Go ahead and send me ads, and I’ll just block your site … never go there except when someone tries to trick me into it, and then my SITE-BLOCKER will refuse for me. Our now and future business IS OVER.

“But why don’t you just trust us?” Because I’ve been online for 30 years and it’s been downhill ever since.

Could you add a pointer to the Youtube you watched?

‘Theeeere once was a girl from Nantucket’ … well, sort of works.

Yeah! Did that once, many years back. took a couple weeks. Used a ripper program that went out on the net and got all the metadata, saved to a HD (now on the third one). Put the CDs in Logic cases (no-wear), recycled the jewelboxes.

Over time, started to drop album folders into VLC, save the playlists, at ur fingertips.

Dear Alex, Welcome to Waking Life !!

FLAC is good, but not necessary for background listening. At 192k the average song is ~ 5Mb. 100k x 5 = 0.5 TB.

With a long, varied list of select internet radio stations, you can choose what genre (or special weekly show) you want to listen to at the moment. Picked by people, not algorithms. Keep a playlist of the stations you like best, startup your player (like VLC) with the list, and pick the one you’re in the mood for.

Or you could just collect mp3s locally for choosier days, dump a bunch of them into VLC, listen to them in album or random order. In either case, at no cost.

There’s a lot to like about Atril (native to MATE).

I’d say that a vacant home - any place (lots of them) where the homeless are dying in the streets of hypothermia - is owned by a garbage human.

IMO owning an unoccupied house thats off-market, or prohibitively-priced is probably a gambling chip.

IF there are ANY families in the same county that are homeless, it should begin being taxed as a gambling-chip. Sell-it very soon or it may used for a free shelter for however it remains unoccupied by the owner.

An apartment-building owner WHO LIVES IN the building year-around might be in accord. (My own GG-ma ran a boarding-home for income after her husband died.)

Needs discussion. I’m more concerned for kids -never being able- to buy a home. “Owner-built”, no problem.

It’s my opinion that housing is so basic a need that no house should be allowed to use for a gambling chip.

The ‘housing market’ needs to be broken in favor of individual ownership. (For many, speculation has driven ownership out of reach.)

Only individuals may purchase individual homes, and must agree to occupy them as their primary and only residences until they sell and vacate them. (Live-in landlords included, e.g. boarders.)

As part of the deal, they must first find another individual buyer (under the same terms) for their present home.

(Futher stipluations needed, but none that permit violation of the above principle. )

“We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.” - Leona Helmsley. (~ 1989)

(Convicted of extortion; sentenced to 16 years; released after months.) Her husband’s death left her with the Helmsley hotels, the Helmsley Palace and the Empire State Building. (Yes, that one.)

Dinty Moore still comes in cans … and is better than ever (esp. compared to most of today’s canned “food”.

Strange to see people blaming their fellow citizens, when it was a certain beloved King that started off his reign by hugely cutting the tax-rate of corporations, leaving them with the ‘trickle-down’.

Somehow rulers manage to keep the people divided by keeping them blaming each other rather the root-cause.

For language learning, I’ve always 1) come up with a simple project plan that’s not too beyond my ability. Build a simple core that could branch off in several directions to make it more and more useful. I started one 10 years ago I’m still enjoying building on… and never needed to use objects … OR frameworks … to do anything.

It’s good to know the basic, vanilla stuff really well. Say you’re getting into text arrays, knowing basics of splice, slice, split, pop/push, indexOf, sort are a lot more useful than, say, typedArray. MDN is useful for details, but is very completist. And if you run into something new that you know you need to remember, try to use it ASAP, and as often as you can.

Lately I noticed the Digital Ocean tutorial series - it’s very good, very well-written. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorial-series/how-to-code-in-javascript

For a reference book with the essencials in one place, a hard copy of "Javascript - The good parts’ by Crockford. Lots of expert examples, indexed, pick it up anytime … it’ll never get old! (Then pick up the essentials added in ES6.)

Not until there hasn’t been any for a century. P.S. Best of luck.

Transistor FM radios are quite small.

I’d guess, with all the veterans living here, that the ‘near future’ isn’t so dangerous.