I’m not sure what the purple app was.

It was a website, and after a Lemmy user reminded me of privacy.sexy, I realized it is decidedly un-purple.

Yes!!! ⭐ ⭐

And it isn’t remotely purple! Thank you for sharing!!!

Its all coming back to me now. Must’ve been repressed memories…

For the record, the service names are: UsoSvc WaaSMedicSvc wuauserv

WaaSmedic must be that watchdog that kept re-enabling update services after I disabled them years ago. I just remember my OS would start a multi hour encode or compile, and I’d come back hours later to a login screen and update history telling me it rebooted when I didn’t have automatic updates enabled.

Thx for the reply.

That is similar to the web page I was thinking of. Thx. I’ll check it out.

God bless Steve Gibson! Security Now! I used Spinrite back in 92. I’ve used his other utilities (when they were relevant), and ShieldsUP too. That man is a treasure. Thanks for the link. I know he gets it.

On second thought, while this is great, I need to block all updates in this PC.

2024 > 1985

FTFY

Unused to wonder if the radio announcers that are always reciting the station call letters found that the letters stopped sounding like individual sounds, and the whole recitation became a sort of “word” for them. Like “You’re listening to 102.9FM WBLM!” Did it stop being “double-you bee ell emm,” and turn into more of a mashup of “dubbleyabeeyelmm”?

True, the difference is pretty subtle, especially to a listener, but I wonder strange things sometimes…

Don’t tell them about insid-- dang! Too late

Good drugs

Now that you mention it, I think I can tell yt-dlp to give me vorbis, but it might still entail a conversion.

Thank you for the comment. I have libopus0 1.3.1-3 installed. While I can play back opus files in strawberry, there are many missing integrations, like metadata cover art, and also audio level normalization seems to skip my opus files completely, as evidenced by viewing scanned files in the playlist with the “integrated loudness” or “loudness range” columns visible, or in the context tab if configured to display loudness parameters. Until I can get that sorted, vorbis is my go to.

Thanks also for the tip about variable bitrate. After reading some more about both codecs, I realized my constant br isn’t doing me any favors, and both excel when it comes to vbr. I’ll also dial back to the 6 or 7 vbr level and go from there. Honestly, my process to develop the conversion that “worked” for me was to take several 320k mp3s from way back in my collection and do a CBR conversion to vorbis that resulted in approximately the same file size, or slightly smaller. Not a very scientific benchmark. I just stuck with that when converting from opus.

Thanks again!

PS I added my current conversion string to my OP. I’ll share my results back here after I trial the new one.

ETA: I think I recall now that some conversions using variable bitrate would fail because the source files didn’t match up to the bit depth or some mathematical multiple of the source bitrate or some such thing that confused me, and was fixed by switching to a constant bitrate. Course, I could have it backwards. I do that a lot these days…)

I dream in a fashion that I “experience” the dream and remember it later, but only around the changing of the seasons. For instance, in Central America where I live, were transitioning into the rainy season soon. I’ve been dreaming so vividly for the pas two weeks, and only started feeling rested two nights ago.

In a week or so, that will taper back to rarely remembering ant dreams, and not surface again until October or November when our dry season starts again. (Disclaimer: we haven’t had a rainy season with rain the past two Yeats, but we still call it the rainy season)

When I lived in New England, it was the same, but four times a year, and most pronounced in the fall-to-winter and spring-to-summer transitions.

That’s not to say I never dream outside of those times, but rarely remember, and not consecutively. Last night I had one dream from 3am to 7am. I woke up once and used the bathroom and easily returned to the same dream, albeit subdued.

The pedant in me has to point our that if it’s the “best song we’ve ever heard…” then we already heard it, and it isn’t still “out there” as in unheard and waiting to be listened to.

And many, many mobile apps out there, except this one is the bad one, because: China.

My point is that meaningful privacy legislation would stop all apps from doing this with our data, but we have legislators who only pretend to care if a bogeyman has access to the data, and forget the part where any adversary could simply buy the data on the open data market.

I’m personally less interested in China having access to my daily movements than I am my own government, which includes states that are trying to criminalize going to certain medical providers.

I’d prefer if nobody had access, but I can see through the charade. These legislators are invested in technology that competes with China, and that collect and sell our data, so they prefer to keep things the way they are and pick winners and losers.

Dumb.

“We are too corrupt to draft meaningful privacy legislation, but watch as we pretend CCP is the real problem.”

Performative BS

It would constantly be telling users how much nicer people are better things are for inexplicable reasons, but would have very little other than news to talk about.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

Oh and use powder of you can - liquid has way too much water in it, they’re ripping you off

Where I live, if you don’t use the powder up in a month, it clumps or worse from the humidity. I swear by powder in the US Northeast. Here in Central America, I have to buy liquid.

I owned four Fitbit devices, and they all broke in some way. The clip broke at the middle joint. Everything else always was at the wristband to body joint, and they refused to make standard wristbands. I’ve had a Vivoactive 3 since 2018-ish, and it still works for me, plus I can have custom activities, and watch faces, and data screens. I like that my partner’s Garmin and mine use the same charging cable, too.

Disclaimer: I don’t use the smart watch features, like texts or calls or notifications of any kind on my tracker, and the battery lasts about five days still, unless I use GPS.