Oh right, and I run Linux Mint 18.3 on my T440. Everything works out of the box, the only things I had to tweak were the touchpad (to my personal taste) and a well-known tearing issue on Intel HD graphics that I'm not sure if exists anymore on the newer chipsets.
If you ask me, go for a Thinkpad. Since you're replacing a 13", you could go either way for a 12.5" X-series or 14" T-series.
I'm on a T440 that I bought refurbed a little while ago, and it's basically like a brand new machine still. With a new internal battery and a lightly used (80+% capacity left) 6-cell external battery, I get 8 hours of battery life minimum. With the 9-cell external battery, you can probably push it above 12 hours, I've seen 17 hours quoted at maximum power saving.
The X-series can go for over 24 hours with the highest capacity batteries installed.
Dell Latitude/Precision/XPS are quite good. The XPS 13 can even be had with preinstalled Ubuntu, AFAIK.
I just replaced a cracked LCD panel in my girlfriends well-used Latitude 6430 that she's had for 3 or 4 years now. Clipped-on plastic frame, 6 screws and a ribbon cable, that's literally all it took. The new panel was ~$65 from a reliable vendor in Germany, it could probably have been half that if we were willing to chance an order from China.
The build quality impressed me, definitely on par with Thinkpads. While I was in there with a screwdriver anyway, I tightened up the hinges a bit. Because you can actually do that on a quality laptop, unlike those anorexic Macbooks and Macbook wannabes.
Is your "dedicated hardware pitch shifter" meant to work on compressed audio? Is the pitch shift in the SBLive sound card meant to work on compressed audio?
If you're simply applying a pitch shift to the analog audio, something in your playback chain is seriously fucking something up, because FLAC decodes straight to 100% clean PCM audio, exactly the same as if you play back a WAV file directly.
I suggest you look into your flawed setup before you start blaming codecs.
If your pitch shift is fucking up FLAC, then the software/method you're using is either extremely stupidly designed, or you're using it wrong.
FLAC decodes 100% faithfully to the original input, so any competent software should give the exact same result as a WAV file.
Are you applying simply bit manipulation directly to the data in the files? What kind of nonsense pathological use case is that? Does it have anything at all to do with playing back audio? Or is it simply some nonsense you dreamed up randomly on a drunken bender?
Have you actually tried 96kbps Opus? I'm guessing you haven't, and you're stuck in a 1999 Napster-downloaded Xing-encoded MP3 mindset. A lot of development has happened on audio codec in the almost 2 decades since then. Opus is currently at the very peak of audio codecs.
And what's wrong with CPanel? What does GMail offer over a complete hosting solution?
I haven't tried Subsonic (I actually wasn't aware of it), and since I will be running a low-power server at home for NAS and VPN (among other things), I will probably run a simple media server of some kind or rely on basic SMB/NFS, and VPN to my home network if I need anything.
I got my own domain name, and signed up with a local hosting/email provider. 5GB space, unlimited traffic, unlimited inboxes, CalDAV/CardDAV sync, calendar, full CPanel environment, automatic SSL/TLS, less than ~$2,50/month.
All of my email and scheduling is now gone from Google, I've moved the stuff on my Google Drive to Dropbox. and I'm working on moving away from Google Photos.
Google Play Music is probably going to be the last holdout, there simply aren't any good alternatives for an online music locker. In the end, maybe I'll end up keeping it locally on my phone instead. Almost everything is on Spotify, so it's only really ~1,500 songs from various indie artists and such. With Opus at 96kbps, they won't take up that much space.
Bluetooth has enough bandwidth to transfer a good lossy codec, such as Opus, which is audibly transparent above 96kbps for the majority of music, and definitely above 160kbps.
The problem is that the bastards implementing Bluetooth audio cannot decide on a goddamn format, so a lot of stuff still has to fall back to the old SBC codec, which is just junk. I know it's fast and doesn't require much power, but it's junk. AptX is a shitty proprietary codec, as is Sony's LDAC. You can also push AAC over Bluetooth, which I think only Apple is doing. But nope, it seems like everyone shuns the shitty proprietary codecs because of licensing payments, and just ignore the perfectly fine royalty-free formats out there.
Are there any credible alternatives to Android and iOS?
All I really need is email, a calendar, CalDAV/CardDAV sync and a full-featured web browser (Firefox, ideally). Everything else is secondary, and most things I actually need can be used in a browser.
If the browser experience wasn't so shitty on dumbphones/featurephones, I would just be using one of those instead.
You just need providers that don't screw you over.
If they offer 25GB of data/month at full 4G speed, then that is exactly what you should be able to pull. All of this nonsense about extra charges for tethering is just the providers screwing you over big-time.
On the contrary, I think [b]everything[/b] needs to be encrypted. My traffic is private, no matter if I'm checking my mail or looking up cookie recipes. It does not concern anyone else what I do online.
I've found Spotify's recommendations to be quite good, but you have to be in a "niche genre" like metal. If they put you in the pop music bucket, you'll just get endless waves of shit.
Other than that, I follow a couple of good labels on Bandcamp, and I regularly read the Toilet ov Hell metal blog. They have good reviews and cover some really great underground stuff.
Yeah, it's a bad design choice, the X270 is a much more appealing machine. Hopefully the T-series will keep the easy serviceability and user-replaceable batteries.
Any newer Android phone will recognize QR codes in the camera app, but you don't take a picture. You let the app recognize the QR, which usually takes a second or two. If not, get the QR Droid app.
QR codes are everywhere, it's extremely unlikely that this is the first time they've had to use one.
Slashdot Mirror
Good riddance.
Oh right, and I run Linux Mint 18.3 on my T440. Everything works out of the box, the only things I had to tweak were the touchpad (to my personal taste) and a well-known tearing issue on Intel HD graphics that I'm not sure if exists anymore on the newer chipsets.
If you ask me, go for a Thinkpad. Since you're replacing a 13", you could go either way for a 12.5" X-series or 14" T-series.
I'm on a T440 that I bought refurbed a little while ago, and it's basically like a brand new machine still. With a new internal battery and a lightly used (80+% capacity left) 6-cell external battery, I get 8 hours of battery life minimum. With the 9-cell external battery, you can probably push it above 12 hours, I've seen 17 hours quoted at maximum power saving.
The X-series can go for over 24 hours with the highest capacity batteries installed.
Dell Latitude/Precision/XPS are quite good. The XPS 13 can even be had with preinstalled Ubuntu, AFAIK.
I just replaced a cracked LCD panel in my girlfriends well-used Latitude 6430 that she's had for 3 or 4 years now. Clipped-on plastic frame, 6 screws and a ribbon cable, that's literally all it took. The new panel was ~$65 from a reliable vendor in Germany, it could probably have been half that if we were willing to chance an order from China.
The build quality impressed me, definitely on par with Thinkpads. While I was in there with a screwdriver anyway, I tightened up the hinges a bit. Because you can actually do that on a quality laptop, unlike those anorexic Macbooks and Macbook wannabes.
The only good choices for laptops are Lenovo Thinkpad, HP Elitebook/Probook and Dell Latitude/Precision/XPS. Everything else is a toy.
That goddamn insufferable bullshit hipster nonsense wishy-washy passionless hipster music makes me want to stab somebody.
Is your "dedicated hardware pitch shifter" meant to work on compressed audio? Is the pitch shift in the SBLive sound card meant to work on compressed audio?
If you're simply applying a pitch shift to the analog audio, something in your playback chain is seriously fucking something up, because FLAC decodes straight to 100% clean PCM audio, exactly the same as if you play back a WAV file directly.
I suggest you look into your flawed setup before you start blaming codecs.
If your pitch shift is fucking up FLAC, then the software/method you're using is either extremely stupidly designed, or you're using it wrong.
FLAC decodes 100% faithfully to the original input, so any competent software should give the exact same result as a WAV file.
Are you applying simply bit manipulation directly to the data in the files? What kind of nonsense pathological use case is that? Does it have anything at all to do with playing back audio? Or is it simply some nonsense you dreamed up randomly on a drunken bender?
Why are you using pitch shifting with lossy input files?
Have you actually tried 96kbps Opus? I'm guessing you haven't, and you're stuck in a 1999 Napster-downloaded Xing-encoded MP3 mindset. A lot of development has happened on audio codec in the almost 2 decades since then. Opus is currently at the very peak of audio codecs.
And what's wrong with CPanel? What does GMail offer over a complete hosting solution?
I haven't tried Subsonic (I actually wasn't aware of it), and since I will be running a low-power server at home for NAS and VPN (among other things), I will probably run a simple media server of some kind or rely on basic SMB/NFS, and VPN to my home network if I need anything.
Just do it.
I got my own domain name, and signed up with a local hosting/email provider. 5GB space, unlimited traffic, unlimited inboxes, CalDAV/CardDAV sync, calendar, full CPanel environment, automatic SSL/TLS, less than ~$2,50/month.
All of my email and scheduling is now gone from Google, I've moved the stuff on my Google Drive to Dropbox. and I'm working on moving away from Google Photos.
Google Play Music is probably going to be the last holdout, there simply aren't any good alternatives for an online music locker. In the end, maybe I'll end up keeping it locally on my phone instead. Almost everything is on Spotify, so it's only really ~1,500 songs from various indie artists and such. With Opus at 96kbps, they won't take up that much space.
Bluetooth has enough bandwidth to transfer a good lossy codec, such as Opus, which is audibly transparent above 96kbps for the majority of music, and definitely above 160kbps.
The problem is that the bastards implementing Bluetooth audio cannot decide on a goddamn format, so a lot of stuff still has to fall back to the old SBC codec, which is just junk. I know it's fast and doesn't require much power, but it's junk. AptX is a shitty proprietary codec, as is Sony's LDAC. You can also push AAC over Bluetooth, which I think only Apple is doing. But nope, it seems like everyone shuns the shitty proprietary codecs because of licensing payments, and just ignore the perfectly fine royalty-free formats out there.
Except BlackBerry is going full-on Android now.
Are there any credible alternatives to Android and iOS?
All I really need is email, a calendar, CalDAV/CardDAV sync and a full-featured web browser (Firefox, ideally). Everything else is secondary, and most things I actually need can be used in a browser.
If the browser experience wasn't so shitty on dumbphones/featurephones, I would just be using one of those instead.
Tragedy of the commons is a myth: http://climateandcapitalism.co...
Providers are severely overselling their bandwidth for BS marketing reasons, and they're making the consumers pay the price for it.
You just need providers that don't screw you over.
If they offer 25GB of data/month at full 4G speed, then that is exactly what you should be able to pull. All of this nonsense about extra charges for tethering is just the providers screwing you over big-time.
ok
On the contrary, I think [b]everything[/b] needs to be encrypted. My traffic is private, no matter if I'm checking my mail or looking up cookie recipes. It does not concern anyone else what I do online.
"We" meaning "maybe 100 grumpy neckbeards".
I've found Spotify's recommendations to be quite good, but you have to be in a "niche genre" like metal. If they put you in the pop music bucket, you'll just get endless waves of shit.
Other than that, I follow a couple of good labels on Bandcamp, and I regularly read the Toilet ov Hell metal blog. They have good reviews and cover some really great underground stuff.
Well, radio "metal" :-)
Don't listen to radio metal.
Yeah, it's a bad design choice, the X270 is a much more appealing machine. Hopefully the T-series will keep the easy serviceability and user-replaceable batteries.
Any newer Android phone will recognize QR codes in the camera app, but you don't take a picture. You let the app recognize the QR, which usually takes a second or two. If not, get the QR Droid app.
QR codes are everywhere, it's extremely unlikely that this is the first time they've had to use one.