AOL really did them a disservice.
I guess they have other products now but I haven't heard of anyone using those either...
In 2021, I bought a soundbar from Creative. The quality of the soundbar was actually pretty good, but it had a really awful noisegate issue where if the scene was too quiet, it would just cut to zero. For some movies this wasn't a big deal, but for most movies it made them unwatchable.
We put up with it for a year, but we got sick of it and I was about to buy a replacement. I tried the updated firmware on Creative's website, and it didn't help, but then I found some YouTube video with like 10 views that claimed to have a fixed firmware from Creative that wasn't publicly available, and they had a link to some shady mega.co.nz download for it. Stuff like that screams "malware!", but I figured that I was about to throw the soundbar into the Goodwill pile anyway, so if I break it no big deal, and it's not like the soundbar was connected to the internet, just optical audio, and I don't think anyone could install a crypto minor on there, so against my better judgement I installed the firmware and...
It worked! It fixed the noisegate problems entirely, and now the soundbar is actually excellent. For some reason, Creative still hasn't bothered uploading the fixed firmware on their website though.
So it's weird, Creative is still around, and making theoretically-decent products, but they lack a lot of polish. Kind of a sad fall from grace.
I sometimes think it’s engineers bypassing QA that will never come.
Aureal made 3D audio for the first time - real 3D audio, ray-traced sound - and it was absolutely staggeringly amazing. I played the first Half-Life using this. It was incredible - unforgettable.
Creative destroyed them, to destroy the competition, and that technology far as I know has since then been lost - the 3D stuff I know of after that is not ray-traced.
Loads of music I discovered, which I wouldn't have through Spotify.
I'm reminded of listening to the Dr Demento radio show and discovering a lot of niche acts that way too, and realizing my dad was actually a cool guy for recommending it to me, and being surprised that it was still around as was he, at least at the time.
I just looked him up, and he's STILL at it, the madlad. Brings a smile to my face. Music really is universal.
Thanks for the reminder, happymellon!
The historical record is fairly clear about why the two stations came under the SomaFM banner, and the fact that they’re both based in SF probably didn’t hurt, but after looking into why they went their separate ways, I still don’t know why BAGeL Radio went independent again in 2021 or 2022 beyond a statement from the operator of BAGeL Radio on a Reddit post asking the same thing. I’m glad they both exist, obviously, and apparently the live nature of the BAGeL Radio broadcast was a factor in integrating it to SomaFM’s more passive playlist-based streaming setup, but that’s all I know.
The thing that fascinated me more, though, were the people setting up there own talk shows. I was kind of one of those irritating edgy-atheist teenagers, and so I remember listening to the "The Infidel Guy Show" every week, and I thought it was so cool that he was able to make his own call-in talk show for fun. It felt like the internet was able to un-gatekeep stuff so that regular consumers could finally be in charge of their own entertainment.
The early broadband internet before YouTube was pretty weird. Internet video was very obviously possible (and there were sites like iFilm that showed that, as well as Shoutcast), and everyone kind of knew it was the "future", but it was also kind of unclear where the hell it was actually going to go and what the "future" actually meant.
I remember before YouTube, I was playing around with Screenblast Movie Studio as a twelve year old, hacking together music videos from pirated episodes of The Simpsons and Spongebob, or recording and editing together little skits I would me, and all I would ever be able to do was burn a DVD and show it to friends. One of my first internet purchases was a PCI capture card, actually, so I could plug in my 8mm video camera into my computer. Even in 2003 I knew it was possible to share videos online, but I didn't really have money to host it myself because they would eat an enormous amount of bandwidth.
It sucks that everything became centralized, but at the same time it is pretty cool that pretty much anyone can upload and share videos now. I upload unlisted videos to YouTube all the time whenever I edit something I want to share with friends.
I had built a portable live-streaming setup with an Asus Eee PC 901 with a Logitech USB webcam, and would record to the internal SD card. It was surprisingly capable and shock-proof due to the early internal SSD. I had the Linux variant because it had faster flash storage, but was weirdly partitioned between a fast 4GB and slow 16GB dual-SSD setup. I somehow managed to trim my Windows XP Pro install down to fit in the 4GB partition with nLite and used no swap file but switched to a fixed size swap on a RAM drive from system memory. I was able to get modded BIOS and system tray utilities that allowed for dynamic under- and overclocking and formatted my SD card to appear as internal storage to workaround some issues.
In the end I didn’t reach my goal of a fully mobile livestream setup due to the lack of fast enough mobile data, but it worked serviceably on WiFi of the time.
I had a lot of niche interests and strong opinions loosely held, and desired to use such tools to find my tribe online, as I had not yet moved to SF, and my world travels had so far been to relatively out of the way areas.
Its almost quaint to look back on that project, as all of that and more is now table stakes for even the lowest-end Android phone, and shortly after I moved to SF in 2009, I would get an HTC G1 and would root and stock ROM it with an expanded battery to essentially redo that entire build all over again with a single standalone mobile phone, though the camera quality and app support was lacking. By the time Periscope came around, I had already moved on to some other “current thing” boondoggle tech hobby projects.
I now personally believe that seeking meaning through external acknowledgement and validation is putting the cart before the horse and also neglects both my own expression for its own sake and appreciating others as ends unto themselves rather than means to my own self-actualization and generally am content to keep to myself to the degree that I do, while deepening my appreciation of others as individuals who are largely also just trying to connect, to be seen.
I’ve mellowed out a lot in most ways, and going through all those experiences made me realize I was at the time a kind of misanthropic pick-me who was good enough, good looking and lucky enough, and smart enough to set myself up to fail by optimizing for the wrong outcomes. I knew what I wanted but lacked a long enough view to actually achieve what I wanted in my life, relationships, friendships, or goals. I didn’t do the work, and I felt a misplaced sense of entitlement to rewards I likely deserved but didn’t earn, so even my humble achievements felt hollow. Once I realized that I was the problem and my project was to work on myself first, a lot of my desire to hack tech things together for its own sake took on a more personal focus.
To quote Halt and Catch Fire, computers aren’t the thing; they’re the thing that gets us to the thing. That thing was always true human connection and community. Once I realized that community is the end itself and not just the means to distract myself from my own thoughts, I had a much better understanding of myself and what I needed to do to be my best self. It all began with me.
Wherever you go, there you are, and it’s better to be comfortable being alone and better still to not be alone, so that experiences shared can multiply the concurrent rewards for all involved.
Sorry for the wall of text lol, hopefully that resonates with somebody.