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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • It wasn’t (maybe still isn’t?) a strictly proportional representation system, so the urban areas get slightly fewer members per vote. More equal than the Electoral College, but still imbalanced in favor of the rural areas where wealthy people have huge estates that have been handed down for generations.


  • Churchill lost re-election because he made a really tone-deaf radio address on Labour’s plans for socialized medicine, national insurance, and nationalisation of utilities and critical industries (all of which the overwhelming majority of the country wanted), basically calling them communism, said it would require a “gestapo” to implement, and he wouldn’t stand for it.

    Clement Atlee more or less thanked him for that speech the next day, and assumed the Prime Minister role after the Tories were absolutely trounced in the 1945 election.

    Atlee lasted 6 years. Labour ran the show with a huge majority for a full five year term, then got an unworkably small majority of 5 seats in 1950. Snap election was called in 1951, and Conservatives retook the majority, despite Labour getting 48.8% of the vote, and Conservatives only getting 48.0%.

    …Funny how that keeps happening.

    Churchill resumed the role of Prime Minister until he retired in 1955.


  • If you’re interested in something that doesn’t even exist, and should be more-or-less straightforward:

    Music/podcast app that will accept VST plugins (there are many FOSS ones, as well as non-FOSS ones) so that we can compress/limit the sound range on podcasts while in the car. Or even a built-in compressor/limiter that’s based on FOSS compressors.

    I was listening to a hysterical podcast episode between three people, but one of mics was way louder than the other two. I had to take it into Pro Tools and fix it myself before listening to it.

    There are apps that allow EQ, but none that do actual compression, from what I can tell.



  • Gentoo. Not an Arch fork, and uses OpenRC by default. I use it and love it. Portage is the best package manager out there, imo.

    You can still get binaries of the really annoying things to compile, like Firefox. Otherwise, it’s all source-based.

    I’d advise installing it in a VM or on a spare computer first to get your hands around what it is.

    In your case, you’ll want to specify the following flags in you makefile:

    OpenRC, -systemd

    You’ll add a bunch of others in there too depending on architecture and personal priorities.

    Follow the handbook. https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/

    There’s also Calculate Linux, which is basically Gentoo with a graphical front end, but I think it’s Intel only. CLI is more fun anyway.




  • I work in music and audio post, and everyone I work with would love to be able to use Reaper (or Logic, or Nuendo) instead of Pro Tools, if Pro Tools didn’t have the post industry completely captured in the US.

    Reaper is a world-class product, and the team could easily charge 10x as much for the pro licenses, and get it. Stick with Reaper.

    There are alternative drum triggers for Linux, I’m sure. Even SPL makes a drum exchanger. There’s got to be one out there.

    VMR shouldn’t be a problem to run, I just don’t know what the install process would look like.

    I’m pretty sure Airwindows plugs are Linux compatible, probably Audio Obsession too.

    In any case, Reaper’s stock plugins are awesome. My only real complaint about them is the EQ cramping in the hi-end, which is typical for stock plugins.


  • I’m of two minds about people not adblocking.

    On one hand: Ads are gross noise pollution, and people are increasingly unaware of all the noise around them (or the noise they’re generating) largely because they’ve been passively trained to “tune out” ads. Also consumerism.

    On the other hand: As long as there are a significant amount of people oblivious to the possibility of adblock, corporate ad mobsters and the other worst people in the world out there will largely leave those of us blocking their ads alone. If everyone ran adblockers, we’d definitely live in a world of WEI… and probably worse. So, maybe all those people are watching ads so that I don’t have to, as the YouTube thumbnails say.