This article feels like it written specifically for me. I have a strong nostalgia and affection for shortwave radio while sadly also forcing myself to come to grips with the fact that it's a dead medium.
I was a volunteer in rural Central America from 1998-2000 and shortwave radio was an important news source for me (but already a VERY niche medium, even then). Nights I dialed in VOA and then found a lot of other interesting things too, from Cuba to broadcasts from Spain, Germany, and Indonesia. It was all fun and exciting.
Ten years later I began a decade of work overseas in rural West Africa. I dutifully brought my shortwave with me, only this time I found close to nothing on the airwaves. Some crazy religious broadcasts here and there, but nothing. I looked around and can confirm that in ten years of living in Africa (with a lot of West African friends and colleagues) not a single one of them had or used shortwave, or even really had any awareness that it existed. The number one media source even then was FM radio tuned in over cheap Chinese FM radios or over FM radio apps on cell phones.
I've still got a shortwave and occasionally scan the frequencies from my hammock here in North Carolina. But there is really not much there (religious stuff still being one exception). I ask myself, if rural West Africans aren't listening to shortwave anymore, really who is?
This article answers it: a few pockets remain, like Nigeria and Myanmar. But the shortwave era ended: everyone who left shortwave never came back, even when newer methods failed. Guess it was fun while it lasted :)
I was in Central Africa (CAR and Chad) in the early 90s and shortwave was a lifeline. The BBC was on in the background almost all day, with the exception of switching to the VOA once in a while to check on sports scores. Beyond news, shortwave was how things like evacuation and security reports were shared.
My shortwave broke in transit home, but I picked up a new one around 2000, just in time for the BBC to end its broadcasts to North America. That really signaled the beginning of the end as other broadcasters cut back or eliminated their broadcasts.
If text-based access to popular websites is your cup of tea, there are two very good gopher interfaces I use regularly: gopher://gopherpedia.com for Wikipedia and gopher://gopherddit.com for Reddit.
The latter is not very helpful on image-based threads but is excellent for text-rich threads (like askreddit). The gopher interface to wikipedia is surprisingly full-featured; I love it.
My suspicion was that it's getting confused by the line above the intro, but I pasted the article's source code into Wikipedia:Sandbox and gopherpedia read the intro just fine. Strange!
That was my thinking too but I can't find a revision without it on the first page of results going back to 2019. Why does it look like a recent edit to you?
I see MacPorts includes the following clients (I took the liberty of removing servers and proxies from this list):
$ port search gopher
bombadillo @2.3.3_2 (net)
Bombabillo is a non-web client for the terminal, supporting Gopher, Gemini and much more.
kristall-devel @20211120 (net)
Small-Internet Browser for Gemini, Gopher, Finger & HTTP
phetch @1.1.0 (net)
A terminal client designed to help you quickly navigate the gophersphere.
vf-1 @0.0.11_1 (net, python)
command-line gopher client
Every time a vivaldi post shows up on HN it attracts a lot of negative comments (and some positive ones). Will just add my voice to the mix - Vivaldi is my primary browser and I love it. On my 5 year old laptop I experience no slowness, and I generally enjoy it's very user-focused features. I also enjoyed Opera prior to version 12. I recognize it's not the browser for everyone, but on my Linux boxes it's the second app I install (mutt is the first one). Your experience may vary.
I used jedit today, and actually I use it most days. It's a great piece of software and these days, the only reason I have to install a java runtime on my Linux boxes. Hypersearch is outstanding, I love the approach to macros (and I've written dozens for myself), and its approach to syntax highlighting is great.
I wrote five book manuscripts for a book publisher that used a custom typesetting syntax - not exactly XML but codes to turn on bold and highlighting, designate section headings, identify keywords, and place specific icons in the book. I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to hack an emacs syntax highlighting format, but with Jedit it only took an hour. I was then able to install Jedit on my co-author's Mac, where the software interface was easy enough for him to use without finding it too techie. Huge success. (Later I figured out how to create a vim syntax, but to this day I my custom emacs config goes uncreated).
I use different editors for different purposes, but Jedit is on every Linux box I build, and I use it regularly. VERY grateful for this software!
Left half of page: "work stuff." Right half of page "personal stuff." Bottom two inches of page: "long term goals for the week."
I use one sheet per week, adding bullet points to the relevant column. I created a template for printing on the office printer, then realized it was ecofriendlier to just recycle one-sided scrap paper (every office had tons of it), and draw my own lines. I use the To-Do app for tracking things from week to week, but when I put down my coffee cup and set down in front of my computer, thinking about what needs to get done, the notebook/pen combo somehow works best for me.
Edit: exchanged diagram for text since the diagram got mangled.
The hardware/software are nowhere as slick as that old ipod. But the freedoms this device give me serve as a reminder that all of the constraints of an ipod (one per user, no library comingling, needs itunes, etc.) were artificially imposed by a hardware striving to maximize hardware sales (and placate the music industry).
> Finally, here's what drove the purchase: I was taking a long car trip, and my wife was doing the DJ work using my device. Of course, every time she wanted to change tracks I had to unlock the device with my fingerprint. Ridiculous. This little device solved that problem
Wouldn't telling her your phone's code, or temporarily adding one of her fingerprints to it for the duration of the journey, have been a much simpler solution...?
> Wouldn't telling her your phone's code, or temporarily adding one of her fingerprints to it for the duration of the journey, have been a much simpler solution...?
The assumption (I guess?) is that you want to keep your phone private from everyone including your spouse.
Which kind of makes sense if you think of it as an external part of your (cyber)brain, rather than a shared computing device.
Apple devices are very personal. There may be guest modes but that’s not the point, they are too multipurposed and yet artificially limited. A good generic music player is a straight forward stand alone device.
Where they fail is where the content is online on some service
Sure, but the complaint was written as it being annoying having to constantly unlock it for her to have access to it, not wanting to prevent her from having access to it.
> all of the constraints of an ipod (one per user, no library comingling, needs itunes, etc.) were artificially imposed by a hardware striving to maximize hardware sales (and placate the music industry).
Last I checked, you could share an iPod between multiple users via a headphone splitter. You could also use it with multiple computers/iTunes libraries if you turn off automatic syncing. iTunes also introduced DAAP playlist sharing/streaming, which was great for university networks before the rise of Spotify/Apple Music/etc..
Most hardware companies want to maximize hardware sales, but Apple unfortunately had to placate the music industry, as you note.
Which kind of paid off eventually in terms of DRM-free iTunes Plus music in 2009, but sadly it made it hard to move music off of an iPod.
I wonder if earlier editions of SoundJam/iTunes supported copying music in both directions?
Do you mean one user per iPod? (because you could obviously have many iPods per user... Apple certainly didn't object :)
But yes, you couldn't use iPods to merge iTunes libraries among friends. For that, you needed an external hard drive (and you could mount the original iPod as an external hard drive and copy the music over, but then those mp3s were seen as data, not music, and could not be played...). And once the iTunes music store got introduced, music you bought there was DRM'd, so that complicated things further.
But I don't think it was deliberately designed to "maximize hardware sales". You could easily wipe it and sync to another user in a few minutes (the original Firewire had 100 to 400 Mbit/s, so say 3 to 10 minutes to replace the entire 5 GB library, so quicker than charging it).
I'd venture that the constraints were demanded by the music industry, not imposed by Apple to maximise hardware sales (how is "needs iTunes" maximising hardware sales?).
It's exactly the specs I want (even has sort by genre! I couldn't find that anywhere), but most of the cheap Chinese-made ones I found online had very poor reviews.
Noom, a popular diet/weight-loss app, works on the same principle. I've used it. To start the free trial you need to prepare the payment mechanism. Then after X amount of days, the paid service automatically kicks in. I wasn't super-excited to discover I'd just committed a lot of money before I was ready or even fully committed to the app/service.
I suspect this is going to be the new trend for future apps, since it almost certainly delivers a higher number of paid users than other methods do.
That's useful most of all to FB, where plenty of political discussion is about how to put a leash on FB these days. Don't want users to be subjected to that now, would we?
For that price (approx USD 120) I get 4 lines, so my whole family. I'm not happy about the data breach, but I'm very happy with TMobile otherwise, and I seem to have a better deal than my friends on AT&T and others here in the USA.
I was a volunteer in rural Central America from 1998-2000 and shortwave radio was an important news source for me (but already a VERY niche medium, even then). Nights I dialed in VOA and then found a lot of other interesting things too, from Cuba to broadcasts from Spain, Germany, and Indonesia. It was all fun and exciting.
Ten years later I began a decade of work overseas in rural West Africa. I dutifully brought my shortwave with me, only this time I found close to nothing on the airwaves. Some crazy religious broadcasts here and there, but nothing. I looked around and can confirm that in ten years of living in Africa (with a lot of West African friends and colleagues) not a single one of them had or used shortwave, or even really had any awareness that it existed. The number one media source even then was FM radio tuned in over cheap Chinese FM radios or over FM radio apps on cell phones.
I've still got a shortwave and occasionally scan the frequencies from my hammock here in North Carolina. But there is really not much there (religious stuff still being one exception). I ask myself, if rural West Africans aren't listening to shortwave anymore, really who is?
This article answers it: a few pockets remain, like Nigeria and Myanmar. But the shortwave era ended: everyone who left shortwave never came back, even when newer methods failed. Guess it was fun while it lasted :)