Notices by Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@retro.social)

Fedi, who do you know who's the vintage MP3 player expert?

I'm asking Fedi because I have certain expectations and requirements that only Fedi can fill. I'm looking specifically to hear from That One MP3 Player Person, here.

There's definitely an era of Peak MP3 Player, the same way e-ink ereaders peaked in 2007-2008 in the Just Before Touchscreens Ruined Everything era - there's definitely an aluminium-body clicky-buttoned MP3 player that Just Plays MP3s and is tactiley perfect and beautiful in every way and probably unobtainum except with eBay and patience, and I want to know about it from The MP3 Player Expert.

I want the person with a display shelf full of MP3 players to infodump at me about when the buttons disappeared and everything carcinized into a phone and made them sad. I expect this person will tell me to look for something in the late aughts to early teens and know the part number for a replacement battery. If this is you, please give me a link to your website, and feel free to show me your socks as well because I expect they're cool as hell.

No need to tell me you use your phone for music or tell me the MP3 player that you already own is good, I don't care. I want to find The Vintage MP3 Player Person With Heavily Considered Opinions, and ask them questions that only they will be able to answer. I need the MP3 Player Librarian. I feel in my heart that this person is here on the Fediverse somewhere.

UPDATE: it's only been 5 minutes haha, alright here's what I want:
* no apple or apple-wannabe
* plug it in and it shows up as a USB drive, I won't install software
* takes SD or MicroSD
* just plays MP3s
* no touchscreen
* no capacitive controls
* preference: steel or aluminium

UPDATE: ipods are apple, I specifically don't want apple, I already know about ipods thx

UPDATE UPDATE: editing the question to make it more obvious that I'm looking for a person not a thing here, I don't want to know about your MP3 player, I want to know where the Vintage MP3 Player Wizard dwells

UPDATE 4: looking into Sony players around the tail end of the minidisc era, also this wee lad looks like a decent "modern" equivalent: https://binarydigit.city/a-simple-digital-audio-player/

@Nine @lukeharby @binarydigit yeah same, thing has Like 2007 But New energy

Cat just said meow

She's never said meow before, she's all acknaaaow or yar or b'gack or mapmapmap, she straight-up looked at me and ENUNCIATED

Me-ow.

🦝 I wanna delete my account because I don't agree to your terms

🐰 You've gotta agree to the terms or we won't delete your account :D

This is how we reduce data centre power consumption and save our phone batteries and data plans, instead of posting spidermanpointingathimself.jpg we post "Spiderman Pointing At Himself Meme" like that pub where people shout numbers

That's Joke Number Eleven btw

In case you haven't heard it, the joke is, guy breaks down in the middle of nowhere, doesn't quite Die On The Moors but makes it to one of them rural pubs where there's always a fire and the same ten blokes and not much talking. Rings for a tow, gets a pint, eyes all over him but they're very polite and they don't Wicker Man him. Some time goes by, one of them stands up, says in a voice that carries across the room "Twelve" and everybody does a wee chuckle and goes back to their pints.

"That's weird" thinks the protagonist, goes back to his pint. "Twenty-seven" says this one lady off to his right, some giggles and blushes and elbowing. "Thirty" says a bloke with a beard and everybody roars, pointing, great big guffaws, apparently it's the way he tells them.

He asks the barmaid hey thirty of what, she says well it must look a bit weird to outsiders but since Dave here kept telling the same three jokes someone said one time "Oh that's a Dave Number Three" and it stuck, and then it got out of hand and we ended up numbering all the favourite jokes that everyone knows off by heart anyway and now it saves drinking time to just shout out the number. Give it a go if you want luv, you'll fit in better.

So our guy shrugs and grins and he takes a swig of his pint and shouts "Sixty two!" and the room just ERUPTS, people are falling off their chairs, slapping their thighs, wiping away tears, big red faces, holding their sides, the whole lot.

"Wow, what'd I just say?" says the guy.

Barmaid calms down enough to giggle "we've not heard that one before"

If I tell you number twelve you'll understand why folk 'round these parts just say Number Twelve.

---

Three friends are hiking in the woods, one of them finds a lamp, it's that one, you know the one, of course he picks up the lamp, of course he goes "Hmm, nice lamp, bit grubby, let's give it a rub," and of course there's the genie. We know this one, we're in familiar territory. Welcome to the joke. Make yourself at home, we're gonna be a minute. 🧞 "MORTALS," booms the genie, 🧞 "FOR A THOUSAND YEARS I HAVE BEEN IMPRISONED IN THAT LAMP, YOU KNOW HOW THESE JOKES GO, YADDAYADDAYADDA THREE WISHES"

🐺 What, each?

🧞 YEAH EACH, WHY NOT.

The guys are all grinning and rubbing their hands together because they know that they're in a funny story and not a cautionary tale.

🦊 Anything? Anything at all?

🧞 SUBJECT TO THE USUAL RULES.

🦊 How about a billion dollars?

🧞 TRIFLING. IT IS DONE.

🦊 gets all excited and pulls his phone out and checks his banking app, it says his balance is $1,000,000,006.72. He's jumping around with glee and gibbering about all the pogs he's gonna buy, the genie turns to 🐺, booms 🧞 NOW YOU.

🐺 Oh genie, I wish to never be sick or injured, I wish for perfect health until the day I die, is that within your power?

🧞 WITHIN MY POWER? IT IS ALREADY DONE.

🐺's knees don't hurt anymore. He feels as though he could run a mile and not even get out of breath. Something jagged floats around on his tongue; he spits out a filling, feels the tooth heal around where it used to be. He's very impressed.

🧞 NOW YOU, 🦝.

While the other two were making their wishes, 🦝 has been concentrating very hard. His brow is furrowed.

🦝 Genie, I would like for my left arm to rotate at the shoulder, anti-clockwise as viewed from my left, about half a rotation a second, until the day I die.

The genie gives 🦝 a gentle smile. 🧞 THIS IS AN UNUSUAL REQUEST, LITTLE ONE. IT IS DONE.

🦝 looks at his left arm, which is rotating in a sort of swimming motion, without any conscious intervention on his part. He gives a little satisfied nod, and says 🦝 yes, good. Thank you.

🧞 YOU ARE VERY WELCOME. NOW, THE WEALTH-SEEKER. YOUR SECOND WISH.

🦊 You said a billion dollars was trifling. I think I wasn't going hard enough. Can you make me the richest man alive?

🧞 A THOUSAND YEARS I WAS IN THERE. YES, FOR FREEING ME, YOU MAY HAVE ALL THE TRINKETS YOU DESIRE.

🦊 looks with wide eyes at his banking app, he's got this manic grin, he's richer than God.

🧞 NOW YOU, 🐺, WILL YOUR SECOND WISH BE AS WISE AS YOUR FIRST?

🐺 Wise. Wise... can you do that? Can you make it so that I can, oh, I don't know, pick up the guitar quicker, things like that? I mean, like, get good at things very easily, is what I'm asking.

🧞 YOU WISH FOR WISDOM? APTITUDE?

🐺 Well, not like, TOO easy, y'know? Like, I enjoy learning, it's satisfying, I don't wanna feel like I'm cheating...

🧞 YOU WISH FOR NEW THINGS TO BE EASY FOR YOU.

🐺 ...yeah!

🧞 GRANTED, YOU SMALL, WISE THING.

🐺 excitedly pulls his phone out and opens up his duolingo thingy and he doesn't have to rummage through his brain for the words he learned two weeks ago anymore, they're right there, he's sharp as anything. He could probably run through the whole course in a couple of days.

🐺 I remember everything! This is so awesome, thank you!

🧞 OF COURSE. NOW. He turns to 🦝. 🧞 YOUR SECOND WISH, WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE ME DO?

The whole time his friends were making their wishes, 🦝 has been very quiet. Watching his arm rotate. Lips moving silently as he figures it out. He nods.

🦝 Yeah. Yeah, okay. For my second wish, I'd like my right arm to rotate, again at the shoulder, clockwise this time from the same viewpoint as my first wish.

🧞 ...AT THE SAME SPEED AS YOUR LEFT ARM?

🦝 Yes, please. So they'd be counter-rotating.

🧞 FOR THE REST OF YOUR DAYS, AS BEFORE?

🦝 Yes please.

🧞 MYSTERIOUS ONE, THIS REQUEST IS GRANTED. MAY IT PROVE AS USEFUL AS YOU SEEM TO THINK IT WILL.

🦝 watches his arms rotating around him.

🦝 Yes. Yes, thank you, that's exactly what I wanted.

🧞 YOUR FINAL WISH, RICHEST MAN.

🦊 I want to be irresistable to women. The most charismatic man alive.

🧞 RICHES AND CHARISMA, QUITE A COMBINATION. AS YOU WISH.

🦊's dating app starts pinging, which is a bit weird because his profile's an absolute disgrace.

🧞 HEALTHY ONE, WISE ONE, YOUR FINAL WISH.

🐺 Well... I mean, healthy, wealthy and wise, right? That's what we're supposed to want, isn't it?

🧞 MORE RICHES?

🐺 Not billions. Just... enough that I won't have to worry. And that my friends won't have to worry. And enough left over to spread around a bit.

🧞 I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU MEAN. CHECK YOUR ACCOUNT WHEN YOU GET HOME. THE REST WILL TURN UP PERIODICALLY, WHEN IT IS REQUIRED.

🐺 Thank you, genie.

🧞 NOW. COUNTER-ROTATING ONE.

🦝 Yes! Yes, I know EXACTLY what I want.

🧞 THEN SPEAK.

🦝 I want my head to nod back and forth, in time with the rotation of my arms. Forever.

🧞

🦝

🧞 IN TEN THOUSAND YEARS OF EXISTENCE, I HAVE NEVER ASKED A MORTAL, "ARE YOU SURE."

🦝

🧞

🦝

🧞 IT IS DONE.

🦝 Yes. Yes!

🧞 I HOPE THIS WORKS OUT FOR YOU.

🦝 Thank you so much.

~~~

With that, the genie vanishes. Life goes on.

Time passes.

One day, 🐺 misses his old hiking buddies and gets on the phone and arranges a meetup at the pub...

~~~

...🐺 The richest-man-in-the-world thing didn't last very long.

🦊 Yeah. It was... hollow, y'know? But I had a GREAT time getting rid of all that money. That was WAY more fun.

🐺 Heh. I'm glad you're happy.

🦊 Definitely. How's the healthy wealthy and wise thing turning out?

🐺 Brilliant, if I'm honest. Especially the healthy bit, haven't had so much as a cold these past five years.

🦊 God, has it been that long. So you're happy?

🐺 Very.

The two men smile contentedly at each other.

🐺 Oh, here comes 🦝.

🦝 walks into the pub, arms rotating, head bobbing back and forth, sits down at the table.

🦝 Alright, lads. I think I fucked up

🦝 How about three dollars, credit card company takes a dime and 2% leaving $2.84, you take fifty cents a sale for gluing some JavaScript together ten years ago, that leaves $2.34 for the person who did some actual work here

🐰 That's an intriguing idea, but how about instead you pay a tenner and I pay the author 80 cents

Becky Chambers' Monk & Robot two-novella series wasn't just good enough to overcome my visceral disgust of Machines Being Treated Like Living Things, it was good enough that I did That Thing where you notice you're getting towards the end of a book but it's Too Good and you gotta go read another different worse book, you read three or four other books while savouring tiny nibbles of the Good Book so it lasts longer. It's very good. The ebook of the first book (called "A psalm for the wild-built" is TWELVE HECKIN' DOLLARS which is a piss-take for a 160-page novella, so the library's the way to go on this one - but if you've got money, you can actually buy the epub (ebooks.com has it, and it claims DRM-free so you should be able to just read it without having to piss around with different software) and honestly, if I were ever gonna pay twelve dollars for an ebook, this'd be the one.

Patrick Rothfuss' Name Of The Wind is juvenile Gary-Stu power fantasy but competently and compellingly written, what reviewers would call "A real page turner," it's pulp dreck by the numbers but it does it well. Until about a third of the way through the sequel, where Rothruss loses the will to continue the story he's writing, pulls two other half-finished unrelated novels out of his desk drawer, files off the serial numbers and welds them all together into more or less enough pages to pass as a fantasy doorstop. He doesn't even Bondo over the joints, barely even grinds down the mess he's done of the welding, then sprays a beautiful coat of paint over the misshapen lumpy clag lines. I haven't finished this yet, I'm still 100 pages from the end, but I'm half expecting he's gonna try and weld another unrelated novella in to fill the hole between here and an abrupt ending that'll leave the reader gagging for book 3, which will never come out because Rothfuss is out of drawer stories to find-and-replace names on. It's very bad but also good readable fun. First book's a tenner, which is still a piss-take for a smegging ebook but there's a lot of it so I guess there's value for money - unfortunately no matter where you buy it from, it's encrypted even after they've got your cash, so you'll have to piss around with removing copy protection or install special software to read the encrypted file (or just get an unencrypted copy from a pirate site).

Publishers: 🐰 Don't pirate ebooks, authors deserve to get paid!
Me: 🦝 Yeah! Authors deserve to get paid!
🐰 Yeah!
🦝 Yeah!
🐰 Twelve dollars!
🦝 I beg your fucking pardon

Working Class Book Reviews: 🦝 You want bloody HOW much?

Oh no I have totally screwed up my Nextcloud contacts list

I was trying to add the contacts that had accidentally gotten saved to a google account from my phone

so I figured "Well heck, this software is super smart, I'll just export all my contacts from my phone, import them into nextcloud, and it'll be clever enough to go "Haha of course he doesn't want to have everyone but these dozen-odd people listed twice, we'll merge the obvious dupes" because it's fancy whizbang modern software"

I figured wrong

I figured so, so wrong

NEXTCLOUD MERGE CONTACTS, I splammered onto my keyboard, NEXTCLOUD CONTACTS MERGE HOW I continued, NEXTCLOUD DUPLICATE CONTACTS HOW TO FIX said my fingers in an undignified panic, and I staggered onto the nextcloud forums for lost souls who'd damned themselves the same way I had. "Help me," whispers user apalfalba, user szaiman responds with a github link, I scroll down, the computer says 3 YEARS LATER: CLOSED. 3 YEARS LATER: ARCHIVED.

Another wild random tab in the dark, here is another poor bastard who made the same mistake in 2023, David says can anyone help thanks, in response he receives two hearts and 669 views and then

3 months later

Closed on Jun 5, 2023

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

I wonder briefly if everything worked out for David, after all we close issues when they're resolved right, not when they're still broken after three months, right? Oh dear, I have to go to another one of the tabs I opened a few minutes ago, I duckduckwent to so many tabs, here's another... poor appddo, what happened to you? You took the same wrong turn I did, and what were you told...

"The easiest workaround I could find - and yes you non google people won’t like it - is to

export the address book from nextcloud as vcf
go into your google contacts (or just create a burner google account with no contacts)
import the contacts in the web ui
fix the duplicate contacts via the “merge and fix” tool from google
export the now cleaned up contacts as vcf again
import the cleaned up contacts into a new address book"

Take Back Control as they say, yes... next tab, and I hope there's some non-slippery surface somewhere on the sides of this well I've dropped into, it's the github tab, it's the issue about there not being a contact merge, this one's been linked to a lot on this journey. Deep breath, let's go in.

Oh no. Silverhook opened this issue in 2016:

"In the old contacts you were able to consolidate or merge two contact entries into one.

Example how this could work:

Alice is in the contact list twice
select both contacts for Alice
a “merge” button appears
click on the “merge” button
the two entries for Alice merge into one (if needed, user can be prompted regarding collisions)

This was particularly useful after importing contacts or syncing between several devices.

It would be great to have this option in the new contacts app as well.

As a bonus, a command to scan all your contacts for such duplicates and to consolidate them, would be awesome."

That sounds great, Silverhook! What do other people think...

scroll scroll scroll

A bounty appears. This is where people give money to a holding-onto-the-money guy and the holding-onto-the-money guy gives the money to whoever fixes the thing. The bounty raises in value. November 2021, the bounty is at $85. June 2022, the bounty is at $120. "This functionality would be very useful." "Please, do address this issue. It is extremely important."

And then... the guy, of course, there's always the guy:
"I don't speak for the Nextcloud project (I'm just a casual contributor every once in a while) but I encourage everyone here who thinks this functionality would be useful, or is extremely important, to contribute a pull request adding it."

and when there's one guy, then another will turn up soon...
"No one is stopping you from writing the code. Or paying someone to write it."

Reply: "I haven't got the time, but I gave some money."

But then there was some... concerns, about the holding-onto-the-money guy.

Brief discussion about can we get a new holding-onto-the-money guy, because the current holding-onto-the-money guy looks like he might run off with the money.

Inconclusive.

I can taste the desperation in this brief exchange:

-----
🐇 "Why is NC missing this very important thing. It is the third time I had to re-do all my contacts with some offline tool."
-----
🦊 👀 "Which tool do you use"
-----

And then the holding-onto-the-money guy ran off with the money and so there was no more money to fix this problem.

Time flows by, nextcloud gets money, they spend it on AI, they post to mastodon about AI and everyone shouts at them for it, the pinball man draws a very nice picture of a dick in a mousetrap and he's very proud of it, and someone posts "Eight years ago. Is there any hope this will ever get addressed? Seems like devs rather build shiny new AI features, something so basic is not exciting enough?" and nextcloud people say OH THUMBS DOWN FOR THAT COMMENT, THUMBS DOWN FOR MOTHER FOR ONE THOUSAND YEARS, The Guy says HEY BUSTER THIS IS OPEN SOURCE AND YOUR COMMENTS ARE HARSH AND UNHELPFUL, The Other Guy says HEY WISEGUY THIS ISN'T SOME GUY'S PET PROJECT THIS IS A GMBH WITH SIGNIFICANT REVENUE AND A TEAM OF FULL TIME MOUSETRAP BOTHERERS and I do a record scratch and turn and look directly at you straight into the camera and say "I know what those letters GMBH means," holding up a finger, "because I'm on mastodon," and I turn back to my laptop and I scroll right back up to the very tippy top of the github issue page and I check the date, reminding myself man was it really 2016 when someone asked for this,

Well technically, it was VERY late 2016, December 2016, December THE TWENTY-FIFTH 2016, this guy asked for this feature ON CHRISTMAS FUCKING DAY like the POOR LITTLE MATCH GIRL, this was all he wanted for Christmas, and you know what? I'm gonna click on his github profile pic and find out if he's just fucking dead. Did he freeze to death waiting for this incredibly standard feature. Did he grow a beard down to his ankles then fall over and get little X's for eyes. Is he a skeleton. Has he been dead and buried for seven years with people dragging tables and chairs across the earth atop his grave so they can have a discussion about large language models.

Nope, apparently he's messing around with XMPP, tryna do something with Prosody, so he's at least kind of alive.

I know what I'm talking about, I run a Prosody server too, I'm also kind of alive. I'm the kind of alive where it's half past one in the morning and instead of fixing the problem I'm staring down a rabbithole of figuring out the social dynamics of how this problem isn't getting fixed. Instead of putting my contact list back the way it was, I've stuck my head into nextcloud's armpit. That's the kind of alive I am right now.

You know how all this started? Maybe once a week I log onto facebook and scroll for three seconds and see a swastika and log RIGHT the FUCK back off again, and this time I saw it was my neighbour's birthday, and I went "Oh I should put that in my phone because the intervals between my looking at this horrible website are getting further and further apart," and I went to my nextcloud and she wasn't in there and I frowned and went "Huh she must be in my google contacts, weird I thought I'd exported all those, alright well this won't take a sec I'll juuuuust stick my head into nextcloud's armpit I guess."

She's really damn old, so sometimes I gotta ring her up and say hey are you alive, so I guess tomorrow (when I started this her birthday was today, now it was yesterday) I'll ring her up and say hey happy birthday from yesterday, are you still alive, and she'll say yeah kind of, and I won't tell her about any of this because she's normal, but I'll tell you. I'll tell all of you.

If anybody ever fixes this please tell silverhook merry christmas

Kid's making her first website <3

Already we've had the talk about how your sketchbook (for sketching out how the site should look) is tall and skinny, and so is a phone, but her laptop's screen is short and wide, and man oh man it would be SO much easier to make websites in the year 2025 if computer monitors had stayed portrait

guys I'm serious, if computer monitors had stayed portrait instead of going landscape in the 70's then they'd be the same orientation as phones and we wouldn't have to make two wildly different websites every time we make a website, we could just make the links bigger

(unless in the parallel universe where computer monitors never turned landscape folk scroll through the internet with their phones turned sideways)

🦝 *wild unhinged gibbering rant*
🐴 haha dan you're so funny
🦝 I am DEADLY serious
🦊 haha, you're
🦊 wait
🐴 what other stuff was he serious about that we thought he was joking about
🦊 *glances nervously at the mousetrap thread*

My eight-year-old daughter figuring out HTML after I showed her a single example: 🐁 Dad I can't believe I'm doing it, I'm making a website!
Me: 🦝 hold on honey I gotta do the internet rant about monitor aspect ratios again

I really wish cryptocurrency was real. Like, I wish it wasn't a world-boiling pyramid scheme, but just a thing that let me send a penny to the author of whatever silly gay webcomic I'm reading whenever they post a new page, and have that penny actually arrive to them

If someone wants to send me a quarter, I don't get that quarter, Peter Thiel gets the quarter, it just disappears. Someone sends me a dollar, I get 47 cents.

Someone puts a quarter in the slot of one of my games, that quarter's mine now. I should be able to earn a living by asking thousands of people for a quarter every now and then

Putting a quarter in a slot, hearing the familiar sequence of tinny mechanical clicks and swoops as it traverses the mech, swings the cradle, bounces past the magnet, flicks the microswitch, but where's the little *tish* at the end? Why don't I hear it landing in the cash bucket with all the rest of the money?

I call the tech over to open the coin door and clear the jam and who the hell do we find squatting in there just curling his fingers closed around the coin, but Peter Bloody Thiel again. He blinks in the light and hisses and scurries off into the depths of the machine. He'll have made his nest around the ballast for the marquee I bet, they always do, they like to nest where it's warm

Make me a system where folk can sign up in two clicks and put five or ten bucks into an account and then send tiny nickel-and-dime penny-ante spare-change transactions between stripesocked ramen-eating indie game devs and webcomic artists without any per-transaction fees, and you could take like a third of the cut and these folk'd still make more money than they would do with paypal.

Peter Thiel sucks half a buck plus four percent up his proboscis with every transaction. If the ten bucks I put into your chop-it-up-into-pennies machine instantly turns into five bucks just by virtue of you having chopped it into pennies, if you take LITERALLY HALF MY MONEY, then the church mice STILL get more money than they would with paypal or cryptocurrencies