• 0 Posts
  • 75 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle





  • I have to tell you, I know many intelligent people that have succumbed to propaganda, and outrage porn addiction. I see it continue to happen on all sides of the political isle. (This isn’t a both sides kind of statement, simply acknowledgement that the same tactics work on our brain, indifferent of political ideology.)

    Whether they are hooked on the dopamine rush of rage baiting up votes, likes or comments; or only seeing everything in the world through a myopic lens of negativity, it has captured many of my friends and family, including myself for a time.

    For some their drug is Fox News, others it’s Reddit, Facebook or TikTok, the results are often the same.

    I have yet to figure out a manner in which to communicate with individuals who spend considerable amounts of time in echo chambers, constantly having their personal beliefs reinforced. Evasion of cognitive dissonance and social conflict are very powerful psychological motivations. I wish I knew the solution.


  • Now that we have a six week abortion ban, with abortion on the ballot as a state constitutional amendment, and one for legalized recreational marijuana, there is a very significant chance for Florida to be in play.

    Many people here are very upset with the state of insurance, especially homeowners. The Biden campaign just came out and said they will be targeting Florida to flip it.

    Every vote will count, remember a few thousand votes gave us Rick Scott, we have a chance to remove him as well. There’s a lot at stake this year.



  • Given the reality that Linux simply isn’t viable for some people (including myself), I highly recommend using this tool.

    https://christitus.com/windows-tool/

    Between this, and manually uninstalling a lot of bloat (or using a specific type of windows install) and a few other tweaks, windows becomes significantly more usable.

    Disabling garbage in the task bar, removing Cortana and indexing services, etc etc, it can also add a fairly decent uplift in performance.

    I’m sure there is still telemetry being collected but significantly less and less impact on my user experience and day to day performance.

    Oh and make sure you turn off auto/feature updates!



  • It greatly depends on the traffic pattern here! I also mentioned this to another reply, but our county has IMO very poorly designed traffic patterns for road crossing. It will generally turn white with a walk sign for a few seconds, and then quickly shift to a flashing red hand indicator with a count down, which means you have X number of seconds remaining to walk until the full red hand (don’t walk) shows up. Flashing red hand symbol IMO is not the best indicator for “you can still walk.”

    The times I’ve had this happen are at very large intersections that have 3 lanes each way on one side and 2 lanes per side on the cross road. With lead greens, and various traffic patterns the walk signs do follow a specific pattern, but there are also opportunities for right on red without the pedestrian having right of way. This mostly occurs during the transitional periods, and during lead greens, which can be a significant amount of time in intersections of this size.

    Yes of course it’s the motorists job to avoid running over pedestrians, I don’t think that was ever a question.





  • I think the mixing being different is likely dependent upon how good the engineer and mastering engineers are/were. I’d wager a fair number of bands releasing their albums to vinyl these days simply send over a very similar final master (maybe slightly less loud if you are lucky) to the vinyl cutting without much thought, because it’s the hip thing to do.

    You are accurate, that they should ensure that low frequencies are mono compatible, but it is likely less of an issue for the style of music most associated with vinyl releases (indi etc), as stylistically they don’t tend to use stereo widening on low frequency instruments. Generally they have kick and bass down the center channel, or I suppose going mono style out of L/R if they are trying to be really old school, but that would likely take a completely different mix adding to production budget as I can’t imagine if would work to well on phones etc, which a lof of music is mix for unfortunately.

    None of the artists I produce or mix for have requested it yet, but if they did I would send them to Fuller Sound Mastering as Michael has been around for ages and knows how to handle masters for vinyl.

    Vinyl cutting also has an EQ curve offset that is printed into the vinyl itself, cutting the bass and boosting the high frequency, which is then re-applied by the players preamp circuitry, I believe it’s referred to as pre and de-emphasis. Funny enough my mastering DAC actually has this feature for some kind of old early CD technology for some lower resolution digital formats that had issues with noise and filtering and used a similar technology, I had never heard of this until I purchased this particular unit haha.




  • I think you missed my sarcasm…

    Edited to add: most CDs sound the same as their digital releases (assuming they had the same master which I’ve found isn’t always true), but occasionally you can actually get higher resolution, up to 96k/24 bit, which do sound different depending on your playback device.

    Most of the difference is likely due to the nature of the DA filter being applied during playback, as I certainly won’t notice the noise floor between 16-24 bit, and any frequency difference is far far behind my range of hearing.

    If you aren’t familiar with what I’m referring too, different DA implementations use varying filtering techniques, some have a slight roll off in the upper frequency range to improve the accuracy of transient response, while others use a flatter frequency response sacrificing the transient. Newer DAs from some manufacturers allow you to select which option you prefer. At double and quad sample rates this can largely become a moot point as any sacrifice to the frequency response is far out of the range of human hearing.


  • I more than welcome you to come to my county, the most densely populated and poorly designed for any kind of walk ability and communicate to our various cities how to improve! Some spots such as St. Pete, Dunedin and a few other downtowns are walkable, but most of the area the residential zones are far from many other businesses and services, as least much to far to walk.

    That isn’t a joke when I say cities, as literally, you drive 10-15 minutes and you are in a different municipality controlled by a completely different governing body. We have a county wide public transit body, but each city has its own objectives and desires.

    I am not oblivious to anything you are stating, but it is much more complex than stating obvious solutions we would all love to have. My work is a 25-30 minute drive, and the only public transit option is a bus, which takes 2 hours, not kidding!

    Attempting to simply redesign a disaster that went from orange groves to wild urban sprawl necessitates funding on a variety of levels, state, county and local, and land that isn’t readily available here.


  • Let me further explain to you what is occurring here:

    People on bicycles, without stopping, will ride from a sidewalk, across an intersection, 2 or 3 lanes per side here, fairly big roads. When you pull up to a light, you are watching for oncoming traffic in addition to any changes to the area you may turn into. A bicycle, who wasn’t there and rides into an intersection with complete disregard for traffic or crosswalk signals can be in front of your car in a literal split second. If I wasn’t looking before accelerating (I am in a manual car and have to put it into gear and all), I would simply run them over. Clearly, that isn’t the case, but I imagine with the age of people here and the size of the vehicles they drive it is not an infrequent occurrence.

    I’m really surprised how many people missed the sarcasm of my first sentence and literally the rest of the post…