smores's recent activity

  1. Comment on Wireless earphones: a belated review in ~tech

    smores
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    Oh... Hm! I don't, but at some point today I'll put them on with my sunglasses and see how they feel

    Oh... Hm! I don't, but at some point today I'll put them on with my sunglasses and see how they feel

  2. Comment on Wireless earphones: a belated review in ~tech

    smores
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    Not the person you were asking, but I really like my Cleer Arc II Sports!

    Not the person you were asking, but I really like my Cleer Arc II Sports!

    1 vote

  3. Comment on Storyteller v2 is now available! in ~books

  4. Comment on Storyteller v2 is now available! in ~books

    smores
    Link Parent
    Hahahahaha well, sorry for the accidental clickbait, but I'm glad you think it's interesting!

    Hahahahaha well, sorry for the accidental clickbait, but I'm glad you think it's interesting!

    2 votes

  5. Comment on Storyteller v2 is now available! in ~books

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    ... Dangit. Could someone ( @mycketforvirrad ?) fix my title for me? Sorry about that, clunky phone typing. "os" -> "is"

    ... Dangit. Could someone ( @mycketforvirrad ?) fix my title for me? Sorry about that, clunky phone typing. "os" -> "is"

    1 vote

  6. Comment on Storyteller v2 is now available! in ~books

    smores
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    This has been a long time coming (5 months!). It's been a while since I've posted on r/selfhosted about Storyteller, and it's improved a lot since then! As always, happy to answer questions and...

    This has been a long time coming (5 months!). It's been a while since I've posted on r/selfhosted about Storyteller, and it's improved a lot since then!

    As always, happy to answer questions and chat.

    Storyteller is a self-hosted ebook and audiobook platform, with built-in support for automatically generating WhisperSync-style "readaloud" books. You provide it with an EPUB file and your audiobook, and it will automatically align the text with the audio, providing you with a new EPUB file that has the audio baked in via Media Overlays.

    You can then use the Storyteller mobile apps, or other reader apps such as BookFusion and Kobo (the app, not the devices, unfortunately), to read and/or listen to your books.

    With v2, Storyteller is now gunning to be your fully featured ebook, audiobook, and readaloud book library management system. It supports standalone ebooks and audiobooks (with mobile app and web reader/listener support coming soon!), advanced search and sort functions, and a wide array of features for managing your library’s metadata and organizing your collections. And you can now point Storyteller at your existing "books" folder and have it automatically import books as they're added to your filesystem.

    Oh, and we support OAuth and OIDC, now!

    Take a look at the blog post or the new docs for some more detail about what's new

    7 votes

  8. Comment on What is a business/org that is great and ethical in so many aspects that everyone should consider using? in ~life

    smores
    Link Parent
    I suspect Libro (which is like a 15-person company) is constrained significantly by the formats and metadata provided to them by publishers. Book publishers (all publishers, this was absolutely...

    I suspect Libro (which is like a 15-person company) is constrained significantly by the formats and metadata provided to them by publishers. Book publishers (all publishers, this was absolutely true for music too when I worked in music streaming) have ABYSMAL metadata practices. Amazon can (and does) hire teams of people whose sole job is to clean metadata, so that you get proper chapter titles in your m4bs. There's absolutely no way that Libro could do that.

    I have noticed that almost all of the books I've purchased from them recently have had m4b files, but they were also mostly newer books. I think they probably default to providing mp3s only if that's all they get from the publisher.

    5 votes

  9. Comment on What is a business/org that is great and ethical in so many aspects that everyone should consider using? in ~life

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    Libro.fm is a digital audiobook store. They: Sell DRM free audiobooks and let you download the files you do with what you please Are an employed-owned company, with Social Purpose Corp and B Corp...

    Libro.fm is a digital audiobook store. They:

    • Sell DRM free audiobooks and let you download the files you do with what you please
    • Are an employed-owned company, with Social Purpose Corp and B Corp certifications
    • Partner with and share profits with local bookstores. When I buy my audiobooks from Libro, a share of that purchases goes to my local bookstore!
    28 votes

  10. Comment on I built my own phone... because innovation is sad rn in ~tech

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    I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed watching this video. It was very entertaining, and also I am blown away by how many separate domains you needed to be familiar with in order to complete...

    I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed watching this video. It was very entertaining, and also I am blown away by how many separate domains you needed to be familiar with in order to complete this project. Also I was devastated when the keyboard cable was a little too short.

    4 votes

  11. Comment on What are your favorite ways to measure your own health? in ~health

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    Hm. I think I don’t like measuring my own health? I do like measuring fitness, which, agreeing with @Akir, feels pretty different to me. Well, I did like measuring fitness? I actually have found...

    Hm. I think I don’t like measuring my own health? I do like measuring fitness, which, agreeing with @Akir, feels pretty different to me. Well, I did like measuring fitness? I actually have found that I care less and less about measuring fitness, and more about doing things that I enjoy and feel good. I stopped pacing my runs and started paying less attention to my climbing grades and lifting weights, and overall I feel energized to do all of those things more than when I was intently measuring them.

    It feels reassuring to hear that I have a good blood pressure at my annual checkup. Other than that, I don't really think too much about my health unless I don't feel well!

    2 votes

  12. Comment on The ancient Roman alternative to daylight saving time; An hour was not a consistent unit of time. In the summer it could be as long as 75 minutes and in the winter it sometimes lasted just 45 minutes. in ~humanities.history

    smores
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    Right, the actual insight (in my opinion, not an expert) here is how susceptible we all are to attribution errors. When we stopped changing the times, there was not necessarily any change in...

    Right, the actual insight (in my opinion, not an expert) here is how susceptible we all are to attribution errors. When we stopped changing the times, there was not necessarily any change in fatalities[1], but people (not experts, but the people experiencing the tragedies directly) attributed all of those fatalities to the change, because the change happened, and then the fatalities happened. Reasoning about counterfactuals is very hard and people are collectively pretty bad at it.

    [1] Pre-sunrise fatalities increased very slightly, but also pre-sunrise now represented more waking time per day

    12 votes

  13. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    smores
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    Storyteller has had 107 pre-releases for v2 😩. We're getting there! Very, very hopeful that I'll have a real pubic beta release next week.

    Storyteller has had 107 pre-releases for v2 😩. We're getting there! Very, very hopeful that I'll have a real pubic beta release next week.

    3 votes

  14. Comment on ‘Sex reversal’ is surprisingly common in birds, new study suggests in ~science

    smores
    Link Parent
    Ha! That's fair I suppose. Maybe you're already familiar with this, but does it help at all to know that songbird auditory cortices seem to categorize sound differently than humans'? Specifically,...

    Ha! That's fair I suppose. Maybe you're already familiar with this, but does it help at all to know that songbird auditory cortices seem to categorize sound differently than humans'? Specifically, they seem to recognize spectral envelopes, rather than pitch or melodic contour. There are plenty of mundane, human auditory tasks (e.g. recognizing"Happy Birthday" in any key) that songbirds can't accomplish at all!

    As for movement, I think maybe it's all the feathers that make their movements feel so alien. They appear much larger and more massive than they really are, but birds are largely teeny tiny critters that weigh practically nothing, so it's very easy for them to move very quickly. Like, it probably seems less alarming to see a field mouse twitch its head back and forth, because it seems more proportional?

    It's still mindblowing to see, like, a grackle perfectly replicate the sound of a crosswalk alert, though.

    2 votes

  15. Comment on ‘Sex reversal’ is surprisingly common in birds, new study suggests in ~science

    smores
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    When I was in college (like a decade ago, so I'm sure we know more now), one of the open questions was "How do singing birds improve their song?" The songs are super precise, but as you say,...

    When I was in college (like a decade ago, so I'm sure we know more now), one of the open questions was "How do singing birds improve their song?" The songs are super precise, but as you say, they're certainly not known from birth. One of the interesting things that had been studied was that male songbirds (it was a specific species but I forget which) could improve their song to the point of wooing a mate even if they'd never heard the "correct" song before — as long as they were around female songbirds of the same species. The females were giving feedback cues in the form of wing twitches!

    This of course just flips the question: how are the females developing their song preferences??

    1 vote

  16. Comment on ‘Sex reversal’ is surprisingly common in birds, new study suggests in ~science

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    Oh that's a pretty fun question. As I understand it, the mechanisms for birdsong acquisition aren't entirely understood (at least across species of songbirds). It could be really interesting to...

    Potvin’s work primarily focuses on birdsong, so she wonders how sex reversal might impact vocalization—especially in species where only the males can carry a tune

    Oh that's a pretty fun question. As I understand it, the mechanisms for birdsong acquisition aren't entirely understood (at least across species of songbirds). It could be really interesting to investigate how sex reversal (kind of a funny term) affects song acquisition — is it tied to the genetic expression, the gonadic morphology, or something else??

    12 votes

  17. Comment on Tildes Book Club - Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut - How is it going? in ~books

    smores
    Link Parent
    Hahahahaha well thanks. It was our first flight with our baby and she actually did great. Definitely a lot of active work to keep her comfortable/happy, but she wasn't bothered by the altitude...

    Hahahahaha well thanks. It was our first flight with our baby and she actually did great. Definitely a lot of active work to keep her comfortable/happy, but she wasn't bothered by the altitude change and managed to take three 45-60min naps over the 6 hours flight. Overally pretty seamless, which is great because it really felt like a huge gamble haha.

    Also, this book in particular is a pretty quick read and pretty short, so I think that helped quite a bit with the progress haha

  18. Comment on How do you manage separate development environments on your computer? in ~tech

    smores
    Link Parent
    Agreed, but I'll extend this and say devenv specifically takes the really great parts of Nix and makes them much more accessible. It also makes use of flakes and direnv to get really dead-simple...

    Agreed, but I'll extend this and say devenv specifically takes the really great parts of Nix and makes them much more accessible. It also makes use of flakes and direnv to get really dead-simple per-directory development environments. I think I've tried every other suggestion in this thread (extensively!), and devenv meets my needs working across different codebases every day the best by a significant margin

    2 votes

  19. Comment on Tildes Book Club - Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut - How is it going? in ~books

    smores
    Link Parent
    Oh, I just bought it on Libro.fm last night! I'm having the same thoughts about needing to sit with it and digest once I'm done. It feels quite dense, thematically and metaphorically

    Oh, I just bought it on Libro.fm last night!

    I'm having the same thoughts about needing to sit with it and digest once I'm done. It feels quite dense, thematically and metaphorically

    4 votes

  20. Comment on Tildes Book Club - Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut - How is it going? in ~books

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    I totally forgot about this and luckily saw this post last night in time to buy the book before my flight this morning. Manage to read about 60% of it while the baby was napping on me on the...

    I totally forgot about this and luckily saw this post last night in time to buy the book before my flight this morning. Manage to read about 60% of it while the baby was napping on me on the plane.

    I've read this before (like 12 years ago) and I remembered liking it, but I'm definitely getting way more out of it this time through. Excited to talk about it with you all!

    6 votes