a degradation in results.
• Search algo manipulation.
• Google intentionally showing divisive content due to the higher revenue opportunities
• And the sheer breadth of right wing grift content.

Did they do Tripple Band at your show at the very end as well with the opening act joining in with Double Band? Was a ton of fun.

Twinsies!

I saw Jeff & Pup last month. Was such a blast to party with punks of all ages at that show. Even bought myself a nice Death Rosenstock shirt (yes, death), that has a nice “Fuck ICE” message on it.

She now uses an even more masculine pen name for her detective novels.

Hilarious that a TERF is using a masculine pen name for her book sales.

Should have paid them back in Geoffrey Dollars.

No credit IS bad credit.

You don’t have to carry debt to have a credit history, but you do have to use credit to have a credit history. If you haven’t used the system, they have no knowledge of your crdit worthiness.

I use credit cards as a tool to protect my finances and purchases (fraud protection is greater with CCs than a bank account/card, as well as being able to dispute transactions where service was failed to be delivered or inadequate). I also always pay off my statement balance in full every month.

I do my best to only buy things I can afford to pay in full, but a home and automobile can be exceptions to that (even though I bought my auto in full due to a financial windfall). But I still participate in the system to gain the benefits of the system

www.nerdwallet.com is a great resource on credit education and provides a wealth of tools for starting build your bad credit to good credit.

Who’s the one bullying and gatekeeping here?

I’m not a camera nerd either, but I recognize that there’s people that need professional hardware either for a professional use or an obsessive hobby (either photog or other electronics or optics work). If a cell phone is “good enough” for me, that doesn’t mean it’s good for a specialist. Just like pretty much everything else in life.

The only reason I have a frednica is because that’s where I chill and hang out with the Fediverse Chick.

Have I been Poe’d?

Rubber begins to degrade after 3-7 years depending on the compounds. Even if stored in ideal conditions to slow the degrading, you’re only going to give it marginally more life.

Degraded tires risk side-wall blow outs and let will easily let through sharp debris (sticks, thorns, glass, sharp rocks) causing far more maintenance needs.

That’s not to say bikes aren’t beneficial and there’s ways to get around this (stuff the tire with leaves, foam core [also has limited life span], etc), but it is something to be aware of.

This all reminds me… I need to replace the tires on my good weather bike.

Most distros have a great getting started guide.

If you have an Nvidia card, make sure you’re looking at distros with Nvidia support and are using the correct installer version for Nvidia support.

Some great distros to look into with above in mind:

• PopOS
• Ubuntu: Nvidia requires a few additional terminal commands unfortunately.
• Mint
• Fedora
• A handful of others that I’m sure you’ve seen mentioned

Also avoid Arch linux unless you’re ready to dive into the deep end of linux. As much as I thing it’s a great distro, and abstracts away a lot of the difficulties or Arch, Garuda Linux, should probabaly be avoided as well until you’re more comfortable with Linux due to its Arch roots (even if the docs are robust, they dive deep on tech concepts and require tons of requisite knowledge).

“AI” text prediction runs locally. Microphone is for voice to text functionality.

As for the keyboard itself. Ehhhhh. It’s lacking UX features to make it actually usable. I dailied it for a month and had far more typos, text prediction broke whenever a number or symbol was fat fingered into the string. Finding symbols you need was worse than gboard & SwiftKey.

I really want there to be a great open-source keyboard, but none actually deliver on UX atm.