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I don’t think there’s any single way to be sure, but it sure reads like ChatGPT to me. Which I’m not sure is such a bad thing—I presume the author used an AI to help them write the story, but the story is real. Or maybe they edited it themselves to make it sound more generic. Whatever the reason, the style takes away from my reading experience. It’s a blog post, I expect some personality!

Mirrors are great, but most bikers don’t have them. And even then it might still be your ears that alert you that there’s a car behind you (electric or not — I still hear them), after which you can keep tabs with your mirror.

I don’t understand why everybody’s so happy to discount ears in this thread. Haven’t they been vital to our survival since forever? Yes eyes are more important in this case, but I’ll take whatever sensory aid I can get on my morning commute..

> I really wish there was a simple solution for streaming audio in a stereo like box

You can turn any normal hi-fi setup into streaming speakers in various ways.

I’m using a fifteen year old Airport express right now. Works well, lossless, although only for Apple devices.

If you mainly listen to Spotify, connecting an old laptop or phone works great too (through Spotify Connect — it’s resilient because it doesn’t need to stream the actual audio).

Finally a bluetooth dongle that you connect to your amp is platform agnostic, the only downside being that bluetooth always uses lossy compression.

These are the cheapish ways, hi-fi companies also make streaming boxes to add to a setup but I never tried those. I’ve also tried amp/receivers with Airplay on them and that seems to work just fine.

Then you set your alarm to fifty minutes ? Surely the max twenty minutes the laundry spends in the washing machine won’t make a difference.

> My Alexa Echo Dot 4 sounds better than my home audio setup from the 90s

I have a hard time believing this… yes today’s small devices sound better than small devices ever did. A lot of work went into that because people appreciate the reduced footprint. Also, those speakers are super cheap in comparison to the budget people would allocate to their stereo setups in the day.

But I’ve never heard a small speaker sound better than a 1970ies or later hifi amp + speakers from a decent brand. With big speakers you can reproduce all these frequencies without physics tricks. The sound is more laid back and the soundstage fills the room.

All the recent engineering has gone into making speakers small, cheap and wireless, like in the 90ies it went into creating multi-channel audio, but I would say stereo sound quality, as used for popular music, already peaked in the 70ies / 80ies.

Of course you can still get those quality hifi components today, or even better than that, but the median household is not listening on that and I’d wager has worse sound today than was the norm in the physical media era.

Thanks for your work. The photo ones are much more practical as a reference though! I would imagine for long term traffic that still counts. You can browse through them quickly and zoom in easily. I’ve been using photo teardowns often as a volunteer in a local repair café and I hope you don’t give up on them.

Hobbyists aren’t forced to buy anything.. I blame youtube for turning hobbies into an exercise at buying stuff. Affiliate links are one of the few ways to make money online and the reason why the majority of videos in the hobby space seem to be gear reviews. Yet as a hobbyist chances are you won’t practice enough to outgrow your tools anyway, and neither do you have the economic incentives of business owners.

The suite is $60 / month, which is not peanuts, especially since the vast majority of self-employed creatives aren’t exactly raking in cash.

In Dutch: https://www.politie.nl/informatie/mag-ik-met-mijn-vrienden-r...

Legally it’s still the exception, the municipality has to make it illegal (although I imagine it happens far too often). But hanging in front of one’s house is legal and actually quite common, at least in Amsterdam, much more so than in for ex. Belgium.

Like you see people put benches or even picknick tables in front of their house, which has no garden or clear separation with the pavement. The houses in this street have a back yard, so if you sit down in the front it’s also to be able to hang out in a social space, do people watching and say hi to your neighbours:

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.351001,5.0003965,3a,57.6y,52...

A lot of dialogue in movies is dubbed for this very reason, it’s very hard to not pick up noise. What you can deal with is how close the mic is to you (which is why news reporters rely on hand held mics, not just the boom mike) and the pattern of the mic: a cardoid, hypercardoid or shotgun mic facing the opposite direction of the noise source would pick up less than an omnidirectional one (which is why the mics you see in studios are not used on a loud stage—not only are they fragile and expensive, they also tend to be omnidirectional).

Interesting we get so many likes here, as I can’t stand this style. It’s the same annoying pretentiousness Paul Graham’s peddles. Karlsson even calls his blog posts essays just like PG!

These authors have this habit of reflecting on their live experiences and trying to make some sense out of them (a time honed and worthy pursuit!), but then moving into thought leader / self help / linkedin territory by making every other sentence an imperative in second person person singular.

A sentence like —

The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.

Could be

The context is smarter than me. It holds more nuance and information than I can fit in my head. I keep telling myself to collaborate with it.

And it wouldn’t annoy me half as much. It would feel as if a peer wants to share experiences with me, whereas now I feel like I’m being shouted at by a middle manager.

Another thing I like in Spotify is that you can play over any device connected on the same network, so your phone can control the spotify app on your pc, that’s connected to speakers, for example. Tidal only offers this on dedicated hardware (Tidal Connect), like smart amplifiers and streaming boxes, that I have no need for otherwise. I’d love for this to be fixed.

In my experience, cars are discouraged from city centres, but not banned. You can drive your car all around Amsterdam, although you’ll have many one way streets and parking is going to very expensive for non-residents… and it’s hard (but not impossible) to find street level parking. Amsterdam has a number of car parks in the outskirts that are cheap if you can show that you used public transport afterwards.

The result is that people use their car (if they have one, still quite common esp. for families) to get out of the city, or big errands, but use bike or public transport for day to day trips.

Actual car free zones exist in cities across Europe but tend to be pretty small and constrained to the hyper centre, like the church square and the major shopping streets. Not that I’m opposed to them being bigger but that seems rare at this point.

I thought the larger public was starting to accept subtitles so I was hoping we’d rather see the end of dubbed movies !

I imagine these were Dutch tomatoes—I’ve heard the best ones don’t actually get sold in the Netherlands, as the Dutch consumers don’t care enough to pay a premium. These get exported to the south instead, where the costumers are more discerning.

I’d say there are three groups: A) casual photography for capturing memories B) casual but with a desire to take better quality pictures C) enthusiastic amateurs and pros.

Now only C will buy a dedicated camera. But in the late 0’s and the 2010’s, segment B did too—lots of people bought DSLRs to get better quality pictures — often sticking to the kit lens and not getting all geeky about photography… just putting everything on automatic would still offer much better quality than a compact camera or a phone camera.

As phone cameras got better, people in this market segment switched to phones — they might just care more about the type of camera on the phone than the most casual of users do.

Consequently camera sales have plummeted: https://www.statista.com/statistics/799526/shipments-of-digi...

That’s shooting in burst mode, it shoots separate photos rather than short videos. In sports you typically use short shutter speeds to freeze the action. If you would stitch these photos together into a video, the results would look jittery because there’s no motion blur.

From the Netherlands, UK Office, as that one was broadcast on Dutch television already before the American version existed. So I guess the answer depends on your age :)

While right to repair is in part about getting consumers to care it is just as much about getting regulators to care. They can do things like force the availability of replacement parts etc.

The right to repair movement seems to have its effects in the EU, with a ‘right to repair’ directive adopted by the EU parliament. Of course it still needs to be implemented into national legislations and the devil will be in the details… it shows the impact though.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240419IP...

Uhm, no ? Chat as in cat is pronounced sja. Or sjaht for a female cat (chatte). The tsjaht pronounciation is when using the english word chat in french.

Isn’t that the common definition?

It’s like the city fails the poor twice: first they have to enjoy substandard living conditions, and whenever this changes, they get priced out.

Gentrification refers specifically to this displacement, and it shouldn’t be hard to understand why this is considered negative. No-one likes to have to move.

It’s also an effect of how the housing market works almost anywhere, so it’s not so easy to imagine an alternative within these market economies—a challenge the article doesn’t really touch upon.

Not so sure about that, mixing engineers have to do very precise manipulation of sound and there’s plenty of them working well into their 40ies and beyond. While of course aspects of your hearing deteriorate, it should still be pretty simple to pick out the artefacts of compressed audio if you’ve gotten attuned to them at a younger age… At least for heavier compression, something like a 320kbps MP3 or 256 AAC is hard to distinguish from lossless but that’s also true for young folks.

If you prefer listen to music on excellent studio monitors that already makes you more discerning than 99% of the general public. You could very well apply the label audiophile to that, no?

Maybe we need two words, one for people like you and me that care which speakers they listen on (because for most, whatever small bluetooth speaker is at hand will do), and one for the people that buy $500 cables?

BTW I feel everyone is affected by differences in audio reproduction. Like how much you can get into a the music at a party will be affected by the sound quality, it’s just going to be subconscious for most.

Today I binged the Youtube of House & Garden, an upmarket English interior design magazine… now I was aware that in the mainstream minimalism has peaked, but I learned that all along there’s been this whole subculture of posh English people designing rooms with ornamental wallpapers, fabrics, moulding, antiques, trinkets—without it looking stuffy. My own house is going to look nothing like this but I found it inspiring regardless.

How it worked in Amsterdam in the 90ies is that the government also started to provide the drugs (Methadon) for the heroin addicts… The addicts were responsible for lots of petty crime in order to fund their habit (stealing car radios, muggings) and this decreased. So this helped make the city a more liveable place, not just for addicts.

Musicians are less gullible than “audiophiles” because they know how the sausage is made

Don’t see the problem with different pronunciations… I have a first name like Jules, I like it… indeed depending on whether people are French or English speaking they pronounce it differently—but that doesn’t bother me at all! It still feels very much like they are referring to me, and it feels like two versions of the same name, not two names.

Thanks! I feel cheated though, there’s plenty of punctuation! If you switch on the subtitles, it features periods commas and question marks more or less where I hear them. It’s just someone talking annoyingly fast.

Even if you properly backup everything and can downgrade after an update, you’re still burned by an update if it breaks your software. Which is why most musicians will be at least a major OS version behind, giving vendors the time to update.