Spotting fake signatures with Meat Loaf as an example ►
◄ Random issue: Your Sinclair #79 (July 1992)
This entry is part of my Project Zebra series covering migration to Linux for personal computing use.
Title reference: Chris Rea, Gone Fishing.
I don't generally use Firefox on desktop (although that may change, see below) let alone in other languages, so let's remove the language packs.
sudo apt remove --purge firefox-esr-l10n-all
sudo apt remove --purge $(apt-cache show firefox-esr-l10n-all | grep Depends | sed -n -e 's/^.*://;s/,//gp')
Since I've got a couple of Wine "bottles" set up for apps and for games, I've reinstalled Foobar with the vlevel Winamp DSP plugin in preference to Deadbeef. It's got a proper media library (including folder structures) and proper on-the-fly volume normalisation courtesy of that plugin, its default appearance is fugly and it works brilliantly. I don't need cover art or visualisations. I just want to find stuff instantly and queue up some songs, with the player out of the way in the system tray. The only point to remember is that I needed to whitelist what file extensions I was indexing into the library, otherwise I was getting crashes.
Apparently I hadn't used get_iplayer since switching to Debian. Time to install it.
sudo apt-get install libwww-perl liblwp-protocol-https-perl libmojolicious-perl libxml-libxml-perl libcgi-pm-perl atomicparsley ffmpeg
sudo wget http://raw.githubusercontent.com/get-iplayer/get_iplayer/master/get_iplayer
sudo install -m 755 ./get_iplayer /usr/local/bin
get_iplayer --prefs-add --tv-quality="sd"
Software watch...
Gnome relaxes a bit on anti-user, anti-customisation stances.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/30/gnome_47/
Thunderbird in the tray... I'm sure Debian'll get it eventually. Birdtray works fine for now.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/22/mozilla_thunderbird_ffix/
GIMP 3 is nearly here... not sure why I keep track when Krita exists.
https://www.gimp.org/news/2024/10/05/development-update/
Still no VLC Android 3.6 (with A-B settings loss fixed) but it's at beta 6.
https://github.com/videolan/vlc-android/commits
Google's huge conflict of interest war on ad-blockers continues.
https://www.xda-developers.com/google-chrome-manifest-v3-ad-blockers/
But it's not just ad-blockers, there's going to be considerable backlash and migration if most other extensions also stop working. Firefox has found that out in the past. Things don't currently look promising, really:
The uBlock Origin wiki notes that there are already Chromium forks continuing Manifest 2 support.
Memo to self: ad-blocking, scroll-wheel, right-click, new tab page, volume control.
I'll probably write more on this but I found out that there's an MP3.com archival project on archive.org from here and here. And like you can go back in time with GeoCities.ws to when there were only eight incarnations of the Doctor, someone's kindly hosting the page assets. So you can see what relatively mainstream bands were embracing the phenomenon like Jack Off Jill and also tens if not hundreds of thousands of smaller artists on http://mp3-2003.computer-legacy.com/
http://mp3-2003.computer-legacy.com/artists/81/the_cheapskates.html
http://mp3-2003.computer-legacy.com/artists/71/leighton_b_watts.html
http://mp3-2003.computer-legacy.com/artists/154/nothing_to_lose2.html
From those examples I think that (at least in 2003) unless a band had special arrangements, it was three tracks hosted at a time in gloriously higher frequency impaired 128kbps. I found quite a few bands that way whilst at university, mostly skipping the file sharing network phenomenon until host and tube sites took over.
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