He had some brothers as well. I remember Groucho formed a club that’s still going today.

Paywalled

Toilet can mean the whole room if separate (i.e. no shower or bath) or just the appliance, depending on context. Can use loo to mean what Americans would refer to as ‘bsthroom’/‘restroom’.

This is what we were all told for years and years- that it was impossible that anyone could hear anything in vinyl that was supposed to be there but that couldn’t be reproduced with digital at cd quality. Then DVD came out And people could genuinely hear the difference from CD quality audio even in stereo. It turns out that dynamic range is limited by the audio sampling rate and the human ear can easily detect a far greater range CD audio supports.

‘Jolene’ and ‘Blackbird’ were covers of black songs? Which ones?

A number of tracks on cowboy carter are covers of songs performed by often well-known white artists previously

Strictly speaking, you cannot make an ISO from an audio CD. Yes, you can make a bin cue file pair as another commenter has suggested. But realistically what you’ve then got is uncompressed wav audio with the metadata in separate files. The only real advantage this gives you is something that theoretically allows you to recreate precisely the original layout of the audio CD, together with the appropriate length of silence in between the tracks, etc.

When you convert to FLAC there is no loss in audio quality, you use approximately half of the storage space compared to wav, and you can have all of the metadata such as tags and art images embedded in the file itself.

Bin/cue is not really very useful unless you’re not listening directly from a computer or burning to a CD and listening to that. For every other use case, it’s better to have a file that you can play directly and index directly.

A lot of ‘samurai swords’ in media are really just machetes frankly. The linked article describes

Gus Lawrence admitted to using his feet to bend his brother’s “prized samurai sword” into an L-shape while trying to break it, according to a bail memo.

Yeah it’s mall ninja kit.

Would it make a difference if they did? Here in the UK every supermarket has a loyalty card scheme. I held out for a long time but eventually I simply couldn’t afford to pay the effective 20% premium for not using it

There’s a large variety on Windows too, e.g. Temurin and Corretto are both available there

I’m missing the part where consumers are required to use their ISP DNS. I never do, in favour of CloudFlare DNS, Google DNS, etc

I wanted to leave Twitter too. I’m a professional engineer in tech and I found setting up in Mastodon to be… …not straightforward, as did a whole load of other people. I eventually got set up. I couldn’t find anyone or anything, the whole model being based around local instances rather than users or topics but… I tried to make the best of it and I followed the other people who had left Twitter that I had followed there when they said where to find them on Mastodon. Then I found I had run into a ‘silencing’ drama where some other instance admins had taken issue with an admin for the instance I was signed up to and as a result everyone on my instance was essentially shadowbanned in a whole load of other places. It had been happening maybe a month before I even found out about this. I’m a grown up, I don’t have time for school time drama. I found that I was using Mastodon less and less and so were the people I had been following. Then my BlueSky invite came through. I can find topics and I can find users. People post and people respond. I don’t have to worry which of 100 identical usernames across different instances is the ‘real’ one or my instance being defederated or silenced.

The problem with Mastodon is it’s basically a social network for people who are into Mastodon, and enjoy centering around their specific instance. It might work for Warcraft guilds but it doesn’t work for me, or any of the people or topics I want to follow, ostly current affairs and tech. As opposed to BlueSky which is a social network for people who:

• Want to move on from twitter
• Are interested in finding and following people and or topics

No doubt at this point you will want to tell me how I’m all wrong, clearly tech illiterate and how Mastodon has at least as many users as BlueSky. Sure, whatevs. It’s like Linux on the Desktop, not a viable mass-market proposition at this point (saying this with 25 years Linux desktop experience).

Mastodon as a mass market solution has failed. It’s essentially irrelevant outside of a tiny niche

The core problem is that many movies have the audio mixed for a movie theatre with multiple separately controllable audio channels. You might see this marked as 5.1 ; DTS; etc. In a typical home environment, you only have stereo sound. This means that the multiple audio channels have to be mixed down to two unless there is a separate stereo audio mix channel provided - basically never except commentary tracks. The shitty way to do it is to just take the left and right front channels which are mainly meant for sound effects and not bother to mix in the center channel which covers the dialogue. It’s still hard even if you mix in some of the centre channel.

Short version: asshole movie makers mix only for movie theatres, not stereo.

So what’s his laying off 5% of staff?

I fail to understand what disabilities this could help with

Fundamentally the only unique attribute for these goggles is 3D and that comes at a significant expense in terms of user experience. It’s the same story as it has been over the last two centuries.

Stereographic photos in the 19th century worked perfectly well but required a special headset and only one person could look at them at a time. Didn’t take off. People prefer to be able to look at two-dimensional photos perhaps casually and to be able to point the things to other people looking at the same photo or to compare it with other things at the same time.

3d movies in the 1950s required special red, blue or red green glasses. Didn’t take off beyond a gimmick. 3d movies could not be watched without the goggles.

3d movies in the theatre in the early 2000s. Didn’t really get beyond the gimmick level. Lots of people complain about headaches.

3d TVs in the early 2000s required special glasses and the 3D could not be used if other people were trying to watch without the glasses.

The conclusion I draw from this is that people don’t like having to wear special glasses or a device strapped to their face, even if it is relatively cheap to produce. Although 3D is nice, it simply doesn’t seem to be sufficient incentive to put up with the isolation from other people and the surrounding environment that the viewing equipment invariably requires.

I’m missing where Russian Santa’s presents are shown, he mostly seems to be involved in surprise pyrotechnics

Given the recent Azerbaijan airlines disaster this really is cartoon level evil.

81 is current average US female life expectancy. Where would you suggest people ‘get old’?