Notices by Misty (misty@digipres.club)

Discovered to my horror today that Python's unpacking can unpack characters from strings as though they were arrays.

a, b = "ab”
a #=> "a"
b #=> “b”

Managed to find one of my white whale CD-ROMs, and started writing a blog post on it... hoping to have something to publish soon. Really exciting find for me

This is a new one. I've never actually seen a website admit that autoplaying videos are a punishment for users they don't like, rather than a way to try to attract users.

You mean the PowerBook G4 is back in stock?

This is today - Bandcamp are donating their share of money to California wildfire relief. It's a good day to buy some music!

They've also published the schedule for regular Bandcamp Fridays, when their share of revenue goes straight to artists. The next one of those is next month.
https://digipres.club/@misty/113952370497187154

Heads up: Bandcamp is doing a Bandcamp Friday-style event this Friday for charity. Bandcamp's cut of every sale is going to support musicians affected by the California wildfires. https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-fundraisers

Very interesting-looking job posting for emulator programmers: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4142833817/

Some of you may have read about this Canadian petition asking the country to end the safe third country agreement, and to update travel guidance to the US. Please also phone your MP and write them a letter - on paper, if you can. https://www.momentumcanada.net/pathways

Recently got reminded of one of my all-time fave tumblr posts https://www.tumblr.com/captoring/682822077371269120

If I can offer one bit of advice as a washed-up Bush era leftist it’s that getting smug over factually-wrong laws does nothing. Like the “he declared everyone is female” thing. They don’t need the justification to be real, they’ll do it anyway.

Being smug over getting to correct something feels good and can make you feel like you've done something, when you really haven't.

Audio folks: is there a good/safe way to lossless trim AAC/M4A audio? Is there risk of introducing artifacts using some methods? I have a recording that only exists as a 128kbps M4A file and I’d like to split it into smaller sections.

Flo Mask currently have everything 30% off. They’re very comfy, great for smoke as well as COVID. Highly recommend https://www.flomask.com/

Going to be fascinating to see what happens to publishing when booktok vanishes after it's all tiktover in a few weeks.

It's been interesting seeing CDs get to the place that vinyl was in the early 00s. I've been hearing that young people have started getting into collecting them, which honestly makes sense - they're everywhere and, mostly, very cheap. Which makes it an affordable way to discover music.

Vinyl was the same way for many years - totally dead commercially, and cheap in thrift/record stores because no one was buying it. Lotta vinyl collecting was broke people collecting music a way they could.

I haven't really talked to young people who are getting into it, but aside from not being affordable anymore, I bet vinyl collecting isn't cool anymore because it's gotten so mainstream. I mean, Taylor Swift is putting out 10s of thousands of copies of newly-pressed vinyl. If you came of age in the era where vinyl's just normal again, you need something else that's both cheap and cool.

Of course, I guess this means that used CDs are eventually going to get expensive the way that vinyl is today, so. If you ever think you'll get back into it, no time like the present.

...like how laserdisc collecting used to be this cute, fun thing for me because it was an affordable way to build a collection of interesting things, and now it costs a fortune.

@goatsarah @zip I’m curious, how have you been storing them? My collection with a lot of 80s and 90s era discs hasn’t had any failures yet. Only burned discs.

Mastodon is second-best, since it supports original images but not GIFs. It forcibly recompresses those into videos, which are worse quality for this kind of 256-colour pixel art imagery. Bluesky, meanwhile, is the worst on both - its image recompression makes the images look pretty bad, and doesn't even make the file sizes smaller!

Running @compactdiscinteractive across three different services (tumblr, mastodon, bluesky) has given me an interesting chance to compare them directly - at least for this kind of "image a day" single-purpose account.

So far, I like tumblr best for this because it's the only platform where all of the media can be presented in its original form - tumblr lets me keep the original images *and* GIFs, without recompressing them as videos.