philamonster
I still have a turntable/cd-changer in my living room which is used monthly at least, but it is mostly a social thing (kids, friends etc). For mobile digital, I had been using Subsonic and subsequent forks since 2010 but self-hosting is too much work with real work and life taking a front seat, still have iSub on my phone with around 4k songs cached which is all I listen to in the car, no paid streaming services at all for over 2 years now. There is a 5k song limit for my car but the plan is to dump my whole collection into multiple USB sticks and rotate as I see fit.
I'm constantly reminded of those past days when certain songs roll through of my youth (90's, 2000's) and the who, when and where of it all. I also get to pass it on to my kids as they discover this musical past in real-time next to me which makes it even sweeter.
Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Reduce motion and Settings > Accessibility > Display and text size > Reduce transparency make it usable-ish. There is hundreds of ms lag at times inexplicably w/touch and upwards of a second plus when connected to CarPlay. But I can't blame iOS 26. I have to reboot this thing sometimes weekly, sometimes less frequent than that since iOS 18. I can no longer justify spending hundreds of dollars on things that don't meet my standard of "works" even if it's 2025.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/29/upshot/traffi...
It is a totally different world on US roads these days. There is so much dumb shit I've done on a bike in my 20's that I refuse to tell my kids about and that makes me cringe thinking how lucky I have been and after about 2 weeks of commuting this summer I have abandoned that dream and instead choose to ride where the cars can't go. I am fortunate to have access to a massive trail system outside my front door but will avoid as much vehicle interaction as I can here on out. Aside from the crazy, impatient drivers there are so many other ways you can get destroyed by a massively oversized car or truck that the distracted driver can barely see out of. Not to mention the erosion of trust that people are going to actually behave on the roads, as illustrated in the above article. Riding on city streets was always something that put my faith in other humans to the test and since I already know the answer, the safest thing one could do is to simply remove yourself from the equation.
That said, I have seen and still see some questionable cyclist practices on these roads from type of bike, lane of travel, footwear (or gear in general), lack of helmet (or misfitting/unfastened helmet) and route choice though I understand, at least where I live now, there sometimes isn't a choice. In larger cities there was an unspoken agreement _most_ of the time between myself and vehicles in the road that we were "aware" of one another. I find sometimes cyclists being far too aggressive to assert that awareness on drivers here (or today?) where it could be an honest misconception that the person behind the wheel knows how to interact with a cyclist for any number of reasons.
Full disclosure; former bike messenger in Boston, Philly & Portland OR, long-time commuter when not riding for work.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90704310/spotify-boycott-daniel-...
I was paying for a family plan with some people spread out and wanted to get everyone on the same page before I just dropped their paid service. I have to say it's been horrendous using the app over what seems like months. I recently bought a car with Apple CarPlay (which is garbage on all fronts IMO though may have more to do with Subaru's console than Apple).
As you said, I was bombarded with Podcasts when the app loads in the car though I NEVER listen to them, ever. Even when my phone isn't connected to my car. Playback has gotten super annoying where if I'm listening to a playlist I've made or my Liked songs when I disconnect the phone and re-connect the song I was listening to will continue to play to the end but then then the app will take over and play recommendations instead continuing with the playlist I was listening to, every time. I also don't like not being able to generate a playlist in the app from Liked songs as I was using liking songs as way to quickly group a few tunes that I want to investigate further at a later time and maybe keep around or remove after a couple listens. They typically don't stay liked for long.
Since leaving the service I've been listening to the couple gigs of songs I had cached locally in iSub on my phone. I used to host my own Subsonic server, over 12 years I think, but had a catastrophic hardware failure in Feb 2021 which brought all my containers down permanently. Fortunately, I was able to recover the array long enough to copy everything to an external drive, nearly a TB of MP3's/AAC/FLAC etc. Not sure where to go from here as I don't really have the interest or resources to build a new/better/more efficient homelab nor do I have the time. These services to stream and never own or curate a thing are killing my interest in general in learning how to roll your own again, which oddly I am somewhat thankful for especially as warmer weather approaches. This has lead me to cancel other streaming services and really question how badly I want to rent content which always ends in not doing so these days. My kids don't always appreciate it but I feel like I've taken back a small amount of control by opting out and not participating. Interested in seeing how far I can go with this purge...
I've personally forbade my kids from logging into devices we own with their school accounts (O365). I've also gone so far as to relegate them to only connecting to a segmented guest network (internet only) with their district issued devices. I no longer work for a district but provide various levels of support for districts in my county as a state employee and let me tell you, no one really knows what they're doing. A district I used to work for uses a product called Aristotle essentially logging key strokes of every staff member and student. There are, or were, certain school admins that made it their business disciplining bored-ass students for things 99% of the time they may have said in jest to a fellow student. On the flip side it was instrumental in catching a couple staff members that were doing some pretty heinous things, one of which who is currently serving 35 years on federal charges.
What?! Is this for real? Nowhere near these numbers in my house....
I've taken no steps to confirm they are actively getting info from my browser if I don't remove my account or if they are not if I do because I have turned off as much account data tracking/opted out of as much as I could for my Google account. But logging out of YouTube, which gives you no indication that you are actively logged in in the active browser window, and then going to mail.google.com will show you that Google is still aware of your account. Bullshit.
https://www.bicycling.com/health-nutrition/a20040926/timelin...