Depending where you look it may still be. My wife uses hers frequently on the back of her head and neck to help with migraines.

Whether or not I am the cause of those migraines I shall neither confirm or deny.

/rant

I know both candidates and their positions. Don’t particularly like either candidate. Really dislike one of them. And I haven’t seen anyone host an actual, honest to god political debate in my life, and no, the final season of West Wing doesn’t count.

All that being true, why the blazes would I have watched this one? My entire life, debates have only ever been excuses to put the candidates up on a stage see which one looks prettier, and shout sound bites into a microphone. That’s not a debate, that’s a campaign ad. And I’m tired of them.

I would really like our nation to get back to a point where I can feel comfortable voting for the candidate whose policies I actually think are the best instead of having to vote against the candidate that I think will actually destroy the country.

/end-rant

Well, I mostly buy music nowadays. but I'm also not as broke as I was growing up and the tooling to convert media to digital is a lot better as well. Between Ebay, Amazon, and BandCamp you can find pretty much anything on either physical or digital formats.

If you were looking to sail the seas, there are Spotify downloaders that download music from Spotify playlists/albums, sourced from YouTube, and of course, alot of music is available via torrents including some rather obscure stuff. Last time I looked on Pirate Bay (about six months ago), there was still a healthy selection of music with active seeders.

For the really old and/or obscure, try the Internet Archive. It sometimes amazes me what they have in their archives. Not all that I've found should be there.

About 6 years ago I somehow (Safety, Maintenance, and Engineering departments never figured out how) managed to get stuck in a robot cage with 4 water jet cutting robots. I have never been more terrified in my life.

One of my coworkers said he had never seen anyone move as fast as when I yanked the safety rip line to kill the machine. Didn’t get hurt, thank god, but found out that adrenaline makes me giddy. Every thing was flipping hilarious for a few hours after they got me out of the cage.

Well, Marshall Mathers in his Slim Shady persona would be interesting. Not sure who I would pair him up with for VP though.

I figure after 4 years of Slim Shady as President, we would either have world peace or the world would be in pieces.

Me too! Not much to look at but it’s a great player on iOS. On Linux, I like SonixD.

I use Jellyfin. I think in your use case, each user would be setup have their own library. You can enable or disable library on a per user basis as will as a per client basis.

Downside is that the default web interface isn’t great as a music player. It does the job but it’s not great.
Other hand, multiple music-first clients exist for a lot of different platforms. Odds are good you can find a client that suits how you listen to music.

Edit: said collection when I meant library.

I'm currently using Mint Mobile for internet on my laptop, No issues related to the carrier. Their customer site doesn't seem to like Firefox much though.

One heads up for anyone looking to use a Mint Mobile sim in their laptop, you will need a modem and software that can send/receive sms. Mint really likes using sms for verification.

It's doable. Stick to the 7b models and it should work for the most part, but don't expect anything remotely approaching what might be called reasonable performance. It's going to be slow. But it can work.

To get a somewhat usable experience you kinda need an Nvidia graphics card or an AI accelerator.

I haven’t seen them but it might be a callback to early animation.

To keep costs down and speed up production, cartoons (pre digital animation) would often be animated at around 15 fps, sometimes going as slow as 10 or 12 fps. Each frame was then photographed 2 or 3 times to bring the frame rate up to 24 or 30 fps depending on the media. Robotech, Scooby-Doo, Mighty Max and the original Duck Tales come to mind as examples. Hanna Barbara cartoons were also known for being on the lower end of the spectrum.

It always amazes me to realize that we now have microcontrollers as powerful as early computers. It one thing to know that a graphing calculator has more computing power than the Apollo spacecraft, another to see it demonstrated like this.

Well, Altria also has a stake in NJOY and I think at one point had a stake in BLU. All of which I’ve found at pretty much every gas station I’ve been to in the US. The only reason I’m picking on Altria is that I’m both a customer as well as a stock holder and am somewhat familiar with them as a result.

Most of the brands I’ve seen in vape shops however seem to be out of Shenzhen, China and I haven’t been able to find out much about them.

Well, saw that coming.

But I think everyone here's belief that it was intended for kids to go and buy tobacco products are wrong. All of the major tobacco companies have their hands in the vape market as well. Juul for example is owned by Altria which owns the Marlboro brand. They're called vice stocks for a reason.
I think that this is just a case where well meaning (I hope) busybodies refused to take basic psychology into account.

Not only a thing but required.

• https://csa.fmcsa.dot.gov/safetyplanner/MyFiles/SubSections.aspx?ch=22&sec=64&sub=130
• https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-V/part-571/subpart-B/section-571.121

• https://www.bts.gov/content/average-age-automobiles-and-trucks-operation-united-states
• https://www.bendix.com/en/products/vehicle-dynamics/

Some probably do, tech has advanced quite a bit since I started driving in 2008, but the newer tech tends not to be installed widely when it first comes out due to how unreliable tech becomes under the working conditions that are normal in the trucking industry. Fleet owners want their equipment on the road making money, not in the shop costing money, so they tend to wait till a tech proves itself to be reliable. Plus upgrades costs money, so they tend not to happen till a unit is replaced with a newer model, which can take a while.

Most large companies in the US have an experimental fleet where they try out new tech first, before they roll it out to the rest of their fleets. They are looking for cost effectiveness, reliability and driver response. The smaller owner operators, which make up the bulk of the trucking industry, tend to follow (slowly) after them. And as old as the trucks are, the trailers are often even older. While most trailers in my company's fleet are less than 3 years old right now, the oldest trailer (now mostly used for hauling pallets back to Chep) was built in 1992 according to it's data plate. If it's ABS system is newer then 2008, when it was last active in the fleet I'm a monkey's uncle, and I'd pay long odds it's still the original system from 92.

Most of a tractor-trailer's stopping power is split between the trailer brakes and the tractor's drive tandems. If there is not enough weight on those axles, the tires can't grip the pavement properly. If I apply too much power to the brakes the wheels can start bouncing or just lock up and start skidding if the ABS system is acting up.

Most tractor-trailers you see on the road in the US are designed to weigh 60,000 to 80,000 lbs (~ 27,000 - 36,000 kg). For comparison, a Honda Civic weighs roughly 3,000 lbs (1360 kg). Every system on the truck is designed around moving that amount of mass safely. With an empty dry van trailer your looking at closer to 30,000 lbs (~ 13,000 kg). Makes a difference in performance. Ride is rougher, takes longer to stop.

I’m a truck driver.

• You are far safer behind me than in front of me. It can take me over two US football fields (200 yards or roughly 180 meters) to come to a full stop and it takes more distance if my trailer is empty. The average car can stop in half that distance. Most cars turn into tin cans when hit by a rig at 25 mph.
• If you see a number of trucks all moving into the same lane, might consider getting in the same lane, behind us. Odds are pretty good we either saw something in the lane ahead or we heard about something over the CB.
• I can see you playing on your phone while driving. Cops in some states have been known to hitch rides with truck drivers in order to catch distracted drivers.
• Learn zipper merging!

I’ve still got a few vintage Napster MP3s from the 56k days.

Damn, I envy you. I lost all my digital music from those days to disk rot and a hard drive failure. Wish someone told me back then that CD-R was not a good backup medium. Or that I had checked on the disks before I needed them. Live and learn.

I use Jellyfin to stream both video as well as audio. Media is stored on my NAS via a samba share.

Much like yourself, I’m more frequently streaming music. The default apps aren’t great for music (and horrid for audio books) but there are music specific apps for most iOS, Android, and most PC OSs. Can’t remember what app I use on Linux (don’t use it much) but I use FinAmp on iOS a lot.

Navidrome is probably a better self hosted music service , but I didn’t see the point when Jellyfin plus FinAmp and met my streaming audio needs.

As for where I got my music collection, I’m an old fart whose music collection predates digital music. Early stuff was ripped from whatever format it was on to digital a while ago. Nowadays I tend to buy CDs and rip them to flac or buy digital from Band Camp or Amazon.

I haven’t seen the need since iTunes and Amazon Music came around, but if you wanted to go sailing you can find popular releases and discographies of popular artists on public torrent sites easily enough. There are also several programs available that can take a Spotify playlist and automatically download the music from YouTube.

While you didn’t ask about audio books, it might help someone else. While I can access my audiobook collection from Jellyfin, it is so bad at audiobooks that that I don’t bother. For audiobooks I use a service called AudioBookshelf. Great for podcasts as well. The audiobooks themselves I generally buy from Audible and then use Libation to strip the DRM.

First OS was DOS (I think) on an Apple IIE at school. I think there were a few Commodore 64’s there as well. A couple years later we got our first home computer running Windows 95. Good times playing Doom, Jane’s Apache, an MS Flight Simulator.

My first personal computer was running Windows XP and I switched to Ubuntu sometime in 2004. Ran Ubuntu for the most part till a few months ago when I switched my desktop and laptop to NixOS.

Started self hosting services in 2012 and started with Ubuntu as base OS. Now though most of my servers are Proxmox with the VMs usually running Ubuntu LTS, though NixOS is starting to creep in there as well.