• 2 Posts
  • 49 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2025

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  • Agreed.

    Spore was horrendously disappointing after what I’d read about it.

    I bought into the hype and pre-ordered it, and then regretted it.

    I’d been given the impression by previews you’d get to play it as a singular session or experience, which I guess they never could have pulled off, but finding it to be segmented as it was was disappointing.

    And then the way it portrayed “evolution” seemed deeply flawed to me. Choices you made had almost no consequences - rather than gradually going down different paths and committing to things playing out in different ways, you could just completely change your mind or go back on things, your choices didn’t really matter.









  • Because politics encompasses almost everything, to be truly politically neutral would mean having no strong views on anything in life.

    It’s possible to be neutral on certain topics, but to be fully neutral you’d have to have no real opinions on economics, immigration, the military, the role of religion, equality, education…

    So the quote is saying you can’t truly be neutral on everything, what specific things are you actually neutral on.


  • Sounds ideal!

    To be honest I’ve been half-looking at audio players for 2-3 years but never pulls the trigger as all I had to go on was Amazon and Reddit reviews of how things sounded, which is so subjective as to be almost useless.

    I saw the Echo Mini in the Guardian for an article about DAPs and trusted that a little more and finally bit the bullet.

    Apparently someone from FIIO in the forums said the Echo Mini wasn’t capable of gapless, which feels unlikely when iPods from about 2006 could.

    Your device definitely sounds like it addresses my biggest “wants” for mine.


  • I find every firmware update fixes something but also breaks something.

    Great they’re working on it but super annoying also.

    Some updates crash the mini refreshing my library, and since about 2.7 a lot of multi-CD albums don’t show the tracks in the right order anymore.

    Still a fan, but definitely not the easy ride that iTunes + iPod was on that front.

    Oh, and cool you can use it as a nifty HQ external DAC also.


  • I’m pretty happy with my FIIO Snowsky Mini.

    It mimics a miniature Walkman and looks really great, and has a cassette playing interface that lets you totally ignore obtaining / managing album artwork. I really don’t care about seeing album art when I play music, but equally I hate seeing a ? or something when an interface expects you to have artwork. This solves that perfectly.

    It’s only up to 256GB, and it only lets you scroll through all artists or all albums so navigation isn’t the quickest.

    It sounds amazing. People go on about how good certain iPod classics sounded, but this is audibly better than any iPod ever was.

    Doesn’t do gapless playback.

    Can get them for £40-£50.




  • For the reasons I switched to Debian see my other reply.

    I use the computer for:

    • Learning and understanding Linux, in the broader sense. It’s a “spare” computer and over the past 3 years I’ve installed Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Gnome, Pop! OS, Spiral Linux, G4OS, Linux Mint, LMDE, Spiral Linux, Debian, EndeavourOS, Fedora, Garuda… and I’ve failed to install (wouldn’t boot to live USB, or wouldn’t boot after installation) many more, including Void, PikaOS, MX Linux, OpenSUSE, and probably a few others…
    • Playing old games. I’ve got a steam deck, but for things like Return To Castle Wolfenstein and the Settlers II you just need a mouse and keyboard. Lutris has been awesome.

    If you have a 15” Retina MBP, it’s been a huge pain in the ass, and multiple distros just stopped working after updates, often not long after installation. But also it’s been a good learning experience for the very same same reason. To work well in 2026 it needs the Nvidia graphics disabling - but the NVRAM defaults that Mac to Nvidia at startup for Linux, so even that bit isn’t straightforward! If you simply blacklist Nvidia it won’t boot.

    I also bought a USB WiFi adapter as the Broadcom card doesn’t work initially on most distros, and can’t support WPA3 even when it does work.


  • Yes, at this stage. Although before now I’ve installed a few different things over the last couple of years as a learning experience also.

    It’s not my main computer, but one I replaced. This freed me up to have a computer with no music or photos or anything on it, so I could test different distros and DEs and troubleshoot stuff without having any concerns about losing anything if I made a mistake or just erased and started over.

    I’d never actually used Linux before 2023, much more familiar now.