nettletea

It's a CLI python app, so I'd have though that it was Windows friendly.

I spent days trying to organise my collection of music (and still haven't suceeded). It's in many formats. In the past I've stripped metadata and just relied on file names, and file structure. I've later re-added it, due to helping playback on some devices. Tagging generally annoys me, and doesn't bring me much. The thing I'd quite like is sleeve notes, and good track info, who wrote the song, which artists played on it etc.

Anyway I have tried a mix of quodlibet/exfalso (with plugins), foobar2k(with wine), mp3tag, and shell scripts. Then I discovered beets, and thought wow that's great. Only to later forget about the application and return to the laborious task of sorting out my files. I rediscovered beets and tested it on a directory of music and was pretty impressed with the ease of it all and the results. Far easier than attempting it by hand.

Having said that the bit that takes me the longest is gathering up and organising orphans. If they are albums, I have to get them into order, then try and locate the tags. Or pepper the files with enough clues, for a tagger. It's all a bit of a yawn fest.

Which reminds me, I bothered to apply replay gain to most of my albums with foobar2k but that sometimes results with very quiet playback on some albums on one of my players at least. I then curse profusely, and just want to rip all of the metadata back out, or even just throw the lot away...

It wouldn't matter though, if once you tried a recommendation, you could vote it in or out of future plays.

That's funny.

That's a bit of a holy grail. Because you need the shuffle to track your mood. I found that it really subdues my listening, in that I don't always want some punk music interupting a mellow interlude. So I've gone back to listening to albums, or crafted playlists.

There are album fillers, and there are tunes that are just bad, and they are better gone. Though granted, the holes don't feel quite right.

I'm trying to understand your MusicBrainz remark, are albums with missing tracks unidentifiable?

You can always rent and buy.

I'd be nervous buying DRM'd content from a supplier that may not be around in the future. But renting I could care less - unless I paid for years upfront - but you generally don't do that.

As someone that likes to pretty much always override author's styles, Chrome is pretty much out for me. There is no easy way in the browser settings to select your own stylesheet. Also there is no easy way to just turn off the author's stylesheet. Doing so can be quite useful for troublesome sites. In Firefox it's View -> Page Style -> None. But even that's obtuse. Not being able to easily flip between stylesheets in the browsers - has meant that author's can't really be bothered to supply them. Having some free well rounded Core styles, that users can apply to any site would be a nice to have feature in the browser, or alternatively making it very simple to add your own.

Opera is the only browser that felt like it let me apply my own stylesheet. Other browers behave inconsistantyl when adding my own. Even Firefox is odd. My compromise is just to specify foreground and background colours, with a larger font size, and an easy to read font. That way the layouts don't get that borked. Reading a well designed page with logical flow off can read quite well, if you apply your own styles, or use your desktops.

Mail selection with Yahoo is tricky, but it's mostly usable. The current iteration is way better than it has been. (They've fixed back button integration. )

Google use a lot of buttons without text, using icons instead, which a lot of the time are background images. This lends to a lot of mystery meat navigation. Google+ is a bit of nightmare on that front for me.

I don't think my setup is that exotic, all I'm doing is trying to use consistent background and foreground colours, font and text size.

It's amazing how many sites seem to gloss over accessibility.

An instagram page: http://instagram.com/p/ieluJhv-V7/

How it looks to me: http://postimg.org/image/an1jbvf65/

Yup, pretty useless. I've never been able to use/see Instagram pictures without flipping between browsers!

Regarding icon fonts:

I override all web fonts, I just want to use a readable one. There's a noticable trend with embedding icons in fonts. Yahoo mail uses them. This doesn't feel quite right, even if it is a neat hack, and it can be annoying.

How I view Yahoo mail: http://postimg.org/image/unnwg0d9p/

I agree with you on the JS front. Looking at you Yahoo mail -> and the user menu.

Imitation aside, the novel thing about this adaptation, is that it practices your typing pace and control. Other typing games focus more on raw speed. Some tutors report/measure your typing rate (Klavaro - fluidity, Amphetype - viscosity). This might some otherway. Though it's doing my shoulder in.

I'd be more concerned about the repurcussions of having it record everything rather than what it looks like.

See Black mirror: The entire history of you.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/

I'd barely notice glass if it looked like that, far less prominent than bluetooth headsets or white headphones, or people clutching smartphones and bumping into each other, or just randomly standing stationary like the zombies that we've become gazing into our navals, I mean smart phones.

There have been a fair few posts about this on HN. I think some people are actually quite glad of a HN blackout.

I did decide one year that I would not check those sites at work. And it helped. I didn't have the time or space at home to bother also, through exhaustion. I now only briefly fire up HN at work at lunchtime, and just scan the post titles. I'm not as disciplined at home.

At home I was lucky to have my battery die on my laptop, which has stopped me moving the laptop around the house. I'm actually quite glad of the little headspace that it gives me.

My partner cheats on me, by sneaking a tablet into the lounge, and that can feel a little weird. I think this has been discussed before. Couples spending more time with their phones/tablets at the expense of their relationship.

I still idle too much time on the PC. I remember a good activity. Time at the computer isn't that memorable. What happened to the last decade?

See also 'News is bad for you': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894244

Oh the paradox.

It's not just photo. It's as simple as people just wanting to be able to do things intuitively and easily. Hey I took a great photo at the weekend, let me share it with you, here you go, done. Or you must hear this song, or read this etc. Sharing has to be very easy.

I have an Aunt with an iPad full of photos, that she's pretty clueless as to how to backup or share. She's given up trying and just takes her iPad to her friends.

I have another Aunt who can't for the life her, get photos from her camera to her laptop. It's a trial.

So if you have a phone with a camera, that lets you seamlessly share photos, even if it's through imgur, facebook, or whatever, it's probably going to be easier than connecting up cables, trying to traverse file systems etc.

My brother wanted to sell a motorbike, and wanted to send the buyer a couple of photos. He was absolutely dumbfounded by the process because his SLR took big photos that his email provider rejected. He's not that web savvy. In the end I said it might be easier for you to just install Dropbox, and it was. How arse about face is that?

Even copying files onto some people's computers doesn't help that much, if their file management skills don't exist.

OSs (desktop) haven't functionally changed that much in the last decade on the face of it. And even the simple problems haven't been solved, which is laughable when you have an insight into the complexity of some of the work arounds.

Where does it state that?

Great that you touched on photo sharing. It's 2014 and it's still difficult to get photos from a camera to your computer to your friends. Publishing a simple web page is still deemed too difficult, discovering and managing contacts, and mass mailing them is hard.

Facebook basically stepped into the niche above. It adds instant messenging, and some automated feed organisation.

To some extent Email, IM and a little web space would suffice as well as some photo resizing tools! OSs, file managers and browsers could really help here, and if these tasks had been far easier to do in the first place Facebook wouldn't have even become what it is. Privacy and authentication for dummies is the other thing that has to be made and integrated into a solution.

With a little work Facebook could be decentralised, and having your Mum as a contact wouldn't make your social network toolset uncool.

It's easy to bemoan the incumbent, but it's not easy to get rid of them.

Remember Myspace, it was huge. A no-frills more personal alternative to it was born in Facebook. They are different products granted. But the early adopters chose to champion Facebook. Just like Google was the new cool Yahoo. Later Facebook grew into the huge monster that it is.

I have political reservations and worries about a silo like Facebook, but I have to respect it being a work of epic proportions.

A new kid on the block might be able to quickly grab the lime-light if they play their cards right, but there's the worry that they'll become the future uncool incumbent.

Some companies amazingly hang in there as the competition just isn't strong enough, good enough or wealthy enough to remove them.

As others have said a good product doesn't have to be cool. My bread board is brilliant, but it's not cool. The worry with I'd have with a well established web app, is that it might become a bloated behemoth.

People are happy to moan about Facebook right now, currently I don't really see a good alternative, but where there's a will there's a way.

Spotify desktop app Linux uses about 11% of my CPU, Rdio / Chrome uses a shade over 30%.

(Having said that the Spotify app's windowing is a bit ugly and glitchy for me. I think it's a Qt app and I mainly have GTK apps.)

If you read the homepage, it suggests free accounts get access for 6 months.

Like the TV then. Weirdly the ITV player in the UK has completely pathetic sound on the adverts that you can hardly hear, which makes them a little more bearable.

How many plays/mins until you run out?

Just signed up. A couple of weird issues, I was presented with people to follow. I had no idea who these people were, and wondered what it meant to follow them. I managed to skip that step. Then I couldn't find a search box to find any artists or songs to play. It was buried down the bottom left of the page. I then typed in an artist, then clicked on an album, and got some music. Then the UI flipped, with a nice big search on top.

Took me a while to find out what a free, unsubscribed account was.

The design is really washed out. Very lightweight grey fonts that are very difficult to read. It's all a bit white and bright. Stylbot for Chrome helps a little there as there aren't any user settings to change the colour scheme.

Oh some mystery meat navigation, click on the bottom bar to bring up the current playlist. Actually you have to do quite a bit of click experimentation, to find out what the icons do. Would be nice to have some hover tips.

Oh and you can scroll the playlist, it's not at all obvious!

Gripes aside, quite nice. Will see how I get on with it.

I will listen more now, but that's probably a good thing. I barely used it in the past because of the limit (no idea what it was, but I'd hit it). As I said if I had a higher quality audio device to listen to songs on, that could handle Spotify, I'd most likely buy a subscription.

I don't know why they don't just randomly make tracks unavailable for free accounts. Or they could remove two or more songs from each album. I didn't even mind the 5 plays of a song limit. The adverts are pretty annoying, but I take them on the chin in exchange for the music.

They probably just observered listening habits. I'd fire up Spotify, listen to it for a day or two, then hit the limit (that I always seem to forget exists). And just switch it off for another month or so. Limits or adverts would suit me. I hate, hate, hate the ads, and soon tire of the free service. My laptop's sound is pretty horrid that it's not worth me buying the subscription, but Spotify is still useful as a sampler.

Yes.

Well your eye sight is way better than mine. Metro apps are almost usable, the desktop is barely usable (I have to walk over to the set, and that's with the text size increased. I have a very small (not titchy) living room.

I can't even use my Windows 8.0 on my 32 inch TV that is 1080 sitting a couple of metres away, while keeping the resolution and boosting all the accessibility settings to the max.

Even the metro Apps I can't use.

I'd need a 50ft display! It's another facet of display/accessibility issues.

I had high hopes after Media Centre, that Windows would get this right. And bought Windows 8.0 specifically for this purpose. Disappointing. I'm forever going over to the TV and my neck hates it.

Personally I think part of the solution is to change the menuing system, breaking it out from the window. If I can at least use the menus/controls on apps I have a good chance of using them.

Punycode.

How do you know if someone isn't on Facebook? They'll tell you ;)

Facebook is still attractive despite the negatives, and I haven't yet seen a good wholesale replacement for it.

Personally I'd like a better feed manager built into the browser itself. And a very simple way to publish too. Access control is the difficult problem.

That's certainly a good point, but it seems wasteful to copy, just in case. Surely though multiple links would decrease that chance.

What I was really getting at was wholesale monotonous rewrites. A lot of the web in my mind could be DRYed up. But perhaps redundancy isn't the issue I think it is.

I do feel I do a lot of toing and froing with searches. More than in the past, but possibly that's just because there is so much more information to filter. I'd have thought that healthy linking would help search engines.

And all that lovely pasted MS word code ;) It's easy to end up with formatting nightmares. The roll-back button is a must.

I hate those editors with a passion, and though I like tools like Markdown (and Git), they are still problematic for people to use.

In many ways I don't see why the editor can't be right there as a first class citizen in the browser like it used to be. Linking and embedding needs to be simple.

Average users don't really want to get to grips with html or some other markup language. But it would be great if at least they could grok linking.