Unsurprising, but still shitty. Par for the course for the company these days.

This is true, and is why I annoyingly have to keep robots.txt on my unpublished domains. Google does honor them for the most part, for now.

I just looked in detail through their privacy policy, and it looks like if you use their “service” they are collecting quite a bit of data, certainly more than I would have expected. I only use stand alone, non-federated homeservers and I have everything disabled as far as telemetry, etc, but I think you’ve convinced me to keep an eye on the other clients. I last test drove several last year and all of them were either lacking features I needed or had issues.

Are you specifically referring to the mobile client of Element? i wasn’t away of anything with the desktop client that has anything to do with location.

Perfect! Though we shouldn’t give Netflix and co any ideas on more classics to dredge up and ruin.

Oh, I remember ed! He’s the talking horse from that old black and white show, right?

My current favorite music player on PC is Quod Libet. It gives a bit of the old FB2K vibe with how its music selection works as well as all the plugins. I use it on Linux, but I know they have a Windows version as well.

I heard it spoken first as well, but I ended up seeing it in text form not long after. I think it would have been more confusing if that hadn’t been the era of internet companies thinking they were clever if they dropped a letter (usually a vowel).

I’ve never heard it pronounced any other way than “engine x”.

Interesting. If that is so, then I am surprised that neither actually support actual lossless at that res without blowing up the noise floor.

Oh, so they aren’t on bluetooth at all? That is an entirely different story, thanks for the info.

AFAIK, ALAC will not be actually lossless over bluetooth for the sames reason LDAC can’t be lossless; there simply isn’t enough bandwidth. That doesn’t mean that it won’t sound great or perhaps work better than LDAC.

It’s nearly lossess if you can connect and maintain a 990kbps connection, but it still doesn’t have enough bandwidth to do it truly lossless. I think it would require 1411kpbs to be actually lossless. It is still better than any codec I know of for bluetooth as far as that does, but bluetooth just kinda sucks for that sort of application.

The only consistent think about Skype is the way it continues to break in new unfun ways.

I did try out hipchat when looking for a Slack replacement and… it did not get chosen for a reason heh. Crazy as it is, we still use Skype for meetings because our CEO and his also-a-CEO brother refuse switch as they just barely understand Skype.

Obviously there is only a single Slack app, it was a common sarcastic phrase. What it implied is that your experience differs so wildly to mine and many others that there must be some other secret Slack app that one of us got :)

And it wasn’t just “more useless features” that happened after the buyout, though that definitely happened. It was things like the forcing of the free pro trial to try to push people into using said new useless features (we had been saving the trial to be able to export the full chat history when we left) and all the new fun bugs related to all the new features. Also, they loved moving around the UI, adding and removing things, etc. It got bad enough that I had to stop using the native client and use a web browser and use extensions to modify the page payout to get it back to how I liked it.

I guess I was very aware of these issues because I use a lot of different chat applications and I see all the places that they should have been doing better. I had already trialed several other options (hipchat, mattermost, google chat, ms teams, matrix/element, whatever zoho’s chat was called), but was sticking with it because moving your company to a new platform is a huge hassle and I knew would likely not get another chance to do it if I chose poorly. In case you’re wondering, we eventually went with Matrix/Element because it was finally good enough and was the most private as long as you have the infrastructure to host.

Also, Discord is the most vile POS chat service I have ever used and I refuse to ever use it again. It is disappointing how popular it is and how many of my friends use it.

You must have used a different Slack than I did. It was much heavier than a simply chat app should be and it always had annoying, but rarely game breaking, issues. When Salesforce bought them the enshittification began in earnest and it quickly went further downhill. Luckily, due to said downhill turn I was able to get my company to stop using Slack altogether.

I have used mini PCs as a servers for years with file serving being a major duty of them. Granted my storage needs aren’t excessive, but most NUCs or Nuc-likes can hold two drives, some can have a third if you include 2.5" drives. My AsRock A300 can hold 4 drives (two of each), but its m.2 support sucks so that’s not as much of a boon as it sounds. If you need significant storage, there is no replacement for something that can hold 3.5" drives though since those can now reach 20+ GB a drive.

I go with scenario 1 because it radically reduces the ways I can screw things up for myself.

I’ve used a bunch of different solutions over the years, but currently I just run Gerbera and it streams my local library to my TVs because of the sheer ease. It’s not perfect, fast forward and rewind can be iffy to get working with some configurations, but otherwise it has been a smooth experience.