They also randomly delete albums and state increased playcount by AI as the reason for removal, and they also allow random dudes publishing remixes on your own artist profile, because there are no checks in place. You can just fill out the artist name in a text field and publish a song:

The artist KARRA recently made a video about it which went viral.
(She also made this meme release up top to prove how broken the system is.)

So fuck Spotify in every way you can. They don’t deserve the money, since they’re clearly doing nothing for the artists with it.

Absolutely. I’ve been working from home for ~3 years and I’ll never go back. I have so much more time for myself (and also, no one is annoying me with smalltalk or stupid questions).

Google has been been cracking down on installing .apk’s on your phone for years and they’re getting more and more aggressive about it. It’s not a question of if they’ll disallow it completely, but when.

It’s already extremely tedious. Back in the Android 2.3 days (oh, good old Gingerbread) you could just get an APK and install it, but those times are long gone.

Years ago they threatened the developer of Total Commander to remove his app from the PlayStore unless he patched out an APK install feature, so he was forced to do that.

Now another example: Try to install eBay on a phone that is not passing device integrity. It is not listed on the PlayStore because your device doesn’t pass safety checks. You can grab an APK and install it, but the OS will check if the app has been installed through the PlayStore and if it hasn’t, it will complain and close itself.

GrapheneOS has patched that bullshit out, btw.

And this behaviour happens with all apps where the developer has enabled the “App Integrity” option, which is heavily pushed as a super-great security feature. So developers might just enable that feature, not being fully aware of the implications.

As you can see, it’s one method at a time, slowly but surely, until Google fully controls the ecosystem. The intention behind that is pretty clear: They don’t want people to have AdAway and Revanced, they want money and user data. And they also want you to login to the PlayStore, get hooked on their stupid daily points challenges and spend your hard-earned money on virtual crap.

This is textbook enshittification, it will only get worse from here on.

I find music on YouTube and autoconvert it to MP3 with yt-dlp and ffmpeg. It fetches new music from my personal “Favorite Music” playlist, downloads the highest quality audio source, converts it to MP3, embeds the metadata and cover art and tries to parse the artist and title as best as possible.

yt-dlp -x -f bestaudio --audio-quality 0 --audio-format mp3 --embed-thumbnail --add-metadata --metadata-from-title "%(artist)s - %(title)s" --playlist-start 1 --playlist-end 999 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=123abc -o "./files/%(artist)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" --cookies-from-browser

Needs minimal adjustment sometimes if the title format is weird, but works 95% automatic. What I like most about this is the fact that music vanishes all the time from YouTube, but it doesn’t affect me. No one deletes the files from my harddrive but me.

That sounds more like your drive not being supported by LibreDrive. OP talked about expired beta keys, which is a current problem with makemkv.

Yes.

Regards,
The Movie Industry

I gave in and bought makemkv yesterday. It just works.

I’m sure most of the Germans will continue using their illegal adblockers. This ruling is ridiculous.

Yes, it’s really good! I still run it with proton, because I couldn’t find a good alternative on Linux. banshee is unmaintained (it was my favorite for a long time) and all others have their shortcomings in some way or another.

Yep, apart from the bugs that really annoys me, too. To effectively debug an issue on iOS, you need an iPhone and connect it to a Mac (or iPad) to use the debug tools.

Every other browser can be run on a typical PC. You can even emulate Android, run Firefox and Chrome and just get cracking. I’m not getting paid to buy an expensive device to do my work, lol.

Michael MJD tested the AOL Desktop six months ago. It was surprisingly competent and got regular updates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUsym8iAWHY

Websites won’t be tested properly on Safari anymore

They only have to be tested on Safari specifically, because it’s doing some things differently from Mozilla and Chrome. I guess Apple will finally have to use their money to actually fix those issues with their own engine, so people will prefer using it. Oh no, all of that hard-earned cash! /s

(As a web developer, I despise Safari, sometimes with passion. At least we finally got rid of IE and that non-Chrome Edge shitshow by now.)

Mozilla said last time they don’t want to maintain two variants of their browser. So unless Apple finally decides custom browser engines are allowed worldwide, a real Firefox probably won’t happen.

I doubt the EU and Japan have enough traction to change Apple’s mind on this issue.

Good reminder to play Persona 5 again.

Define “alright”. Fascism is on the rise here, too.

I upgraded to Fedora and convinced my employer that I really need to run this at work, too. Fuck Microsoft.

Vodafone has a hotspot service here in Germany. All of their cable routers have a second wifi network everyone can use (unless you opt out).

When they introduced it, it had a big flaw: They stored the MAC address of your device in their database as authorized, but never deleted it.

Hypothetically speaking, you could pay for a month, cancel the service and then browse for over a year until they noticed you and kicked you out. 😆

But I would never do that, of course.

Tigole is doing the same.

It redirects to “Rectal administration” on Wikipedia, so yeah…I’m also not clicking on that one for “further” research. :D

Stop right there criminal scum!