I got a pair of Zero:2 budget earphones. Wires are annoying when you’re used to wireless, but this was a good bet. Sure my AirPods block out plane noise better, but the passive noise cancellation is perfectly adequate on these, even on flights.

For mic audio you just can’t beat a physical wire.

Edit: these are a collaboration between 7Hz, a ChiFi manufacturer with a decent reputation, and Crinacle, an audio influencer(?) who tuned their sound. They’re 20 odd US dollars and sound awesome for the price, they’re my default backup pair of earphones and sometimes I’ll even just use them when I don’t really have to. I did change the cable to a braided one, the original picked up a lot of sound rubbing against my clothes, but hey, at 20$ I expect compromises like that.

It’s fine, but the stylized moz://a we had gotten used to just felt like it said what it had to say very succinctly.

If it makes you feel better/worse, the subscription is shared across multiple games. I was playing a bunch of Microsoft Jigsaw at one point (don’t ask), and while you could play as much as you’d like for free, the fact that they squeezed ads into it to extort you (or more likely, clueless older people) really cheapened the whole thing.

They had a lot of pretty photos which were probably not free, but come on, this is Microsoft, they have the money. I think this should’ve been bundled with Windows for free. I truly think a lot of people might even look back on it fondly the way they do with a lot of the older bundled-in games. We will take for granted how much the default option with any sort of technology around us has an impact on us as kids. Maybe not everyone, but not everyone loved pinball or inkball.

Actual textbook enshittification: what was once a space for a nice default thing to fall back on if you were bored and had their operating system has now become an “opportunity” to “generate more business.” Very sad. Computers are impossibly wonderful machines, everyone who has access to one should be able to enjoy a few basic things, packed in, for free - with no strings attached (looking at you candy crush).

I’m sure there’s a nice free or paid jigsaw game made with love out there that could satisfy that itch I felt that one week in 2020. Hm.

Edit: I have now redownloaded Microsoft Jigsaw and might just expand this comment into a full post/rant about the state of modern consumer software through the lens of Microsoft’s current casual games suite

I’ve done only a little bare metal work back when I was a student and I felt like a goddamn wizard.

Like… yes. Of course everything looks the same, just an ocean of ones and zeroes that is just coherent enough to make a processor do something, such as fetch the right ones and zeroes from somewhere else. Of course folders aren’t dedicated physical sectors of a storage device. Of course like half of anything we ask a computer to do is manipulating storage, and taking this storage and feeding it into the actual memory of whatever is going to process it.

When you zoom back out and realize that the majority of data processing happening right now is people streaming short form video on an unfathomably massive scale, that’s when it just falls apart for me and can’t exist outside the abstractions that make the concept digestible.

Like I can kind of understand Lemmy, as software. I can see where all this data sits and gets queried and how it works. I can vaguely conceive of a few possible federation protocols. That vast ocean of unindexed “content” over on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube? That the algorithms can serve you up no problem but that you can’t even always search for manually? That’s terrifying, on the scale of these platforms. It’s like a leviathan sci-fi body horror meat machine but of data. Yeah yeah I vaguely understand CDNs but I’m talking about the whole thing: the algorithms, the video files, streaming all this data, the impossibly complex social phenomena built around the data… the fact that this monumental achievement is only used to sell ads, landfill fodder, and to fuck with people’s brains and worldviews, it’s legitimately horrifying. I especially think about this when I’m in a public place surrounded by people watching videos on their phones and swiping through them at dizzying speed.

Is this how computer people end up chopping wood in the forest?