I'm far less ambitious, but I ripped my entire 100+-disc collection to FLAC years ago. I've set up a mutant shell script/Makefile hybrid that can transcode the entire FLAC tree to whatever format du jour makes sense (Opus these days), while doing it all in parallel and using all cores (really all but one to keep the system responsive). Album art in the FLACs gets carried over along with tags.
On the LAN, the FLACs just sit in an NFS share, while on the phone, Foobar2000 works nicely with the Opus files.
After ten years of Spotify subscriptions, you own nothing. Put that $12.99 or more per month into discs instead, and you'd have quite a nice music collection that's still yours ten years later.
You dont own those either. If you lose your copy, it's gone forever with no remediation or claim of ownership except at the specific retailer you did your transaction at. The source where it came from is unaffected by your loss, and they can decide at any time to stop selling their discs with or without your involvement. The nostalgic rose tinted pandering behind vinyls and old media conveniently forgets the introduction of digital storage to actually ensure reliable redundancy, and so "buying" physical media is just a smoke and mirrors way of saying the disc is for vain aesthetics while the actual mental relief comes from the secondary process being able to digitize it locally.
Following the same mindset of circumventing the traditional process, I could spend one single month ripping every single song I possibly can from Spotify and have the same claim of ownership over their files that you do with a much larger variety and without all the wasted physical space on assets that are immediately digitized. The only benefit to your method is that you feel like it justifies hoarding.
Presumably people also have some sense of fair exchange when buying the disc to rip vs. ripping from Spotify. If you want to be strictly rational you can of course skip the Spotify part too and just pirate it.
True, but back in the day one had to pay for every call, sometimes at per-minute rates: always so for long distance, and in some areas even for local calls. Quite a contrast to today's unlimited-minutes cellular plans (which likely get used little enough that the providers have no trouble offering them).
A key factor in the development of dialup BBS systems in the US was that local calls were usually at least flat-rate, with unlimited service available here and there.
Bringing it back to the topic at hand, back then I recall a number of social events revolving around local BBSes in Champaign-Urbana, and Fidonet's Net 115 in the Chicago area. All that sort of thing vaporized pretty quickly once the internet opened up.
> back in the day one had to pay for every call, sometimes at per-minute rates: always so for long distance, and in some areas even for local calls.
Where and when did you pay per-minute for local calls? Everywhere I lived and traveled within the US back in the day, so to speak, local calls were always unlimited, even in rural areas.
In the Chicago area you had options ranging from fully-metered to unlimited throughout the metro area. In the 1990s, as more people got online, the unlimited plans went away, and the best you got was that calls within eight miles were flat-rate but pay-per-call.
It goes back even further, to 1960s/70s-era phone phreaking. A lot of budding phreaks started out by finding miswired PBX systems and using their number-out-of-service announcement recordings as impromptu conference bridges.
Wow, what a find! Thanks for posting this. It's funny that dial tones bring back the memories!
Yah a network where you could dial a number and get automatically connected to another phone anywhere in the US without any computers at all and not even a transistor being used! Crazy.
Be sure to send them an email first, so that you can arrive at the proper time for them to give you a tour. It is very, very worth it. One of the best museum experiences so far.
Thanks to both of you for the info. I'm longtime Seattle and I had no idea. I'm still disappointed that the living computer museum was closed. Jody Allen is a decent person so was surprised she let that tiny line item expire from the spreadsheet, I digress.
+1 to this! If you have any interest in telephones, telephone switching, or phreaking, this place is incredible. And the people who run it are awesome.
I'm thinking it would be better to go commercial/industrial, with an actual standard like BACnet [0]. Consumer tech just always seems to be whim-driven.
Ya but that would increase complexity and costs. Currently I can use some Meross branded stuff because it can be provisioned without their cloud nonsense and is mqtt. Other bespoke devices are esphome with mqtt control (no home assistant)
Even scarier: my dad, who has been actually been getting good advice about his blood pressure issues (hair-trigger too low with his meds). It's at least coming up with citations from Cleveland Clinic and such, but still, it scares me, even if he has a good sense of how to ask it questions.
Please don't, or more specifically, don't force this on me. I'm trying to get work done, and the last thing I need is to learn an entire new desktop paradigm because CADT. As it is, any time I'm forced to interact with GNOME 3 I want to rip my eyeballs out. If I'm setting up a desktop, Cinnamon for fat systems or XFCE for lean ones do wonders for my sanity.
Have been using Xfce for some time now on Ubuntu, but for my Debian installation I wanted to try something else. Gnome 3 looks good, but it's just too annoying to work with. I liked Ubuntu Mate, but Mate on Debian just wasn't for me. KDE sounds like a contender also, but my quick test installation gave me too much Windows vibes. Your comment is the final straw for me: I'm going to check Cinnamon out. Thanks.
The one thing I lamented about the Apple II Plus (vs. the original with Integer BASIC) was that to make room for autostart, they had to rip out the mini-assembler in the Monitor ROM. That was the closest thing I ever saw to an assembly-language REPL before this. At least they were able to keep the disassembler.
It's common in the C64 world to use freezer cartridges that allow you to interrupt normal operation and invoke a monitor program. These typically include rudimentary assemblers and disassemblers as well. Fun and useful for patching and reverse engineering!
Btw, I've only had a rough idea of how these are actually implemented, non-maskable interrupt something-something, and never knew how they make sure that the interrupt vector points to some persistent routine that can invoke the monitor. I found this great article explaining at least how The Final Cartridge 3 does it (in the first two sections): https://www.pagetable.com/282
I remember being so confused, as a 10 y/o kid, trying to follow examples from an Apple II-era book on my public library's Apple IIe computers. I didn't understand why I couldn't get the mini assembler to work. The idea that features would be removed on future machines simply didn't occur to me. I guess I really didn't even understand that the IIe was a different machine than what the book was written for since most everything else worked as-expected.
It makes sense that I didn't find it. Integer BASIC didn't make sense to 10 y/o me, either. I'd started with Applesoft, since it was in ROM, and Integer BASIC seemed needless and strange. I also didn't understand why "FP" was the command to get into Applesoft.
(These are yet more examples of situations where, if I'd had a mentor, I think I would have gone much further at a younger age.)
I got lucky and built a decent Apple II collection in the late 90s and early 2000's before their prices became ridiculous. I bought an enhanced IIe first because that was closest to the computer I grew up with. Later I got a 48K II+ and was able to experience that era of Apple II computing. To round out the collection I got a ROM03 IIgs and decked it out with a memory upgrade and a BMoW Floppy Emu. I never was particularly interested in the IIc so I opted not to get one.
My "white whale" machine was the Laser 128. A friend had one and I enjoyed using it. He'd bring it over to my house and hook it up to the TV. Having a portable computer in the late 80s, even if it wasn't battery powered and didn't have a screen, was pretty cool. I wish I'd bought it from him when he moved to PCs and sold it but at the time I didn't realize it was a good find. It's a bit like the IIc but, I'd argue, is overall a better machine.
I started using the Apple IIe when I was 8 y/o. I started with playing games and programming in Applesoft BASIC, and eventually got to the point of doing rudimentary 6502 assembler programming (mainly modifying programs from magazines). I left the platform at 12 y/o when my father bought a PC.
When I was 14 y/o I scored a copy of the venerable "Inside the Apple IIe" cheap. I spent part of summer vacation really digging-in to the machine. I didn't have a IIe at home so I spent a lot of that summer in the public library using the old IIe machines. They were long-in-the-tooth at that point and no other patrons used them anymore. I got as much time as I wanted on them because of that. It was a fun contrast to the 1 hour / day limit each person got back when I started using them. I could come in when the library opened and spend all day there grinding away.
I feel fortunate having come back to the platform with a broader exposure to programming and while I still had the energy and exuberance of a teenager. I understood a lot more about what was going on and I was willing to grind thru tedium. I had a lot of fun playing w/ double-hires graphics, digitizing audio via the cassette interface, and doing some rudimentary software cracking. It was a fun time.
Nice to hear your experience .. I myself have kept pretty much every system I’ve hacked on since 1978 in my personal collection[1] - or at least, where feasible. Anyway, it means about 50 years of computing history in my collection, which .. sooner or later .. I will have to turn over to others to maintain/use/do whatever, off into the future.
The great thing about these machines, actually, is that .. you can always find a new user for an old machine.
The 8-bit systems of today would give the 8-bit users of the decades past, positive conniptions at the mere concept that there are, pretty much every week or so, new releases for these ‘’ancient’’ systems ..
Actually, kids learning computers these days -definitely need to know more about ancient computers- as a positively directed purpose.
So, if you’ve got someone in your life who has the interest, all I can say is - crank out the old machine, turn it on, and do something fun/useful with it.
[1] Disclaimer: 40 years of computing, mostly in working order. Mostly missing the early things I bolted together myself in the outback HAM workshop where I first burned my fingers on building things ..
Yes, I remember when this happened, it was a bummer .. but taught us the valuable lesson that the hardware manufacturer can give, but also take away. At least it kind of kicked off a tooling market ..
Incidentally, apropos onboard assemblies, in my retro collection I have a Commodore PC running an ancient DOS, and it is unique because of two reasons: it has DEBUG.com, and .. the machine is infected with one of the very early viruses of the era.
So, if you know the right path to take on boot, you can get the virus to infect things, under the debugger, and see it in action.
DEBUG.com was for me, a complete boon of a tool, so to speak, back in the day. It was just enough assembler/debugger to be able to do very effective things.
Anyway, Z80 REPL is delightful, I want a 6502 REPL now, and can't stop thinking about how to get one on the Atmos..
The BBC Micro and the Atom that came before it had an assembler built into BASIC. Just think, in the early 80s you could do inline assembly if your BASIC code wasn't fast enough...
13 year old me had a box of cassette tapes with index labels like "0 DEBUG", and "10 ASS", and "28 MEMHAK", "30 UNDEL", and so on, where the #'s were the position - on tape - of the little bundle of utilities I would auto-load as soon as I got home from school, while having dinner, etc. I spent days, dreaming of having a ROM burner to put all these things in the last (usable) 16k address space of things ..
There was another downside, that the Applesoft BASIC license gave Microsoft a hostage which they later used to kill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBASIC. Hard to tell how much it mattered that the Mac came with no user programmability, which had been expected for PCs till then.
Techbros just can't grasp that "No" doesn't mean "Later." It's not exclusive to Apple by any means. Android update incoming? Your choices are "yes" or "later."
Techbros are just the ones happy to implement it. Which is of course a black mark all on it's own, but the ones explicitly rejecting the very concept of consent are sales, marketing, management, project leaders, etc. IE the people who are actually legally in charge of making these decisions.
Frankly, most of these people at high levels in these companies seem pretty apathetic to the concept of "Consent" at all, because I don't think they think we have a right to it.
Remember, LG owns the glass. Not you. Not the person who purchased it and has the legally respected rights under the first sale doctrine, but instead the company who bought some code that runs on it.
> Will old domains resell for premiums like low-background-radiation steel?
See also: any number of user-contributed sites that were bought by big players and basically parked. Does anyone even go to mp3.com for any real reason other than to see if anything has been done with it since the original was forced offline? I suspect they'll eventually unload it to someone who forks over enough money.
On the LAN, the FLACs just sit in an NFS share, while on the phone, Foobar2000 works nicely with the Opus files.
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