Thanks for the warning, but to make the the warning, can edit this and put “[NSFW]” in the post title, please?

I just looked it up, and it seems a lot of the pre-Apple Silicon MacBook had swappable airport cards that used a completely standard mini PCIE slot. From a cursory google search, it looks completely possible to swap in something like an Intel Wi-Fi card that is supported natively by the kernel.

A mini-PCIE Wi-Fi modem can be had for not too expensive, around the $30 range; in fact, if you have a good stack of old Wintel laptops, one of those might have a card that works well. In fact, I did that with my sister‘s laptop (although she was using Windowd) – her Realtek Wi-Fi card was causing endless misery, so I ripped the Intel modem out of an ultra book from circa 2016 and put it in her laptop. No more issues.

The 2023 IDW Star Trek Annual’s plot was basically all the holodeck programs on the USS Theseus read “Photons Be Free”. Luckily, Tom Paris happened to be there and understood what the phrase meant, and Captain Sisko dropped off holographic Spock, Janeway, Stamets, HMS Enterprise Picard and Riker, Sato, etcetera with their holographic equipment to settle on a planet.

Don’t you mean that that you like PADDs with 3.7% deeper bevels?

Exactly. Luckily, back in high school, my IB History class spent a good couple months just learning about authoritarian rulers and their tactics.

I especially like pulling out Pinochet because he’s a clear and relatively recent example of right wing authoritarianism, manipulation of existing religious structures, and US government support of authoritarian regimes that help contextualize its trend towards authoritarianism.

I think the biggest issue with ENT is probably the sexualization of T’Pol, the culmination of a nasty habit in Berman Trek.

I could tune out 7’s catsuit because she was otherwise well-written and the good plotlines outnumbered the bad, but it feels like at least 75% of all T’Pol stories were of the horny Berman type, to the detriment of her character.

s/MP3s/FLACs/, but otherwise, I agree.

Drive space isn’t scarce these days, so I think keeping a lossless copy somewhere is good, if just to compress the audio for a device with less storage.

2 things:

1. A lot of artists, you can pay money through Bandcamp or the artist’s store to get their music legitimately (and in lossless format, if you care about that kind of thing), and they often get a decent chunk of that money, especially when it comes to indie labels and self-published people.
2. Why listen to (relatively) crappy YouTube audio when you can just get a FLAC or high bitrate MP3 off SoulSeek or simit?

At least in the objective legal sense, it very much is in the eyes of the YouTube terms of service and the law of most jurisdictions with strong copyright protections.

There is a legal distinction between streaming on YouTube (normal TOS-compliant use) and downloading the video as a whole through a 3rd party tool (circumvention of copyright protection, and YouTube gets no ad revenue with the download), which is usage outside the TOS.

Now, I don’t really give a darn about following US* copyright law for a megacorporation’s sake¹ and have gone ahead and downloaded from YouTube, but it’s still piracy in the legal sense. This is not intended as a criticism of your actions, just a legal nitpick.

*Obviously, not everyone here is American (good riddance); this is just my personal experience. 1: Especially considering Google’s breaking it all the time with their ML models in my opinion.

I second this, but with a few things I wish I would have known:

1. Before you hope on SoulSeek (with an application like Nicotine+), please study up on the etiquette - downloading someone’s shared files without sharing any files that they can choose to download for their collection is called leeching, and while some people don’t really care, a lot of SoulSeek users will get really angry if you do this because they’re giving you their internet bandwidth for nothing in return.
2. To share files, you have to port-forward; be sure to check your ISP’s terms of service. I hear that as long as you’re not using a huge amount of bandwidth, even stricter ISPs can be pretty lax on enforcing their anti-p2p rules, so you may be able to get away with the risk of breaking the terms of service. However, to truly reduce the risk, you should probably use a VPN.

Of course, there’s a whole other ethics of piracy rant I have, but I’d rather not pull it out right now. The main time I used SoulSeek was to download a rip of a rare TMBG CD (like, not a single copy on Discogs and only 1 on eBay).

Yes, but these are my two thoughts:

1. That’s basically just piracy, and my feelings are that while sometimes it’s ethical*, a lot of musical artists have made a good faith attempt to allow you to acquire it in a legal, DRM-free format at a reasonable price, meaning in a lot of cases it’s not ethical, especiallyf with streaming basically eliminating record sale revenue and tour profit margins getting thinner and thinner.¹
2. When I want to pirate, I would at least do it right; why extract lossy audio from YouTube with yt-dlp when you can easily get a lossless FLAC on SoulSeek or another peer-to-peer network?

*: if the media isn’t easily legally accessible, if it’s stuck under a bad corporation, and fair use like making an FMV. I think it’s much more ethical to pirate film and television, as if you pay for a film (whether a subscription or a Blu-Ray), it’s often just going to go to some ultra-rick executive who had nothing to do with the talented people who worked on the film. Also, DRM makes streaming an inferior experience to just opening a video file. Music is a completely different game, especially with the proliferation of indie labels and self-publishing.

1: Of course, if the artist is some multi-millionaire or billionaire artist, then go ahead.

Honestly, while I still use Apple Music for some things (I don’t like Apple, but I’m unfortunately stuck on it right now), I’m a big fan of building up a collection of digital media files bought either directly from artists or ripped from the CD collection I’m building. I usually go for FLAC, though less for its compression and more for its superior metadata support compared to WAVs.

For discovering new music, Bandcamp allows you to check out some songs; otherwise, check it out on YouTube or something and buy it directly from the artist later.

Like others have said, Bandcamp might not have everyone, but they do have a lot of indie artists and even some bigger ones. Some artists that don’t have everything on Bandcamp might have their own store you can buy from.

It for a fact uses CEF: https://www.spotify.com/us/opensource/

Chromium Embedded Framework literally describes itself as follows on its Git repos: “Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). A simple framework for embedding Chromium-based browsers in other applications.”

The Spotify “app” is mostly just web app code running on top of a single page Chromium instance, meaning for the most part, it isn’t truly native.

While we’re at it, let’s just pull in Chris Pine (multiverse crap) and William Shatner (Nexus crap) and have one of those nutty SNW episodes that sounds like a horrible idea but is surprisingly one of the better episodes that season:

True. I just think it’s a few years too early; armel is dying, but I don’t think it’s 32-bit x86 level dead. I feel like 2030 would have been a better year. If they really found the user base was that small, though, then I guess that’s less for Debian to maintain.

I like to imagine some weird historian who insisted on pen accidentally flipped the ‘9’ in ‘2191’, and that error just happened to end up in the Enterprise D’s historical database; the holodeck just went along with the error, and Riker was none the wiser, having gotten a C- in Early Federation History at the Academy and having frequently gone to the bathroom “for legitimate reasons” during his high school Earth history class. It was only in mid-2380 that he finally discovered his misconception.

Although it’d still be a bit dismal that trip only lived to 70.

MIPS I get, but armel feels a little weird; I’d wager there’s more production users of Debian on armel than RV64 - not a huge use case, but one that merits a bit more consideration.

I think ~2030 would have been a more realistic date, since most of the last devices with ARMv6 would be about 20 years old by then.

I love the Jake Nog shenanigans episodes.