I'm loving these LLM-powered hardware liberation projects! Another one that caught my eye that I'm hoping to make use of myself is to run Kodi on old Boxee media players:
https://github.com/yoavmagor/boxee-2026-yoavm
First: Thank you! Secondly: I wish more people did this. If you end up needing to manually enter the data, at least if you add it to a public database more people can benefit, which also makes it feel less frustrating.
I'm in the midst of a major music library overhaul and would not know how I'd ever get it done without Beets. For example, it's clearing out embedded images, fetching new hi-res artwork and verifying FLAC integrity, as I go through artist by artist.
The soundtrack to Lost Highway is one of my top albums, all categories. Equally as fascinating, weird, violent and beautiful as the film itself. The tracks are masterfully sequenced, often blend into each other and form a complete work in itself.
It has long been my testbed for gapless playback on various hardware and software, often to my disappointment. (I'm not sure the experience is even available on streaming platforms, where things are normally playlists of disparate blobs of data, where perhaps "this track is not available in your region".)
They may have higher ambitions for this generation! In the presentation (roughly at the 10-minute mark), they show off the standard target demographics and setups for creative work, then complementing that with some more enterprise-flirty stuff about making workers more productive and lowering office energy usage, only to finish off with this:
"And with the industry-leading reliability of macOS, healthcare systems can count on mini when providing critical care."
Whether you think music streaming in its current form is a net good or bad for humanity, consider not supporting Spotify the company. From the very start, they're nothing but grifters.
Daniel Ek has his background in ads, SEO and related stuff –basically every possible way to make a buck using this newfangled internet thing – including selling virtual clothes for virtual dolls to kids age 9-17.
The teaming up with Martin Lorentzon was never about music, but simply finding an untapped market, a niche in which to apply their particular set of skills of hawking stuff online. They teamed up with the guy behind µTorrent and eventually convinced the major labels to buy into the idea (by getting a cut). The idea that they are on the side the art form, let alone artists, is pure mythogenesis to serve their brand.
Recently, music hasn't been enough to feed the growth. They want to colonize podcasts, an open ecosystem, and have put billions of dollars into investments and deals locking popular podcasts onto their platforms. They now intend to do the same with audio books.
Spotify has from the very start had an incestuous relationship with labels and various middlemen. It was never a fair game, they make special deals whenever it serves their purpose (driving the price down). Everyone involved is guaranteed to make a cut before the artist, and the entire ecosystem is built upon the idea that the less they pay out to the artist, the better their numbers look. Nowadays they don't even pay out anything at all unless you have 1000 streams, which just happens to be about two thirds of the catalogue. Is it in their best interest to keep songs with 500 streams from getting more streams, or not?
Why would they care about money laundering, or legitimate artists having their entire body of work deleted by a middleman because someone maliciously sent a bot their way?[1] The cheaper they can amass content, the better. Hence these backroom deals with what are basically content farms. What the featured article describes is not only sanctioned, it's the entire strategy going forward.
Once generative AI comes further along, what their algorithm will push will continue to be what serves their bottom line, i.e. the cheap stuff. You'll soon see the audio book equivalent of Johan Röhr, churning out thousands of books, narrated in real time by a non-human voice, algorithmically pushing out authentic works from all the lists.
Speaking of iOS and the associated hardware, an immediate dealbreaker for me in terms of daily usage is the clipping to sRGB.
This stuck ut immediately to me trying the app out, which made me read about it on your blog[0]. Oddly, when accessing Ente on the web (Safari on a Mac), the thumbnails look right but the full view is sRGB.
I understand Flutter has made some progress in this department [1], but I guess there's more going on here?
The fundamentals of the project look absolutely great! Hope to become a user very soon.
Maybe Pierre can pull it off himself. He’s clearly knowledgeable and has strong convictions and Darktable is incredibly powerful, so I’m hoping the good bits from either camp can be reconciled into something lasting, minding the bus factor.
Darktable’s issues and lack of coherent stewardship is quite noticeable.
Just received notification and went to order. Shipping to my location (Nordic region) turned out to be expensive enough that I’ll have to pass on this for now and live with older hardware for a while yet. Too bad!
There's one thing I cannot stand about the Apple streaming platform: the first one or two seconds of a song seem to be served at a lower bitrate, making any powerful intro hits/notes basically get a low-pass filter applied.
Or, at least this is my understanding of it – that they've prioritized serving audio FAST, rather than waiting an extra second for the higher bitrate to buffer. I find it absolutely infuriating and can't un-notice it. For some reason, it seems to behave the same if the bandwidth/latency is great or poor, or whether files are cached or not.
I don't use other services, but never experience this with any other player (including my own Navidrome setup), even if the files are the exact same.
Do you have a good reason to believe “Cate” doesn’t in fact have a conjoined twin with a rare facial deformity placing her left eye roughly in line with her mouth?
Thanks for the details! The Fujifilm SP500 doesn't seem as utterly unattainable as an $18,000 Noritsu, but it's still a bit of a stretch for anything but commercial work. I have a few of the latest and greatest Nikons which still yield pretty great results.
It does run on Windows, and on the Mac you have the option av installing the current versions from Adobe. Even without an active subscription, you'll still have access to the library module (i.e. all your metadata) and can do various exports etc.
I would be interested in hearing more about your experiences running these and possibly some notes how they compare regarding scan quality etc. Do you primarily scan 35 mm?