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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM.

    Creative Labs did wavetable synthesis well before the AWE32 — they released the Wave Blaster daughter board for the Sound Blaster 16, two full years before the AWE32 was released.

    (FWIW, I’m not familiar with any motherboards that had FM synthesis built-in in the mid 90’s. By this time, computers were getting fast enough to be able to do software-driven wavetable synthesis, so motherboards just came with a DAC).

    Where the Sound Blaster really shined was that the early models were effectively three cards in one — an Adlib card, a CMS card, and a DAC/ADC card (with models a year or two later also acting as CD-ROM interface cards). Everyone forgets about CMS because Adlib was more popular at the time, but it was capable of stereo FM synthesis, whereas the Adlib was only ever mono.

    (As publisher of The Sound Blaster Digest way back then, I had all of these cards and more. For a few years, Creative sent me virtually everything they made for review. AMA).




  • An honest review isn’t what’s going to kill their business. Even a bad product in and of itself isn’t necessarily what could cause the death of their business — it’s their not adequately tempering consumer expectations. From the sounds of it, they’ve oversold what the product can actually do, and are charging a price based on this fantasy.

    If you’re honest in your marketing as to what your product can actually do, and charge a corresponding price then consumers and reviewers may be more forgiving. Where companies like this one which are doing fairly experimental stuff fail is when they over-promise and under-deliver. And reviewers will always take them to task when they do that.



  • Got a T-Mobile eSIM while travelling in the US last year to get around this. The eSIM was a great deal (can’t remember the specifics, but pretty cheap with a decent amount of data). I was making two trips to California and Georgia in the same 30 day window, so it was useful to have.

    The only downside was that I couldn’t activate the eSIM before getting to the US, and LAX didn’t appear to have any WiFi while we were there (not sure if that was generally true for the time, or if it was just offline). So I wound up having to roam to get the eSIM, and to get a text message from the shuttle that was picking us up from the airport (as I had to give them that in advance, and didn’t know what my US number would be until I got there).

    Still saved us some money, but it was a bit of a PITA to activate with no WiFi available at the airport.








  • The ability to “strive” is a learned skill that needs to be honed over years. It’s not really natural to most people — it’s easy to fall into a low-energy state and want to stay there because it’s comfortable. It takes practice and energy putting yourself out there and putting an effort into making more of your life.

    If you’re happy with who you are and what you’re doing, then I’m not going to neg on your life. But are you going to spend the next ~50 years just gliding along, and not creating or building any value for yourself in this world (and that doesn’t have to be monetary value — building a family, and building up your community through volunteer works build value as well)? When you’re in the twilight of your life, do you want to look back and find you did nothing of significance with your life?

    Maybe that doesn’t bother you. That’s fine. Just so long as 15 years from now you’re not some bitter middle-aged person complaining about people in the upper-middle class who get to do things you don’t get to do and who have more money and nice things that you do.

    But none of that would be for me. So I put in the work, learned how to strive for the life I wanted, and got a graduate degree, built a beautiful family, got that management job (and the pay that goes with it), and spend my spare time volunteering (currently) with three different organizations. It’s a busy life and take a lot of time and energy — but it allows me to have people around me who love me, with the money to do and own nice things together, and to give back to my community to make it a better place. And when my time eventually comes, I’ll have hopefully left this world a little better off for the effort.


  • Don’t know where you are in Canada (which I’m assuming based on “Social Insurance Number” and “Prov.” fields in the form), but at least here in BC much of what they’re asking for here is illegal to even request in the first place.

    Your Drivers License, and banking info are all personal private information which are covered by the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA). This guidance document from the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of BC outlines what a perspective landlord can ask for, and what they can’t.

    This is either a scam, or a really shitty landlord. Either way, don’t deal with them. You can open a complaint with the OIPC if you want (probably most useful if you’re sure they’re legit; not too useful if it’s a scam).



  • Canning can be zen — with a bit of practice it’s not that difficult, and it’s often easy to find someone who is willing to help out. I’m often canning with friends or family — and it’s often as easy as throwing the right ingredients into a pot, bringing them to a boil, ladling it into prepared jars, and letting them sit in the pot.

    As we built up the community, dealing with the “tide of crap” did get easier for us as moderators — we had a good core community of regular users who would quickly flag things that were dangerous, and with an automod rule to auto-remove posts with 5 such reports meant that we were often able to moderate posts of concern while they were private. But it took work to build up the community to the point where it was self-policing. I’m hoping that resiliency we tried to build up has continued to keep the community safe.

    Glad to be here on Lemmy as well. Online discussion boards have been my bread and butter since the grand old BBS days of the mid-80s.


  • I’m glad people think so — we really wanted to help build an online community of people who could share their joy of home canning, where safety and adhering to the best scientific principles was respected. The most gratifying results were when we would hear from some new canner who were able to get over some fears they had around safety and completed their first successful canning project.

    I haven’t been back to check on the situation since we got the boot, but I hope for the sake of the community there are still people there keeping to this credo. A jar of food just isn’t something worth getting sick (or worse!) over.



  • It was quite the interesting thing to run back then — it was all very “Wild West” of software, and a LOT of stuff didn’t work well.

    It wasn’t my daily driver; it really wasn’t ready for most workloads back then. But it was nearly free, and we shared around the CD-ROM amongst hacker friends interested in giving it a try.


  • My experience modding r/Canning burnt me out on online canning forums. There is a ton of unsafe information out there, and so I just got out of online canning discussions altogether.

    There was a Lemmy instance out there that was intended to revolve around self sufficiency that offered me moderation rights to their canning forum, but that instance didn’t really take off, nobody ever posted to their canning community, and the instance went offline several months ago.

    I still can — but I don’t participate in any online canning communities, so I’m not sure what’s trustworthy out there right now.