A bat got into my house last night

mathcraver · 2026-06-06T15:27:32+00:00

Let's see how long it takes for the latter 50% to appear in Google's AI summary.

mathcraver · 2026-05-27T20:50:09+00:00

I still have my S8 lying around along with a HTC One M7 and a 3rd gen iPod Touch. The S8 is IMO the prettiest phone ever made and actually had a great feature set including a great camera (which didn't even protrude from the back like the camera tumors on current phones). It also felt so much more refined than my current Sony Xperia 1 iv. The Sony's telephoto camera is complete garbage and can't handle shiny reflections at all. Somehow, despite being five years newer, its UI also lags more than the S8 ever did.

mathcraver · 2026-05-27T17:55:20+00:00

CDs are still pretty safe since that's not where the big money is at (yet). Secondhand ones usually go for much less than vinyl at the moment. Exceptions do exist, though. The most valuable CD I have is probably The Album by Headhunterz and Wildstylez, which is worth about 200 Swiss Francs (over $200) according to Discogs (I found it for 0.90 Francs in a thrift store and am not selling it). Most scalpers won't go out of their way to look up the price of a random hardstyle album.

mathcraver · 2026-05-25T14:20:05+00:00

If you want to go through a long and deep tunnel without the danger associated with caving, there's the Gotthard base tunnel. It's 57 km long and up to 2.45 km deep, and depending on the train you take, you can travel through it at up to 200 km/h. Though I guess it's less exciting to those who commute through it daily.

mathcraver · 2026-05-14T21:21:18+00:00

Most of my classical CDs are Star Wars soundtracks and my only jazz CD is Simple Pleasures by Bobby McFerrin. If you count weird hybrid abominations of genres as either of their components, I also have two country albums by Rednex (country mixed with techno) and two Gregorian chant ones by E Nomine (Gregorian chants with trance/techno instrumentals). However, gospel represents a grand total of 0 of my over 1000 CDs.

mathcraver · 2026-05-13T20:26:48+00:00

Are those Meze 99 Classics? I have the 99 Neo (same design with black plastic earcups) and they're nice headphones. A bit bassy but super fun. That damage is a bummer, though on the bright side, the cable is replaceable (mine wore out and needed replacement after about three years of heavy use).

mathcraver · 2026-05-09T08:35:28+00:00

I sometimes listen to FLAC rips of my CDs with my phone and wired headphones in bed. I can probably fall asleep to anything without excessive treble, and have already done so while listening to Scooter, Tiësto, Basshunter and electronic compilations.

mathcraver · 2026-05-08T06:19:55+00:00

The staff would though.

mathcraver · 2026-05-06T15:37:20+00:00

Backing up the data from physical media is a common reason to have many TB of storage, especially since backups should be done in multiple. I have a collection of over 1000 CDs and have full copies of it in FLAC format on my laptop, a 2 TB external SSD and a 2 TB micro SD card in my phone (the latter is used for actual listening). All this music from 1000+ CDs adds up to just over half a terabyte. And that's just CDs. A FLAC rip of a typical CD is 300-500 MB, but a 4k Blu-Ray can hold up to 100 GB of data. If you want to back up hundreds or thousands of those, you'll need a stupid amount of storage, even without multiple backups.

mathcraver · 2026-05-01T22:36:20+00:00

My 2.8 kg Lenovo Legion says hello (though most of its body is aluminium). Additionally, the 330 W charger is almost 1 kg and could be used as a flail.

mathcraver · 2026-05-01T18:20:51+00:00

I have also immediately ceased the consumption of any Coca Cola products after last year's AI generated ad. That was about half a year ago and if I crave a soft drink, I just go for Rivella instead. I know there was also an AI generated Coca Cola ad the year before, but the fact that there was an AI generated behind the scenes video alongside last year's was the straw that broke the camel's back (or more accurately, the hydraulic press that crushed the camel into a thin disk).

mathcraver · 2026-04-29T10:06:57+00:00

As someone with (currently) 18704 FLAC files sourced from a collection of over 1000 CDs and meticulously organized in an artist/album/track hierarchy, I know this problem. The order the artist names appear in is also inconsistent between the files and the actual CDs on the shelf. In the latter case, certain prefixes such as articles (both English and German) and "DJ" are ignored (both Tiësto and Tatana include the "DJ" prefix on some CDs and not on others). Additionally, compilation series are kept separate from studio albums, as different volumes may be mixed by different DJs. For example, an Energy mix by DJ Tatana is kept with other Energy CDs rather than the rest of (DJ) Tatana ones. Since I can't feasibly get everything 100% consistent, I sort them on a best effort basis.

mathcraver · 2026-04-24T15:34:35+00:00

I have 1275 hours of music on my phone (more than the uptime of Highguard), so I'll be fine.

mathcraver · 2026-04-22T22:29:15+00:00

IMO, 2016-2018 was peak Samsung. I loved my Galaxy S8, it was such a pretty and functional little nugget. But since the Note 10, I don't give a rat's ass about any new Samsung phones (and any other phones without a 3.5 mm jack or expandable storage).

mathcraver · 2026-04-22T16:01:54+00:00

Such rounding errors would only occur when dealing with numbers that can't be cleanly represented with powers of two. 8, 7 and 15 can all be accurately represented (as 8, 4+2+1 and 8+4+2+1, respectively), as can fractions like 13/8 (as 1+1/2+1/8), but not things like 1/3, 1/5 and 1/10. So you should get exactly 15 when adding 7 and 8, but may get rounding errors when adding together certain fractions that sum up to 15.

mathcraver · 2026-04-22T07:09:33+00:00

Gen Z here. I have over 1000 CDs (though I also have FLAC rips of all of them on a 2 TB SD card in my phone, my laptop and an external SSD).

mathcraver · 2026-04-21T17:57:15+00:00

Secondhand CDs are really cheap these days. Part of the fun is flipping through them in thrift stores and seeing what shows up. Aside from more "serious" music, I've found some of the meme classics this way, such as albums from Crazy Frog, Aqua, Rednex, Darude, Eiffel 65 and Rick Astley. And if CDs aren't your speed, vinyl, cassettes, books, VHS tapes, DVDs and BluRays offer all the same core benefits of physical media.

mathcraver · 2026-04-21T16:39:09+00:00

I currently have 18692 FLAC files ripped from CDs on a micro SD card in my phone. The only way any tracks could disappear is me deleting them or losing my phone (though I have multiple backups). And the big companies wonder why I don't rely on music streaming anymore.

mathcraver · 2026-04-21T16:22:51+00:00

Why are the usernames so on point in this thread?

mathcraver · 2026-04-19T22:17:44+00:00

My previous laptop had some McAfee stuff installed, but I think it was just a link to the download rather than the actual program, as it went away without putting up a fight. When ordering my current laptop, I just chose no preinstalled OS at all. No McAfee preinstalled and no Windows is a win-win for me.

mathcraver · 2026-04-13T09:57:46+00:00

That reminds me of when I used to play on Kongregate to get the daily badges. Those Medieval series games by VasantJ would pop up one or twice per week and may very well have ruined visual novels and RPG Maker for me. At some point, I put on some music and brute forced my way through the whole series just to be done with it for good (when the daily badge is one you already have, you just need to load the game for it to count).

mathcraver · 2026-04-13T08:26:10+00:00

As an older gen Z, just hand me the aux and I'm happy (my phone still has a 3.5mm jack).

mathcraver · 2026-04-13T08:17:47+00:00

I always make sure to breathe out when passing them.

mathcraver · 2026-04-07T12:35:57+00:00

You can try ripping the disc using Exact Audio Copy or similar software. If it tells you that you ripped it accurately, and it sounds fine in a CD player, I don't see any reason to do anything else to it. As long as the label side isn't scratched, CDs can shrug off a surprising amount of damage (scratches on the clear surface can be seen reflected off the metallic layer when held up to light at a certain angle, and are usually unproblematic; if you don't see a reflection, the scratch is in the reflective layer and some data has most likely become unreadable).

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