Tootfinder

Because I constantly hear myths about the good old compact cassette here's a longer post dispelling them:
1. They can sound as good as CDs
2. They don't wear out
3. You can't use a pencil to wind them
4. You can go to specific tracks automatically
5. You don't need to carry around extra batteries
I will elaborate below:
1. Sound Quality
Many higher-end decks can record cassettes on metal tape with various Dolby noise reduction settings; especially the combination of metal tape and Dolby S will make tapes that are pretty much indistinguishable from listening to a CD.
Even normal or chrome tape with Dolby B (around since the 1970s) will give great results; likely indistinguishable from a CD when played in a car or while out and about with a personal player.
Some extremely high-end tape decks produce better than CD results in some regards (for example some Nakamichi models go to 26KHz with frequency response, while CD are inherently limited to top out at 22KHz).
It's true that the dynamic range of CDs is much better than either vinyl records or tapes. However, unless you're super into classical music there's likely not much music for which this truly matters, as 99% is mastered to use much less dynamic range than provided by any audio media format. (If you're super into classical music you probably want SACD or other high-res lossless sources anyway, not CDs.)
2. Yes, it will wear out mechanically but you will wear out mechanically before it does. Please watch VWestlife's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dgJ4hRHBiw
3. European and American pencils are too thin to engage the cassette reel cogs. (You'd need to get a Japanese pencil. People mostly used BIC pens for this purpose which have the right thickness.)
4. Most (nice) decks and personal players from the early-to-mid nineties onwards have track skip features (e.g. Sony has AMS, Automatic Music Sensor), which allow precise winding to a specific track.
Some decks even did this in the early 80s!
5. My late-90s Walkman has seventy-eight (78) hours of playback on one (1) single AA battery.
Anyway, the main reason why I like them is they're fun to use and recording them is very deliberate instead of algorithms selecting music for me. :)

If you are an anti-fascist, you are against petroleum. Petroleum funds fascism globally. It is at the heart of the military industrial complex driving global imperialism, from both the US and Russia. Motonormitivity is fascist, both in it's elitist roots and in it's ties to historical fascism (Hitler hated bikes, just on principle). Oil is militarism.
Oil is the dominant resource which drives war, both in terms of it being the primary spoil wars are fought over and in terms of fueling the military vehicles and weapons that carry out those wars. Practically every war since (and including) WWII has been over oil. Genocides are carried out to secure oil. Gaza is over oil, in more ways than one.
Oil is the absolute enemy, and AI is simply an extension of that: an attempt to atomize us so we can't resist the oil-centric global order, one last grasp at the control over our lives oil has given to those whose power is now threatened by a solar punk future.
"I haven't written for a few weeks now. As I write the closing chapter and begin rewriting previous sections, everything feels both more distant and more immediate. The working title [Kairos] has only continued to feel more and more resonant, both during the writing and during my pause."
Now is the time to resist by making something different, by creating a world fundamentally opposed to these systems of oppression.
This is the last in my Kairos series. From here on out I'll be editing to try and make it more of a book than a series of posts. Thanks to everyone who has helped so far. All editing is welcome (typos, spell checks, questions and challenges). Between ADHD and dyslexia, it's always hard for my brain to notice mistakes in my own text so I always appreciate the support of those who can.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/kairos

Well, shit. Guess I picked a bad day to re-case my PC and upgrade the GPU. Everything went well until I tried to update the OS, which failed while tossing a Mesa dependency error. Did some checking, and it seems to just be a Mesa issue I can't really do anything about ATM. So I'm stuck in 4K/basic graphics driver mode, with screen tearing a-plenty, till tomorrow? Hopefully? lol.
The new case looks nice at least.

Penumbra
(Being at the right place at the right time, the geography lining up perfectly to funnel the last light through a steep valley and making the sky glow from this perspective... The silhouettes of the ruins of Castle Eisenberg in the penumbra on the hilltop in the forgeground, also see next pic)
1/2
#MountainMonday

Like global search and replace but don’t like surprises?
Check out serpl – a handy little command-line app that gives you a visual preview of the changes you are about to make. You can even go in and remove the replacements you don’t want from the source previews. The regex support appears to be basic, however (I couldn’t get a negative lookbehind to work).

Last evening of Christmas vacation before getting back to work for the new year.
Aiming to make it a good one. Working on GPU acceleration of the TIE filter and maybe the histogram block so I can do jitter analysis faster.
The peak at T=0 in the jitter histogram is related to use of the GPU CDR block and doesn't show up in the CPU implementation. It's likely caused by transients of some sort at thread block boundaries and I need to spend more time chasing it, I wouldn'…

I packed for #POTA before heading out to do the weekly grocery shopping, even though it was only 40°F / 4.5°C with low clouds. I decided it was too cold to sit in the helinox chair without insulation, so I drove past US-3867 and went to US-2755 Umstead State Park instead, where I could sit at a picnic table. I took a floor mat out of my car to sit on. As it was, it was cold enough that I co…

"In the past, whenever there was a financial crisis or a major political conflict, investors would pile into dollar assets, driving the dollar up – as happened during the 2008 financial crisis. That hasn’t happened under Trump; the dollar index has fallen 10% against other currencies in 2025. ...
"The dollar, as the world’s major currency for central bank reserves and in transactions in international trade and finance, has been in gradual decline for decades."

The debasement trade and the future of the dollar
The gold price against the US dollar is back above $5000 per oz after its recent short sharp contraction last week.  The unprecedented rise in the gold price, particularly since the beginning of th…

"No group in America has fallen further, faster than young men. When I began talking about this several years ago, that was a controversial statement, especially on the left, where many pathologize masculinity.
While the right has suggested the solution is to take women and non-white people back to the 1950s, the left’s view is that young men don’t have problems, they are the problem.
Neither attitude helps."

The Cult of Therapy | No Mercy / No Malice
“Don’t read the comments,” I tell people, just before I have a drink and … read the comments. I knew my book Notes on Being a Man would spark controversy, as you get the most flak when you’re over the target, and some of the criticism (likely) misses the mark. The comment that hits home: […]

Folks, I’m just putting the finishing touches on an update to the Gaza Verified site that will make signing up for verification as easy as signing in with your Mastodon account (with none of the manual adding of the verification link to your profile that proved to be a stumbling block for many).
I’ll be reopening sign ups today once I’m done with that.
In the meanwhile, please remember that there are folks in Gaza who are suffering through an ongoing genocide at the hands of Isra…

Gaza Verified
We’ve personally had video conversations on Signal with the people from Gaza whose Mastodon accounts on the fediverse are listed here and we verify that their accounts are genuine. – Joy & Aral Balkan