Tech you miss/ new tech trends you hate - ok boomers

[seri0us]

I got rid of Spotify Premium a few months back because I need to cut back on luxuries. I don't miss it anywhere nearly as much as I thought I would. And yep, I've had songs disappear on me too (although never mid-playback).

Between ripping my CDs, going through old HDDs and rediscovering the joys of Soulseek, I'm in no hurry to go back to paying for a music streaming service. Heck, once I have cash to spend on music again, it'll be going on CDs before hipsters ruin those for us. Secondhand CDs are already starting to creep up in price...

Over a year ago I quit Spotify and started getting stuff from Soulseek, random open directories, and ripping audiobook type things from YouTube. It's a lot of fun and in a weird way I enjoy picking what to put onto my phone.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

Over a year ago I quit Spotify and started getting stuff from Soulseek, random open directories, and ripping audiobook type things from YouTube. It's a lot of fun and in a weird way I enjoy picking what to put onto my phone.

You probably already know of this but if you want video game OST, https://downloads.khinsider.com/ is a great site. A lot of songs are now being updated with FLACs along with the mp3s.

 

[Becky McDonald]

Good thing you didn't rely on just that service for music.

How many technophile bugmen out there don't have any media collection offline and just stream everything?

Speaking as someone living in the no-man's land between Zoomer and Late Millennial, there is one experience I cannot relate to with my retarded abortion of a generation; watching something on stream and it goes down, or crashes, or buffers infinitely.

$80 gets you a good, reliable name-brand Blu-Ray player with USB and streaming capabilities. Another $20 on top of that gets you a stack of rewritable Blu-Ray discs (yes, they DO exist) which you can format as a data storage device, essentially allowing you to store 25GB worth (or 50 if you want to pay a bit more) of whatever the fuck you want on it, regardless of the maximum specified minutage, at any definition. Now, $100 sounds like a bit of a steep investment, but you'll see a return on it within a matter of weeks.

• Sports autist who wants to watch old games or championships? Locate them, burn them to the disc, and watch them.
• Mega autist who wants to watch someone's crummy VHS recordings from 1995 for that authentic '90s friends house experience? You can do that too.
• Want to watch a particular version of a movie, especially a fanedit/remaster? No problem. Download it, burn it, and watch it.
• Want that one show that NEVER got released on home video, and if it did, it either got cut to shit by licensing/censors or only sold 5,000 copies in Indonesia? Torrent it, burn the whole thing to a disc, and watch it.
• Want to just put a bunch of YTPs and other internet meme shit on there? Sure. You can do that too. The sky's the limit.

Plus, since it's a Blu-Ray player, consumer Blu-Ray discs are dirt fucking cheap right now. Think mid-2010s DVD prices or mid-2000s VHS prices. Nobody wants them anymore because every motherfucker and their dog has moved to streaming. You can buy joblots on eBay or at thrift stores for stupidly low prices. Oh, and speaking of DVDs, you can play all of those too. Limitless entertainment without paying a further penny (other than more discs). No buffering, no censorship, no worrying if it goes offline, no adverts, just you and your recordings.

And if you have your bugmen friends round who INSIST on watching something via streaming? Still no problem, since it supports that feature, you can just have them log in to their cuckflix account and freely consoom, even if your TV isn't smart by default.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

as someone living in the no-man's land between Zoomer and Late Millennial

Meanwhile I may be somewhat older, as I still use DVD and VHS.

No Netflix (though I do watch online vids with an ad blocker).

 

[byuu]

80 gets you a good, reliable name-brand Blu-Ray player with USB and streaming capabilities. Another $20 on top of that gets you a stack of rewritable Blu-Ray discs (yes, they DO exist) which you can format as a data storage device, essentially allowing you to store 25GB worth (or 50 if you want to pay a bit more) of whatever the fuck you want on it, regardless of the maximum specified minutage, at any definition. Now, $100 sounds like a bit of a steep investment, but you'll see a return on it within a matter of weeks.

• Sports autist who wants to watch old games or championships? Locate them, burn them to the disc, and watch them.
• Mega autist who wants to watch someone's crummy VHS recordings from 1995 for that authentic '90s friends house experience? You can do that too.
• Want to watch a particular version of a movie, especially a fanedit/remaster? No problem. Download it, burn it, and watch it.
• Want that one show that NEVER got released on home video, and if it did, it either got cut to shit by licensing/censors or only sold 5,000 copies in Indonesia? Torrent it, burn the whole thing to a disc, and watch it.
• Want to just put a bunch of YTPs and other internet meme shit on there? Sure. You can do that too. The sky's the limit.

Why go through the extra step of burning it onto a bluray instead of just directly watching from a flash/hard drive?

 

[Flavius Anthemius]

I do get nostalgic for the days of having a dedicated MP3 player, granted a smartphone phone can basically do the same thing and more, but I just kinda like the tinkering aspect of tailoring a bunch of music on a dedicated device and taking it with you wherever and whenever without having the added baggage of a phone, it was like the evolution of the Sony Walkman, but more accessible for a newer generation that didn't use cassettes or CDs anymore and was more adjusted to digital file sharing and online media, which I think around the mid 2000's was when that was just starting to take shape.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

A true weirdo will hook up a VCR to their АрВид expansion card and store data on VHS tapes.

As an old commodore faggot i can miss that aswell.

Any sound recording could be data. There was software in the form of sound sent over radio, and even stored on phonograph records.

I guess for the former, one would have one's computer hooked up to the radio, and that computer would treat it like a tape player.

 

[Becky McDonald]

Why go through the extra step of burning it onto a bluray instead of just directly watching from a flash/hard drive?

Because I've tried that on the model I have, and it jumps back to the start when you try to rewind or fast forward, as well as freezing for a few seconds (likely because the stick I used was 32GB). Maybe on more expensive players, it works better.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Social media in 1979? Yes! - YouTube

(the video title is misleading as it's a BBS - more like a discussion board like this site)

 

[The Great Milenko]

Any company trying to add IoT into their product is a shit trend.

 

[AnOminous]

I guess for the former, one would have one's computer hooked up to the radio, and that computer would treat it like a tape player.

You can actually run networks over something called packet radio. It uses a variant of the old X.25 protocol (the formerly nearly universal packet switching protocol that was what TCP/IP mostly replaced). It would generally be really, really slow, so don't expect to be torrenting 1080p video over it.

You need a ham license to do it. Well, to do it legally anyway.

 

[ditto]

You need a ham license to do it. Well, to do it legally anyway.

It's suprisingly active in TradCath circles (the real.. not Twitter kind)

 

[AmpleApricots]

There used to be a radio station here, back when radio actually still was a thing, that had a "computer hour", basically home computer news, various software recommendations etc.. Part of it was playing back a program you could record to use at your home computer. The communists on the other side of the wall had similar programming I'm aware of, for their spectrum clones. My guess is the playback of a datastream over public radio waves would cause mass hysteria now.

(the video title is misleading as it's a BBS - more like a discussion board like this site)

is it tho? We interact with people on this board hence it's social. (Of course it's not social media in the Zucc sense, what many people think of if they hear "social media")

 

[Nabeshin]

I didn't knew where to post it, but a tren that I hate is techtubers specs benchmarks.

All techtubers knows that due micro-architecture differences, you can't compare the specs number from AMD/NVIDIA/INTEL GPU's between as they don't translate equally but then they seem to forget that this applies to CPU too and even compare the raw number between CPU's that runs in different architectures as if the numbers can be compared directly.

 

[seri0us]

I didn't knew where to post it, but a tren that I hate is techtubers specs benchmarks.

All techtubers knows that due micro-architecture differences, you can't compare the specs number from AMD/NVIDIA/INTEL GPU's between as they don't translate equally but then they seem to forget that this applies to CPU too and even compare the raw number between CPU's that runs in different architectures as if the numbers can be compared directly.

If it's not totally ridiculous like that, then it's simply boring to watch benchmarks for very long. I just want to see a somewhat notable PC be built a/o tried out, not a somewhat detailed look at how it plays games or how it does on benchmarking software.

 

[Ukraine is Big Gay]

Being a "Computer Enthusiast" has been the most boring, pointless, depressing load of nothing in the past four to five years.

The GPU market is a fragmented wasteland with a price hike on the bleached bones.
While CPUs are coming out so fast that Intel actually overlapped 11th and 12th gen in a single year. And often there's barely sub single digit percent differences between the lot in real world performance.
The difference between DDR4 and DDR5 at the end of the day being the number on the end and not working in older boards.

When even the tech youtubers from hardcore shills to legitimate individuals have to do a two year string of padding, side hustles, off topics and drama posts because there's simply jack and shit to talk about or review or hype you know something is fucked.

The only mildly interesting thing to me has been the "Handheld PC" push with a few devices in the past decade. Which is just digging up a flopped concept in 2004 with the OQO. And older than that still, palm pilots and their ilk.

 

[BIG BILL HELL'S]

You can actually run networks over something called packet radio. It uses a variant of the old X.25 protocol (the formerly nearly universal packet switching protocol that was what TCP/IP mostly replaced). It would generally be really, really slow, so don't expect to be torrenting 1080p video over it.

You need a ham license to do it. Well, to do it legally anyway.

Also, encryption (e.g. using https) isn't allowed (outside of a handful of very specific edge cases), which is why accessing the Internet over Amateur Radio is basically nonexistent.

 

[Maverick Vile]

I despise the trend of slapping a touchscreen on everything. I dread the day when too many brain-damaged Zoomers and whatever feral children coming after their generation are making decisions on tech that we just do away with keyboard and mouse altogether and my living hellscape is complete. Touchscreen typing is the single most infuriating daily interaction I have with technology. I love fat-fingering the wrong letter or getting the letter I wanted right only to have it slide to the letter next to it as I lift my finger off the digital keyboard that takes up a quarter of my screen space every time I want to type something. Made a typo? Well, good luck fingering the exact positioning of that letter you messed up, because we don't have arrow keys on our wonderful touch screens. I have to imagine that the barely legible postings of Zoomers on social media is due to most of them simply writing off a typo as not being worth the time needed to get the cursor in the right spot to correct, and I can hardly blame them.

And don't even get me started on gaming with touchscreens. Anything more mechanically-intense than Fruit Ninja is just better off on a controller/keyboard than a fucking touchscreen.

 

[Blimp]

I'm still clinging to my dying Clip Zip with Rockbox, I really hate that the concept of a tiny kickaround "MP3 player" that doesn't suck is pretty much dead because phones took their place for the vast majority of people. Manufacturing in general seems to be limited to gimmicky hipster bullshit (Pono) or overdesigned loaded audiophile toys (Fiio) (unless I've missed something neat). Cheap Aliexpress players like Ruizu's that attempt to fill that niche fall apart when your eyes begin to focus on it, but the inability to use Rockbox on any of these is the biggest dealbreaker. Rockbox is a really nice firmware, but the players that let you use it best haven't been made in a decade or more, so you need to play eBay roulette for them, and they're getting pricier because of their finite nature. Because of this, the Rockbox project will eventually die as well, that's gonna suck

The hardiness aspect is what makes the Sansa stuff an especially big loss. My Zip has a some bad sectors on the internal memory, so it likes to crash once in a while. The battery only holds 65% of what it used to with voltage drooping a little, so it has issues accessing micro SD cards on anything other than a full* charge or connection to a power bank. The buttons are starting to go, but at 12 years old, that's pretty tough, and it's still a snappy way to play literally all my music with loads of options, and still does a lot more than anything I can find on my phone, the DAC is also somehow better too. It also survived a couple washes. I guess Android Foobar is okay? But also sorta useless without components like on the PC, and to build on the touchscreen stuff above, going from tactile buttons you've been using forever to a touchscreen for music is miserable for things as basic as play/pause or seeking

It sucks we never saw Rockbox on the Zune, that was great hardware chained to some of the worst software in the world, it's like Microsoft set out to make an even worse iTunes with playlist/transfering issues to match, what an embarrassing fucking waste of Wolfson DAC's. I assumed if we were Jtagging our 360's, something like the Zune had some security fuckup we could exploit too, but as it turns out, nobody else bought a Zune, and there was a reason no first-world nation hosted most Xbox mods. Any hypothetical Zune port would be illegal in Microsoft's eyes since nothing's running without pulled keys, and the fact the fucking thing doesn't even work as mass storage device means development would be a giant pain the ass for a niche player. It's pretty much the same shit that killed Rockbox on gen 7+ iPods, it's a "device" now

 

[seri0us]

I'm still clinging to my dying Clip Zip with Rockbox, I really hate that the concept of a tiny kickaround "MP3 player" that doesn't suck is pretty much dead because phones took their place for the vast majority of people. Manufacturing in general seems to be limited to gimmicky hipster bullshit (Pono) or overdesigned loaded audiophile toys (Fiio) (unless I've missed something neat). Cheap Aliexpress players like Ruizu's that attempt to fill that niche fall apart when your eyes begin to focus on it, but the inability to use Rockbox on any of these is the biggest dealbreaker. Rockbox is a really nice firmware, but the players that let you use it best haven't been made in a decade or more, so you need to play eBay roulette for them, and they're getting pricier because of their finite nature. Because of this, the Rockbox project will eventually die as well, that's gonna suck

The hardiness aspect is what makes the Sansa stuff an especially big loss. My Zip has a some bad sectors on the internal memory, so it likes to crash once in a while. The battery only holds 65% of what it used to with voltage drooping a little, so it has issues accessing micro SD cards on anything other than a full* charge or connection to a power bank. The buttons are starting to go, but at 12 years old, that's pretty tough, and it's still a snappy way to play literally all my music with loads of options, and still does a lot more than anything I can find on my phone, the DAC is also somehow better too. It also survived a couple washes. I guess Android Foobar is okay? But also sorta useless without components like on the PC, and to build on the touchscreen stuff above, going from tactile buttons you've been using forever to a touchscreen for music is miserable for things as basic as play/pause or seeking

It sucks we never saw Rockbox on the Zune, that was great hardware chained to some of the worst software in the world, it's like Microsoft set out to make an even worse iTunes with playlist/transfering issues to match, what an embarrassing fucking waste of Wolfson DAC's. I assumed if we were Jtagging our 360's, something like the Zune had some security fuckup we could exploit too, but as it turns out, nobody else bought a Zune, and there was a reason no first-world nation hosted most Xbox mods. Any hypothetical Zune port would be illegal in Microsoft's eyes since nothing's running without pulled keys, and the fact the fucking thing doesn't even work as mass storage device means development would be a giant pain the ass for a niche player. It's pretty much the same shit that killed Rockbox on gen 7+ iPods, it's a "device" now

I really wish I could use my Zune with Rockbox and Bluetooth.