Didn’t know that. Thanks!

134a is for automotive ac units. Unless something has changed recently, household hvac systems use a different type. It used to be R22 for both, but that was a long time ago. Turned out freon (R22) was bad for the environment.

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.

My house is old enough that it doesn’t have neutrals, so I’m kinda limited in what I can install. I’ve been using smart plugs by thirdreality and battery powered buttons. No problems with the smart plugs yet.

THIRDREALITY ZigBee Smart Plug 4 Pack with Real-time Energy Monitoring,15A Outlet, Zigbee Repeater,ETL Certified,ZigBee Hub Required,Work with Home Assistant,Compatible Echo Devices and SmartThings https://a.co/d/05vm2VMC

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.

A couple of years ago I was using a transcription service, though that may be of less help nowadays due to AI transcription. Pay was crap, but it was better than nothing for me at the time. The service I was working with seems to have shut down, but you might try https://www.transcribeme.com/freelancers/

Last time I needed to do this was 2006ish. Like I said it’s been a while. Worth checking into though. Might need the cd burner installed (or emulated) for the option to be available.

I also seem to recall that thee were a couple of projects attempting to strip the DRM off of Apple’s proprietary music format. Not sure how those turned out.

And no, as far as I know, it is not possible to go straight from Apple Music to mp3, or whatever format you prefer. It has to be downloaded to iTunes first.

Not sure if it is still possible, but the work flow for this used to be to use iTunes to burn the tracks or album to a CD and then rip the newly created CD to a format of your choice.

If you don’t have a CD burner, I seem to remember it was possible to emulate a cd burner on Windows and create an iso instead. I don’t remember how I did that though. I was running XP back then and that was a long time ago.

Edit: adding link to iTunes software

I don’t think it started as a proxy war. Russia just decided to be stupid, but at this point it may very well be a proxy war in fact.

It’s to pretty much everyone’s benefit (except Ukraine’s) for this to drag out for a nice long time. The more manpower and material Russia and their allies burns up in this stupidity, the longer the rest of Europe can breath freely. It gives them time to rebuild the armies that they have allowed to atrophy. There’s probably more to it and it’s callus as fuck, but that’s the math I see.

I think that the Nazis or Japanese did experiments in that vain, but don’t quote me on it. They did quite a lot that makes my stomach roil. As to how far they could get, no clue.

Either way, once organs start to be removed, you won’t be around for long. Under most circumstances anyways. We do have the ability to sub in machines for failed organs, such as heart, kidneys or lungs, but I don’t know of any cases where all of them have been replaced with machines at the same time with the “patient” still awake during.

Full life support tends to be a “Buddy, your fucked!” sort of thing and if you’re not already in a coma, they will likely put you in one.

Depends on what you are trying achieve.

You can send sms via foss no problem as long as you know what carrier the recipient uses. All of the carriers seem to have email bridges to the sms network. Receiving sms is another question entirely. To receive sms, the network needs to know where to send the message. There are commercial platforms that can link you into the sms network.

Another option is KDEConnect which can link your Android device to your computer and you can send and receive sms that way.

https://simpletexting.com/blog/how-to-text-from-computer/

Pirate Bay? I don’t know. I haven’t run that sea in close to 20 years. Went open source instead. Might check the Mega Thread for more up to date info.

Well, I use NextCloud (via Nextcloud AIO) as my cloud backend for almost everything. If all you want is contact syncing, that is almost certainly overkill. It’s a Big project that does just about everything.

If I remember correctly, there were a few more focused projects listed in the Awesome-Selfhosted repo that may be useful to you.

I’ve never played guitar hero so I don’t know what you mean by that.

If you’ve seen the Simply Guitar or Yousicion ads (I’m not linking them, too cringe!), you’ve got the general idea.

UG Pro’s midi player didn’t exist when I first started playing with the guitar, so something I’ll do with tab or sheet music, when I need to hear something to understand what I’m reading, is to enter the tab or standard notation into MuseScore and use it to create a midi track I can listen to. You can speed it up or slow it down as necessary.

It’s also possible to take a midi file, open it using MuseScore, and it will convert the midi data into standard notation. From there you can have it translated into tab. Tab created this way isn’t great, and you will have to modify the fret choices it makes to make the song playable, but it will get you in the ball park. The rest is just learning your instrument/tuning, what notes are where, that sort of thing.

Most popular songs should have a midi file available, especially popular music pre-2010ish. Downloading mp3s on a 56k modem sucked! Midi’s were a much faster download.

Another thing you can do is take the audio track your interested in learning from and load it into a DAW. Use an EQ filter to isolate the instrument, and add a boost after the EQ so you can hear the instrument clearly. Depending on the DAW, you may also be able to slow down the track and pitch shift it back up into the correct frequencies. This is a bit more difficult but will let you learn directly from the musician you’re interested in. I seem to recall an application that could do this in a more automated fashion, but I don’t remember what it was called.

Without knowing what you’re looking for? Might try archive.org. They’ve got a large collection of archived disk images. Might find what your looking for there. Otherwise you might try a public torrent search engine.

The logistics issue is not that big of one. We’re a warehouse that runs our own trucks. We could get it there with only a bit of extra fuel burn. HOS might cause issues though. Additionally, the need is great enough that many food banks and shelters would be willing to come pick it up if we weren’t all (Grocery industry and food banks) afraid of getting sued to death by some person that got sick after eating something that was a day after it’s arbitrarily set use by date.

We at the warehouse salve our consciences some by donating fresh products directly to some food banks local to our warehouse, and a few of our stores order a little extra to donate locally, but it’s nowhere near the amount that gets tossed by the stores.

I work in the grocery industry. For us it’s a liability thing. If you get sick and sue, it winds up costing us even if we win. Given the razor thin margins we operate on, we would have to increase prices to cover the extra cost.

The result is most grocery stores toss anything that doesn’t sell and lock the dumpster.

Some is donated, to be sure, but most is just tossed out.

If you had time I would say to try contacting CNN directly. Most news outlets don’t mind sharing old reports. Can take a while though.

Another option would be to contact the reporter who did the report as they might save such things for whatever reason or might be willing to put you in touch with the outlet’s archive department, but again might take a while.

But since time is an issue, YouTube may be your best bet.

I haven’t really followed most protests in a while, but I do recall more than a few occasions where there was a particularly hot-button issue being protested by two separate groups in close proximity and the police were there solely to keep the different protesting groups away from each other. I seem to remember that they (the protesting groups) had gotten a bit rowdy but that not much came of it.

The riot squads committing war crimes against civilians stick out in part because of the brutality but also because of the relative rarity of it.