Category: Technology

Technological Overthinking #5 | Finding a new read-it-later app

10 December 2024 / Sinead

This is a follow-up from my previous post about the read-it-later app Omnivore, and why its existence and shutdown shows off the good and bad of open-source projects. Diving into the world of self-hosting software isn’t for me yet, which means it’s time to search for a replacement hosted service. After reading a variety of lists and reviews of recommended read-it-later apps, and learning from what others in the Discord found to be useful, I decided that writing down a checklist of what I was looking for in a replacement service would probably be the best way to test the options.

What I needed a replacement read-it-later app to have/ not have.

A priority on web browser features/settings (i.e. that its not using the “app-first with a limited web version” approach)
A Firefox extension that would let me easily save links/pages.
An Android app that reliably saves links from web browsing and other apps e.g. Discord messages.
A paid hosted syncing service.
A focus on reading text, not on audio.
No sponsored content or advertising mixed in with my saved links.

What I would prefer the replacement to have/not have:

No AI features (or at least the ability to fully disable and ignore any AI features)
Preference for a yearly subscription over a monthly subscription.
Payment with money rather than data.
Preference for developers using open source software and/or a nonprofit structure.

With the checklist in place, I started trying out some of the recommended alternatives to see which might be the best fit.

Apps/services I tried:

Readwise Reader (free trial)

Reader was already in the “probably not” pile as it aims to be a much larger program than I need. It aspires to be a read-it-later app, a note-taking app, and a full productivity system that integrates with other systems. For me, that would probably lead me to turn leisure reading into work, which would not be a good idea.

While I was impressed at Reader’s polished and coherent design, I did find that its everything-app nature felt like “too much” as a replacement; for me it felt intended to be a system that needed active maintenance rather than a tool. I have nothing against systems (case in point: this blog series!), but I didn’t want to replace something that had been simple with something much more complex.

The dealbreaker for me was that Reader automatically summarised imported articles with their AI “ghostreader”. This meant that when looking at my list of articles/feed items, I wasn’t actually seeing the start of the article as written by the author, but the AI summary instead. Worse, there doesn’t seem to be a way to disable it. The fact I couldn’t turn the AI off instantly sent Reader to the “hell, no” pile. A read-it-later app that wants to “ghostread” things for me is not where I want to be!

One of my favourite apps has shut down….

3 December 2024 / Sinead

It’s probably not surprising that I’m often particular about which apps and programs I use. While most of the time apps can be relatively interchangeable, I have three favourite programs/apps. For me, that’s defined as programs/apps that a) I have chosen as the sole way for me to do a specific task after a lot of research, and b) I would be genuinely upset about not being able to use any more.

The apps/services are MusicBee (where I manage and back up my music and podcast library and sync it to my phone and mp3 players), Omnivore (where I save articles from my phone, laptop, or desktop to read later and archive), and Listenbrainz (an open-source listen tracker).

Of the three, MusicBee would be the biggest loss. It’s also the main reason I still own a Windows PC. Finding anything that could equal MusicBee would require intensive research, but its local-first nature means that I could continue to use my installed copy even if the program was no longer actively maintained, making it hard to truly lose access to.

Omnivore, on the other hand, is a service rather than a program. It is also now a dead service: on November 30th, the hosted service was shut off and all user data was deleted.

Technological Overthinking #4 | Alternatives to a typical gaming headset

20 April 2024 / Sinead

This is a companion to my more general post about alternatives to headsets, as I wanted to write about both the options available for people and about my own experience and the solution that worked for my particular preferences and caveats. Splitting the two aspects into two posts seemed like a better option than creating a giant wall of text.

Due to everything on the limitations/caveats list below, finding a comfortable communication option for gaming is quite tricky for me. Given that gaming is my main way of socialising, a faulty choice here can be very annoying. This meant that taking the time to dive into researching more options was worthwhile, especially if it resulted in a more comfortable gaming-party experience.

I’m aware that this is irrational, and that it’s very much a first world problem, but trying to find a working alternative to wearing a typical headset was annoying not only because I had to try (and return) a lot of audio products, but because I felt stupid for not being able to just do things in the “proper” way.

Limitations / Caveats

I’m very sensitive to noise; the “immersion” of hearing all of the background noise and detail inside the game that people often desire can instead feel like a sensory overload for me because there are so many sounds going on.

Filtering out chat audio from the background of game audio is also tricky for me, so I need to have the option to hear only chat audio.

Sometimes, direct audio from earbuds/ headphones can feel physically painful even at very low volumes, so I need to have the option to send all audio (game and chat) out from the TV.
I get headaches from wearing most headphones for longer than an hour. The only exception to this to this I’ve found is the Bose QC 35ii because of how light they are and how little force they apply. Wearing headphones or a headset can also put uncomfortable pressure on my ears and jaw when my TMJ is playing up.
Lots of earphones and IEMs just don’t fit my ears.
I need to wear either earplugs or my noise-cancelling headphones for a large part of the day when I’m at work, and would prefer not to have to shove more things in/on my ears when I’m at home.
I’m not very good at talking loudly, so I need an actual mic rather than an inline mic to be audible to my friends.

Anti-Caveats (aka factors I don’t need to worry about)

I live with someone who is severely hearing impaired, and my neighbours are hearing impaired too, so being overheard or disturbing others is not something I have to think about.
I have an old flatscreen TV with surprisingly high-quality speakers: both game audio and music sound good and don’t have that scratchy “laptop speaker” sound. This means a complex setup with recievers/ surround-sound speakers isn’t necessary, as hearing party and game audio through my TV is actually my preferred option.

Help! I’m a gamer who can’t* wear a headset

19 April 2024 / Sinead

Now that gaming is such a known and celebrated part of the world, and has stopped being portrayed as a negative hobby, aspects of it have become standardised and locked in as essential parts of the activity. Across media, adverts, videos, and streams, gaming now has an expected portrayal with standard steps. You boot up your console or your PC “setup”, covering your aesthetically arranged desk in an RGB glow, settle into a comfy chair, put on your outside-world-blocking headset, and get immersed in another reality.

When you have to do any of those parts differently to that stereotyped (and marketed) pattern, it does kind of feel like you’re doing it wrongly.

* By “can’t wear”, I don’t mean that wearing a headset is completely impossible. It’s more that, due to a combination of hearing/audio processing issues and sensory oddities, wearing headsets or earphones is often very uncomfortable. Listening to game audio and chat audio simultaneously through headphones – achieving the “immersed” type of experience that is portrayed as the ideal and default way to game – is not the way gaming works for me. As a result I’ve spent a lot of time looking for ways to have an audio setup that means sociable gaming can just work for me.

Now that I’ve tried a lot of different options and finally found one that works for me, it makes sense for me to write down the types of alternative options and their general pros and cons to hopefully help anyone in the same boat. (I’ve spun off my specifc limitations/caveats, and the options that did and didn’t work for me, into its own post).

Alternatives to a typical headset.

Technological Overthinking #3 | Retiring Last.FM

24 December 2023 / Sinead

This installment of overthinking yet again revolves around music, but this time it’s about keeping a long-term record of what I choose to listen to over time. (This was partially inspired by wanting to have my own version of a Spotify Wrapped that didn’t require Spotify!)

A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to keep a consistent play count and record of what I’d listened to over time, that wasn’t solely dependent on my PC. I’ve reinstalled Windows, corrupted things in Windows, and changed hard drives out frequently enough in the past that I’ve had to recreate my music library data quite a few times before. Also, I don’t only listen to music on my PC, so using an external source that could collate data from my PC, my phone, and any manual additions, seemed to be the best approach.

Last.FM was the main tracking service I’d heard of, and it seemed trustworthy because of having been around for such a long time, so it felt like a good choice. I signed up for Last.FM in December 2021 and, at first, I really liked using it. My media software of choice, MusicBee, has a built-in Last.FM feature, so automatic scrobbling (the Last.FM term for ‘keeping track of a song being listened to’) from my PC was easy. I enjoyed the recommendation mix and radio, as they gave me a way of discovering new music that wasn’t attached to a streaming service.

The listening statistics were also fun to use, as they covered both global and personal stats. Being able to look up an artist or album and see which of their albums and tracks had the most listeners was interesting. But being able to click on an album and view my play-count of each song from that album, and to click on a song and see each time that I had scrobbled it, was a whole new level of data to enjoy.

Tech Support Adventures | iMovie Compressor kit error

25 October 2020 / Sinead

While I’m often the person my friends and family call upon for technical support for Windows, Android, or things on the internet, I have little experience with the Apple ecosystem. But when my friend Josh told me about his sudden and confusing issue with Final Cut Pro X, I was so intrigued that I had to investigate. We eventually figured it out, and I got a crash-course in OSX as well.

The issue:

Final Cut Pro X (10.2) would crash and display a “Final Cut Pro quit unexpectedly” error message whenever an export option was selected.

Further details:

OS – El Capitan
FCPX – Version 10.2, without Compressor or Motion.
iMovie – 10.1.6

No new applications had been installed recently, and FCPX had been working correctly after the last OSX upgrade.

We couldn’t try restoring from a backup as there weren’t any viable backups, but all of the following troubleshooting steps had already been tried without success:

restarting the MacBook
clearing FCPX preferences
making a new FCPX library
deleting generated render files
making a new user account
booting in safe mode

Technological Overthinking #2 | Sony Walkman Album Art

4 June 2020 / Sinead

One recurrent technological question I have is why my MP3 players never display album artwork consistently. The issue often seems random; when I get some albums working, others are blank in their place. So I wanted to figure out what the problem was and write solutions down for future reference.

As I’ve used Sony Walkman MP3 players since about 2008, I initially checked posts and articles about Sony players. However, this problem applies to multiple brands of MP3 players and to other devices like digital photo frames.

Many people with Sony Walkman players have posted about cover art issues on Sony’s support website. But the official replies just tell people to transfer songs using Sony’s Content Transfer software, without explaining why the issue exists. I wanted to fix the issue within the music programs I already use (MediaMonkey and Mp3tag) instead of adding another program into the mix.

After looking on multiple sites, subreddits and software forums, I found three essential criteria for making album art and other tags show up properly on Sony MP3 players. (These criteria may apply to other MP3 players as as well, and the “baseline” JPG criteria may resolve issues with car infotainment systems and digital photo frames).

1) Every song must be tagged using ID3 tag version 2.3.
2) Every song’s artwork must be embedded into its ID3 tag.
3) Every artwork image must be a JPG. More specifically, it must be a “baseline” JPG rather than a “progressive” JPG.

Now I’ll explain what all of those words mean, and the steps that I followed to make my song files and cover artworks fit these criteria. It’s important for me to clarify that each individual criterion was figured out by someone else; I’m just putting them together so that I can show the steps in one place.

Technological Overthinking #1 | Music Library (2023 version)

4 June 2020 / Sinead

I can understand why streaming services have become so popular: being able to access a large library of familiar and new music that can’t be erased by a faulty hard drive or a wrong button-press is appealing. But, like most techies, I lean towards the “control” side of the convenience-control spectrum in many situations.

For music specifically, I prefer ownership over streaming. I like being able to buy albums from multiple places, store them and back them up wherever I wish, and play them on software I already use, rather than being restricted to specific marketplaces or software clients. (I would also rather rely on my storage and backups than on the unbelievably complex licensing arrangements between streaming services and publishers). For me, staying on team “offline library” was the obvious choice.

Investigating an issue with my MP3 player last year led me to an interesting program called Bliss. In short, Bliss manages your music library based on rules that you define. You set rules about how you want files to be labelled, named, and organised, and Bliss either highlights files which don’t fit the rules so that you can edit them, or adjusts them to meet the rules automatically.

Although Bliss is overkill for my relatively small and wholly-offline library, I really liked its rule-based approach. So I’ve taken the rules I decided on within Bliss and recreated them inside my desktop software of choice, MusicBee.

Language and Duolingo

1 August 2018 / Sinead

I went to a secondary school which at the time emphasised language teaching. Students were encouraged to take two different language GCSEs – one in Year 10, and one in Year 11. My class had Italian, then French.

Even though I had completed 4 years of French by the end of secondary school, I never clicked with the language. As I learn most readily through reading and writing, I found the gaps between spoken and written French confusing. So while the written side of GCSE French came easily to me, trying to speak in French was frustrating.

Italian was far more enjoyable – the logical connections between how words are pronounced and spelt made the language easier for me to understand. I enjoyed the language so much that I’ve repeatedly considered revisiting it.

At the moment, I’m practicing using Duolingo and Tinycards. I have a 109 day streak on Duolingo right now, which is probably the longest I’ve ever consistently done something. However, this isn’t 109 days of full attention. I have used streak freezes to skip some days, while I’ve also had “bare-minimum” days where I just repeated early lessons to fulfill my streak instead of actively trying to learn. But I’d estimate that at least 80 days have been legitimate.

Facebook Suicide Prevention Initiative

12 March 2015 / Sinead

On February 25th, Facebook’s safety division announced an extension of their suicide prevention initiative. They describe the initiative as being based on work with suicide prevention organisations, clinical research, and lived experiences from mental health survivors.

From what I’ve seen so far, parts of this initiative seem beneficial, and useful for helping people through a bad night or self-destructive impulse. However, there are still some concerning areas, and there has already been at least one example of just how this initiative can be dealt with wrongly.

The Benefits

Firstly I’ll go through its helpful aspects. The idea of pointing out that the post suggests someone is upset or distressed could be effective. Receiving this message might be the shock that lets someone realise they are having difficulties beyond typical ups and downs, and so might encourage them to see what the offered help is.

From the other side, allowing people to send an anonymous “someone thinks you might be in trouble” message reduces one of the barriers people often have in talking about mental health issues. It starts the conversation in a low-risk way, without requiring the face-to-face questions that many people just don’t know how to carry out.

Facebook’s post showed some pictures of the support options. The support page offers the following message: