Some iPod #retrocomputing history!

It did not launch with AAC support. The best you could do was VBR MP3.

AAC was likely added in mid-2003.

They made a very un-Apple like decision to under-promise and over-deliver. "1000 songs in your pocket" is based on 160k and 4 minute songs. My first MP3s were 128k.

Reddit claims the original iPod got AAC support in firmware 1.4.

The specs page mentions AAC for the first time between March and October 2003.

AAC was Mac-exclusive at first. Looks like there were some dark ages where iTunes was Mac-only, and windows had MUSICMATCH Jukebox Plus.

Not a lot of people realize this, but LAME/MP3 encoding in general progressed from the early 2000s. I don't know how substantial the improvements were.

I think 128k would be very listenable, especially on the $20 earbuds and earbud-like headphones everyone wore back then.

Hydrogenaudio test back in 2006 showed a tie between MP3 and AAC at 128k.

https://web.archive.org/web/20011103172549mp_/http://www.apple.com/ipod/specs.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20031008043154/http://www.apple.com/ipod/specs.html

https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Hydrogenaudio_Listening_Tests

RE: https://social.lol/@brennan/117240582001712896

This is UNHINGED. As far as I know, the only PC Linux distros with any money are Ubuntu, Red Hat, SteamOS, and maybe SUSE.

$18.5 million is very likely more than the total money spent by ~35 of the top 40 Linux distros.

The Elementary founder works on just $75,000 a year.

https://mastodon.online/@danirabbit/117009825329329714

#askfedi NO JOKES: Is there any context where not disclosing genAI usage makes sense?

Joke replies - NOT ALLOWED
"There's no use for gen #AI" - great, so disclosing it helps people see that. We don't need a reply on this one.
Serious answers - Encouraged!

#askfedi #infosec is there seriously no better file hasher than this 20 year old app

My Odroid HC4 ARM box holds up great for basic use. The only times I notice slowdown:

apt update/install
150k "rm" commands for 150k files*

*generated by rmlint. rmlint and fclones are the only file dedupers worth using. rmlint is conservative and probably the safest deduper on the market.

I feel like this rm job would be <1 hour on a desktop, but here it's going to be like 24 hours.

https://rmlint.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html

NAS v1:

Odroid HC4 (about as fast as a RPi 4)
OpenMediaVault

Like most GUI-frontends to terminal-based tools, it got unwieldy. Especially when new OMVs came out.

NAS v2:
2010-era high end AMD Phenom II gaming PC
Proxmox, Turnkey Linux Fileserver, Alpine Linux running docker

Boring, but also unwieldy. Technically nagware / donationware. Samba management just sucks (seems to be a problem with the granular permissions of Windows/ACLs and them not going 1:1 with the Linux paradigm). Too much enterprise-grade scaling options that just get in the way for a single machine.

The main reason I'm switching is the wattage. I'm guessing v3 will use 20+ fewer Watts of power.

NAS / home server number 3 thread.

cc @scottjenson

My informal TLD explainer:

you can just buy a domain name for about $10 a year. there's literally no technical or security difference between any domain extension, be it .com, .org, .social, .engineer, or anything else. there's nothing that makes wikipedia.org more secure than wikipedia.party. (wikipedia.org is owned by the wikimedia foundation, unlike wikipedia.party.) A domain name is just something you choose to call yourself, and you give a company 10 bucks a year for the privilege.

It's basically the same thing as putting up a cardboard sign in front of your house, with the added restriction that your cardboard sign can't be an exact duplicate of one that already exists. wikipedia.org is only trustworthy because people go in the wikipedia library and note "right, got it. the cardboard sign that says wikipedia.org is good." and maybe when they see wikipedia.party they think "that cardboard sign isn't set up outside the library."

almost every domain name (TLD) is managed by reputable companies who respond to spam and virus takedown notices. you can look up domain names via a "whois" search, which is like looking up someone in a phone book. you can look up a domain on whois and see some basic facts about it, like how long it's been around.

I could create microsoft-official.com and there's nothing about .com that would get it closed faster than microsoft-official.cool . If anything, the .cool is an easier identifier that this is not a popular corporate site. By social conventions, major corporations stick to .com, .org, .ai, and so on. mastodon servers can be hosted on any extension, so a lot of people have fun with it - lgbtqia.space for example.

extra info: a handful of domains are not open to the public, like .google . in very rare cases, the group that manages the domain extension ("TLD") may prohibit some kinds of material. for example, .de is germany and they (presumably) ban holocaust denial. this is not something that comes up in practice basically ever.

More than one person has told me that they are slightly suspicious of #mastodon URLs, because most of them use uncommon TLDs like `social`, `engineer`, or `pizza`.

It might be worth explaining TLD basics on the common onboarding sites for Mastodon (like lists of servers, or explainers for what Mastodon is). These are people who don't really know what a TLD even is. #UX #fediverse #askfedi

@scottjenson

Two of the most important lessons I learned in grad school:

1) you can register anything you want as a fictitious business name and get an official looking logo and letterhead and credit card

2) if a conference rejects your paper, your business can book the next conference room over at the same hotel and hold your own workshop and present your paper anyway

@datum do you know anyone with advice on where to buy #covid masks/respirators? mostly looking at semi-"disposable" masks for a group.

if you were born when the California High Speed Rail authority was founded, you could have done these things in these year spans

5 years: goo goo ga ga
13 years: gone through k12 education
4 years: college degree

flown to japan
4: learn japanese
4: do another 4 year degree

and the HSR authority would still be jacking off in Bumfuck, California while you'd be riding the shinkansen every weekend to fuck elderly women in Ōsaka-shi to get your mind off your stressful 80 hour salarythem workweek in Tōkyō

SlavaSoft HashCalc is the best GUI hash/checksum calculator made to date. I've tried a handful on Windows and this app which dates back to the mid-2000s is by far the most convenient and simple. It has drag and drop.

This episode of "The Adventures of Pete & Pete" has one of the best premises in television. Moments from it have stuck with me forever. Little Pete hears his favorite song, but he can't find it again. He puts everything into recovering it. It's a parable of what we now call #LostMedia. #Nickelodeon #PeteAndPete #90s #TV

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wKh6siqIPc

#PSA if you own the place you live, at some point you will need to buy a new heating device. Your old one will break. There are 3 things you can do while you wait: insulate, insulate, insulate.

You have a golden opportunity. The best time to insulate your home is when your heater works and you can spread out the upgrades over years. You may be eligible for tax breaks. You should expect your heater to die after 10-30 years.

You should also get a smart thermostat that can record your furnace usage. It should store data for at least a year (Home Assistant can probably do this). The cost for this should be $250 or less, with some as cheap as $100.

You should do this because it will give you a very accurate estimate of your actual heating use. As Technology Connections points out, almost every heat installer in the USA oversizes what they install - costing you *significantly* more money.

When your old heater breaks, you will know your heating needs.[1] And with the insulation, hopefully you have decreased those significantly!

Insulation is a way to #green up even the dirtiest home heater! It sets the table for your next green heat pump.

[1] Technology Connections has a video on a lot of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTsQjiPlksA

#home #DIY

Imagine sending a 2005 computer back to 1985. Computers in the 80s were cinder blocks that could barely display basic UI. A 2005 computer is mindblowing in comparison: friendly UX and informative websites.

Now imagine sending a 2025 computer back to 2005. Is any piece of it mindblowing? Hard mode: no AI and no gaming.

On this week's techpod, Brad wishes for "less compute." I agree. All of my server needs outside of a Plex-like media server can be fulfilled by Intel CPUs available in full low watt boxes for $50 to $75 easily. Outside of gaming and ML, I'm rapidly approaching the era where my main "desktop" computer can shrink into a laptop or 1L micro PC. Not a $2000 top of the line box - a $50 eBay special.

https://www.chengeric.com/homelab
https://techpod.content.town/episodes/318-system-b-or-systemd

#Nixos for servers is a promising future. https://www.chengeric.com/homelab