The "album problem" is, of course, the fact that our music listening habits have changed over the past decade and the value of a well-thought-out album is not nearly what it once was. This is in large part due to the fact that it's easy for people to create playlists with a billion different songs to choose from, recommendation algorithms, "Discovery Weekly" playlists, and whatever else the streaming services can throw at us.

I may not speak for all of us, but I've personally not been able to fully consume a new album for quite a while now, finding that I gravitate toward a few songs/singles that get dumped into a separate playlist. I don't like this and I miss the days that I would discover deep cuts in the back of an album that I listened to ad nauseum.

I present to you the "Six Disc Changer" playlist. The rules are simple:

1. Create a new playlist in Spotify, Tidal, or your chosen platform. Call it "Six Disc Changer"
2. Add six FULL albums to the playlist
3. Force yourself to listen to the playlist -- maybe not exclusively -- but a fair amount. Imagine you're driving around in your 2002 Honda Civic and the only music available to you is what you've got in your CD changer.
4. Any time you want to add a new album, you must remove an old album. You should only have six CDs loaded up at any time.

If you want to take the concept a few steps further...

5. Any time you remove a CD, add it to a separate playlist called "CD Catalogue".
6. Any time you want to add a new CD to the catalogue, you must "purchase" it with an "allowance" of your choosing. I'm going with 1 new album per week. You can swap out albums from your Catalogue playlist freely, but new albums must be "purchased." This will simulate scarcity, which was a large part of what drove us to listen to albums over and over again.

But... why?

My goal is to get back to listening to full albums and truly taking them in. The best way I can think of to do that is to simulate the way things used to be. By using a streaming service instead of, say, just going back to CDs or records, you get the benefits of convenience, Last.fm, easy Bluetooth, etc.

As for what's in my CD changer right now, I've got:

1. Sufjan Stevens - Javelin
2. The Antlers - Need Nothing
3. Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues
4. Refused - The Shape of Punk to Come
5. George Harrison - Living in the Material World
6. Bob Moses - Battle Lines

Is it dumb? Probably. It's been fun so far and my music listening experience has been much more focused.

I'm a technical writer. My company sells DevOps software mostly operated on the command line. I'm responsible for explaining this software via HTML5 documentation on our website.

One of our largest customers employs at least one software developer who is "totally blind" and requires a screen reader to work. I assume others exist, but they have not contacted us. Unfortunately, our website is not 100% ADA-compliant. It's far from the worst I've seen, but it could be a lot better.

I'm familiar with high-level web accessibility paradigms and am currently doing an informal audit of our website to determine what we need to improve to make it fully ADA-compliant. I've prioritized discovery for accessibility concerns in our next sprint. Eventually, I'd like to look into hiring a consultant to do a more robust analysis, but only if necessary because I'd need to request funding. Unfortunately, I have limited control over the text that displays in our product, just the documentation. Long-term, I'd like to collaborate with the product team to ensure our CLI is fully ADA-compliant.

I've begun reading web accessibility materials from the government. In the meantime, I wanted to ask: are any of you blind or low-vision, or have you used screen readers in the past? Or do you know any blind/low-vision devs? Either way, can you provide any personal insight into any of the things I can do as a technical writer to improve the usability of software documentation for the purpose of enabling you to do your job? My goal is to make the documentation experience great for screen reader users, not just OK.

All major operating systems have their own file-sharing protocols (AirDrop, Nearby Share, etc.) which are incompatible with each other. There do exist apps for "cross-platform file sharing", however, they require installation on both the sender and the receiver devices, which makes it a bad solution for quickly sending files to other people.

I was thinking about making a file sharing solution that acts as a bridge between those different protocols and only requires action from one of the parties. However, there's a huge issue with AirDrop - it uses a custom networking protocol called AWDL. There are open implementations like OWL, but they still require low-level wifi access, so it can't be run on Android without kernel modifications.

This means that the only way this can be implemented is by using a physical device, eg. a Raspberry Pi Zero W or a similar microcomputer that runs a custom firmware. An obvious problem is that it requires a lot of effort - you need to buy a Raspberry, flash it with the firmware and carry it around with you, just to be able to send or receive files to other devices without using third-party websites.

So I'm personally not sure if that's worth making. But maybe you'll still be interested? Is this a big enough problem for you to want to use a hardware solution?

I am realizing as I age that when I’m feeling unwell in some kind of way, I cannot be comforted by others.

I have friends and family and sometimes a romantic partner who try to comfort me, and while I am thankful for their support, I never feel comforted. I know what doesn’t work but I cannot provide them with what I want or need because I don’t know what I want or need to feel comforted.

So, how do you get emotional or mental comfort from others?

Edit - I wanted to start a conversation about how you (the reader) feel comfort from others. Thank everyone so much for the tips for me, but that was very much not the point and I can see now how that was unclear. Thanks again, everyone!

To the powers that be: if there is better phrasing, please help me out with the title.

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

Hi all,

Has been a while :)

I'm having an issue with upgrading an SSD on a Lenovo x270 and thought I'd reach out for some advice.

I'm installing a SATA SSD (Crucial BX500) but the original caddy in the laptop is for a NVME M.2 PCIe SSD. The only part I can use of the original caddy is the plastic shielding that can fit around the new drive.

The issue is, now I have no shielding. The new drive will fit in the 2.5 inch slot the old drive was in but it rests on top of only two small pieces of foam glued to the board. Do you think this is an issue? Should I shield it somehow? Perhaps EMI tape? If so, should I shield both the top and bottom of the drive? There's no caddy I can find for this use case in Europe.

Any help would be appreciated.

p.s I am following this article: https://techblog.paalijarvi.fi/2020/01/02/32gb-ram-for-thinkpad-x270-and-other-pimp-ups/

As you can see, in their case, some metal foil (an EMC cover?) came with the eBay cable they bought to support the SATA connection. I'm wondering if that's nesscary.

What is this?

Your "backlog" is all those games you've been meaning to play or get around to, but never have yet. This event is an attempt to get us to collectively dig into that treasure trove of experiences!

How do I participate?

Choose a game (or several) from your backlog and play it/them. Then tell us about your experiences in the discussion thread for the week! If you're not sure what you might write, take a look at our 2022 or 2020 events to get an idea.

Do I need to finish the games I play?

Nope! Not at all. There aren't really any requirements for the event so much as this is an incentive to get us to play games we've been avoiding starting up, for whatever reason. Play as much or as little as you like of a given game. Try out dozens for ten minutes each or dive into one for 40 hours. There's no wrong way to participate!

What's the timeline?

I will post an update thread weekly, each Wednesday, all through November. At the end of the month, I think it would be neat to tally how many collective games we all removed from our backlogs, as well as what the best finds were from our collective digging into our libraries. I expect we'll turn up some good hidden gems, as well as interesting insights.

Do I need to sign up?

You don't have to do anything to officially join or participate in the event other than post in these threads! Participate in whatever way works for you. Also, because this is ongoing, it is okay to make more than one top-level post if you're updating the thread with new information.

Do I need to wait until November to get started?

Technically yes, but I won't police it. The first official discussion thread will go up on Wednesday the 1st, but feel free to kick things off here if you're wanting to pre-game the month!

But November has Big Name Release coming out. Why this month when people will be focused on that new game?

I'm doing the best that I can! A "problem" with 2023 is that it has been an absolutely stacked year for gaming releases. There simply hasn't been a "slow" month. With limited time left, I figured November was at least better than December. Think of this as an opportunity to cut down on your backlog before all the end-of-the-year sales hit.

What if I have trouble deciding what to play?

You're in luck! I'll be debuting a Backlog Bingo Card card system when the event starts. It'll hopefully help people cut through the difficulty of choosing and make decision-making easier for those of who are cursed with both big backlogs and unhealthy doses of analysis paralysis.

Let's burn through these backlogs!

Does anyone have any short-to-medium length content that clearly introduces the ideas of Jung?

I don't mind it being dense philosophically, but there's sort of this deliberate obfuscation of ideas that Jungian content creators utilize towards some end.

In philosophy, specific terms and jargon is necessary to ensure philosophical precision of the idea being presented. If one looks up said jargon, they can gain context about what's being communicated.

As far as Jung content online goes, there's a lot of jargon being used, but I'd wager about 50% of it is made up on the fly. When looked up, the term often either doesn't exist, is an adhoc portmanteau of two random terms, or simply doesn't make sense within the context it's used. Why? It seems like they deliberately are obfuscating their ideas for seemingly no reason. Perhaps there's a perceived invulnerability to criticism if your position on basic ideas can't be nailed down?

It seems that Jordan Peterson is the most prominent idea-obfuscator in this tradition, but I understand why he does it; some of his audience likely wouldn't care for the fact that he's likely what they'd describe as an atheist if you were able to pin down the ideas he conveys (e.g., Christ is but one of many manifestations of a Jungian archetype.)

Kinds of content I'm looking for:

• Newb friendly
• Clearly communicates ideas
• Philosophically precise
• Critical, but not polemic (i.e., no "debunking" videos)
• Video/audio/books preferred

Thank you in advance (:

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.