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I’ve been buying vinyl for the sake of collecting it, with limited intention to ever play it.

And I’ve been wondering why would anyone buy the cassette or CD? (And I own more cassette players than the zero vinyl players)

I recently found out that some of my favourite vinyls, that I’ve been collecting, ONLY include the art/lyrics booklet in the CD version. These are from the early 2000’s (peak cd?).

I reckon I’d buy an art / lyrics booklet over a physical medium of the music itself. Particularly if it included flac download of the music.


> And I’ve been wondering why would anyone buy the cassette or CD?

I have no interest in cassette or vinyl. I love CDs because they provide the highest music quality, uncompressed audio that’s trivial to rip to lossless FLAC files, complete with metadata.


Sure, but on the whole I’d take getting FLAC directly over CDs. Not that I don’t have CDs, even deluxe editions with picture books and stuff, but I pretty much never get them out.

I can understand people preferring vinyls as physical artefacts, the full frame jackets of my father’s albums are gorgeous in a way that’s distinct from and superior to CD album art, even if the music bit is markedly inferior technically (although that technical inferiority has led to better musical end results in some cases, you can’t compress the shit out of a vinyl, then again hopefully that time is long on the past).


I'd take getting FLAC files directly, but they're not available most of the time.

Yeah. But my point is mostly that the CD remains nothing but a transmission vessel for the audio, I don't know anyone and have seldom heard of people who value CDs for their physicality as a CD. Unlike vinyls which they very much do.

So you go to work, earn money, then you buy yourself some object to put it in a shelf?

And thats basically it?

You are not even playing it?

To do what with it? Letting your kids/family sell your collection with a loss?

Is it background decoration for you? Couldn't you just buy bulk of Vinyl no one wants to use it for your decoration purposes?

That feels like consumerism at the peak.


Is it consumerism to walk around the beach collecting pretty rocks to go home and put them on a shelf?

A rock is not a consumer good, so no.

And a rock is unique, nice to look at, did not cost you anything and kind of an appreciation of nature.

Enjoy your rock! (i'm sincere)


Naturally since people are buying things, technically they are consuming.

I mean that collecting a relatively small number of durable and visually pleasing objects isn't really the worst flavor of consumerism, even if it seems pointless to some people.

I agree we have a massive problem with over-consumption (most glaringly with things like fast fashion), but I'm not sure record collectors are a big problem.


>And I’ve been wondering why would anyone buy the cassette or CD?

Many people I know buy the CD because they prefer owning a physical medium, and the CDs they actually play and have a collection of them.

As for cassette, I don't know about buying regular releases on it, but there's a small but very passionate music community around cassette releases for experimental and indie music (same as a demoscene using old computers or people making new 8bit games).


I buy cassettes. Mostly old, period-correct ones, but some new. I also have a fairly high end tape deck, that these days can be had for rather good price. Our perception of cassettes are mostly warped by the experience of badly recorded tapes played on horrible, unmaintained players, but inherently the tape is much less of a limiting factor to quality than most of the things people use to play music nowadays. In fact, when comparing my vinyl and cassette purchases, I have higher change of getting a bad sounding vinyl than a bad sounding cassette.

Notably, tape decks with separate play and record heads let you listen to the recorded signal, while it's being recorded and quickly switch between the tape and source signal. Even on a good pair of headphones, when correctly dialled in, vast majority wouldn't be able to recognise which signal is the tape.


> 3) basically giving up on the “console wars”, ceding the hardware victory to Sony, shutting down a bunch of game studios telling the world how tough the climate is even though you’ve just had the most profitable years in your history, betting big on gamePass etc?

I’ve only seen this referred to as a strategic failure. You seem to be declaring otherwise. What’s the upside for Microsoft?


I'm not saying any of those decisions was necessarily good. They're just the kinds of things CEOs do. I personally think Microsoft dropped the ball spectacularly on this, from the perspective of the consumer, and objectively choice is less and the outcomes are worse, and gamers and game devs have suffered tremendously as a result. However Microsoft achieved their objective, which was to be able to say that games revenue gross margin went up.


I couldn’t agree more.

I find gmail to be the absolute worst offender in this category.

1. They dark pattern you into downloading their browser (they give three options, two of which are chrome)

2. In not launching iOS, I’m not logged into the session I may already have open in safari. Which is incredibly painful for any product that sends notifications via email, which id like to action.

And if I do login, and it asks for an email verification code… fail. I can’t access it in gmail without closing the browser…

3. Their in app browser (or the way they re-write links?) doesn’t seem to play nice with opening the corresponding app. Never seems to work.

Incredibly user hostile.

Is there a better alternative mail client I can use with gsuite?


I use the Gmail app and just have it set to always use the default browser?

Gmail app -> hamburger menu (top left), scroll down to settings, Default apps, Browser = "Default browser app (Configure in iOS settings)".

I think I must be misreading your concern - if so, not intentional.


What does "better" mean to you? The native Apple Mail app works with Gsuite.


+1 for a yoto.

It also led to my biggest ‘Doh’ moment with tech.

My sister showed it to me at a holiday house where we had no internet. I thought it was awesome, an offline music/audio player that her daughter could use. She mentioned you could make your own cards. It immediately reminded me of making mix tape cassettes and cds as a child.

I bought one the next week without doing any further research.

When it arrived and asked me to connect it to the wifi I was very confused.

I realised I made a massive assumption that “someone had solved the NFC card memory capacity problem”. I’d seen it work without internet and made all these assumptions about how it worked.

Obviously wrong in hindsight.

Still a great piece of kit, but I’d love something that was more akin to a cassette players rec/play/rewind/rec & Physical medium.

But portable cassette recorders still exist…


They’re a fantastic piece of kit! They have a Micro SD card internally and download the album/card on first use, then it can be used fully offline any time in the future. It’s a great trade off in my mind (though I’ll post one level up about how I wish it’d do even better here…)


Do you live in Auckland?

It sounds similar to the system I encountered there. I don’t remember all the details, I was only renting for a year.

It didn’t sound like it was NZ wide.


I live in Texas and I also have this system


This message reminded me to email a few people. Thanks.


It’s an interesting idea.

I’ve definitely felt the pain of file formats in some unexpected ways recently.

Like airdropping a photo from iPhone only to discover a .HEIC file, which nothing will accept.

I’ve previously used “what ever turns up first on google”, but I now won’t for anything of significance (privacy)

I’ve recently discovered Automator (on Mac) and the quick actions menu. Which can achieve a lot of image and pdf related conversions, but takes some setup (not a mass market solution)

I like the idea of this product. But I think the challenge will be: - reaching the user at the moment they have this problem

- making your solution frictionless to solve their immediate problem, while also bootstrapping to solve it next time around (without them forgetting it exists)

If you can nail that experience for a single use case, I think this will be a winner.


Hey, I’m just catching up here and I really appreciate the feedback and I’m gonna work to integrate all this feedback into the application and repost about it again I really appreciate you


I think the real problem is getting it to actually work....


i think i hit credit limits because so many people were using the app all of a sudden and i'm just like using my own funds for api costs and had a cap on my openai account


Let me actually work on this HEIC issue right now. I think that I know a fix for this.


You lost me at ‘single model of 300km/h train that can make it here’

Meanwhile here in Australia our “fast rail” trains go 160km/h. Unless it’s over 32 degrees, then they slow down. And if it hits 36 degrees they slow down even more (90km/h)

And it gets that hot here a lot…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V/Line_VLocity

https://www.vline.com.au/heat



Don’t OBB Railjet trains travel at 230km/h?


Australia, not Austria ;)


I can count on one hand how often I've seen that mixup happen in that direction.

As an austrian, I am amused.


Is it Austria that has the stands in the airport for tourists who thought they were buying tickets to Australia, or is it the other way around?


I think it's a myth that originated from an ad: https://www.vol.at/2023/11/397526796_1104257417472438_811840...

I suppose it's difficult to make that mistake because plane tickets are to cities, not countries as a whole.

As a real story, I knew a guy who had a B&B near a beach called San Francisco, in Spain, and he regularly had to cancel bookings from people who thought it was in the US city of the same name, though :)


Apparently people confuse cities when flying too, here’s an article about a passenger going to the wrong Sydney, and more examples:

https://simpleflying.com/ameican-airlines-passenger-flies-si...


I am not familiar enough with air travel that I can say either way.

But austria and australia regularily exchange mail that got sent to the wrong country.


Wow not even a verbal slip up I literally read Australia as Austria. Equally impressed and horrified with myself


Built xonboard, employee onboarding tool for Xero: https://www.xonboard.com.au/

Got our first 100 users through the Xero App Store.

Now getting well over 100 per month via that channel. No longer our biggest channel, but it was until we started actively marketing our product.

The App Store model can work just fine, if you have a compelling value proposition that genuinely adds value to the users of that product.

There’s always the threat of being copied, but that’s everywhere.

Look at what larger products you could complement via integration. Make sure they have a channel for you (some are useless, Xero is great)

Xero App Store: https://apps.xero.com/au/app/xonboard


Getting a 400 on generate.

Is this a joke? Or should it generate something?


Hey I updated instructions on connecting on private repo. Earlier ones might not be clear:

(0) Only connect those private repos that you feel comfortable to share with us. (1) To connect to a private repository, toggle the private repository option and click the "Connect" button to see the "How to create a fine-grained token" instructions. (2) You'll need a fine-grained token with at least "Contents" read permission to access private repositories.



Ah it could be some supabase edge function resource limit issue, fixing.


The process should take ~5 minutes. You could find it in "my demos" after generation


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