I think I’ve bought from 7digital a time or two in the past and had no problems. Obviously there are issues with Amazon as a company, but I think they were the first big name to offer DRM-free MP3 purchases and I used it a lot back when it first launched, especially since they offered a selection of albums each month for just $5. They should have most mainstream music available for purchase, depending on which country you’re in. According to this Wikipedia page listing music stores they only offer 256 kbps MP3 but I was sure most if not all were upgraded to 320 kbps now, although of course you would have to re-download anything if you had downloaded the lower-quality version previously. That Wikipedia page is a good link to other stores as well, with a number I’d never heard of including specialty stores.

Also, along with someone else’s comment mentioning ripping CDs like the old days, check to see if you have a local record store. It’s been a mantra since at least the Gen-X days to “support your local scene.” I know in Raleigh the longtime staple Schoolkids Records is still alive and kicking, although their Chapel Hill store closed last year. It might take some digging but it can be worth seeing if there’s a local store in your area.

Self-hosting there are some ways to fight back, or depending on your opinions on Cloudflare it seems they’re fairly effective at blocking the AI crawlers.

There’s actually a surprising amount of free static website hosting out there. Besides GitHub, GitLab, Cloudflare, and Netlify come to mind offhand.

Eventually it sort-of got a rewrite to create RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic, initially for iOS and Android, later for Windows, macOS, and Nintendo Switch. It largely is a rewrite of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, with the goal of bringing the game to more modern platforms, and the save files for parks and rides are compatible. In this interview with Atari Club, Sawyer says the rewrite was in C++ but even with a team of people still took longer to write in C++ than it took him to write the original in x86 assembly.

If anyone previously paid attention to RCT Classic, it’s been seeing some development work again and is working on Android again. They also made RCT Classic+ on Apple Arcade (basically just the game and all the expansions included) and also updated the regular versions of RCT Classic so they run correctly again (RCT Classic stopped working on macOS when Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications and Atari didn’t release a recompiled game until recently).

Just saw this article recently. Gabe was part of a team trying to convince developers that they would be better off writing their games with more abstracted code/libraries instead of writing their own interfaces (some of which were written by people convinced they were being really efficient but were actually terrible). One thing they did to prove their point was going to id and offering to have Microsoft port Doom to Windows for free. But the experience and seeing the success id was having distributing their own game led Gabe to launch Valve.

I think the fix was to put a limit on the script, just have it run a couple times, the same as it would during the day, not just keep going until it gets stopped.

I think the bug and the cost were not that the cost was different at that time of day, but that by running at night without worry of interruption her script ran multiple times doing upload after upload after upload. If it had been during the day they would only have a few succeed because the line would get interrupted or couldn’t be used. Maybe during the day they’d only succeed on 3-5 calls but at night the script was making 50, 60, maybe even 70 calls.

That’s fair, and I think a lot of the problems with that software was the internal developer/administrator for the software (I think it marketed itself as Open Source but was probably more accurately Source Available to customers) had taken it hostage with no one else allowed to touch it. I think it had become the proverbial million lines of undocumented spaghetti code that had guaranteed a permanent job for this guy because if he left the entire business would fall apart, including an inability to bring in revenue. Everyone knew he was a problem, except perhaps his boss, the CFO. When our companies merged they were originally supposed to join us on NetSuite (not without its problems of course but definitely better than the other software) but the hostage taker supposedly convinced the CFO that NetSuite wouldn’t be able to produce a report the CFO liked and we wound up moving to theirs instead. It was also supposed to save money by having lower user licensing costs. They brought in an outside consultant for our transition because the internal guy was too busy but then it turned out the internal guy was doing a bunch of non-standard stuff that didn’t work with the consultant’s design and the internal guy had to redo it anyways. When I left two and a half years later the company had spent millions on the transition and two different additional major pieces of software (the second replacing the first) trying to replicate what we’d had in NetSuite but was still lacking much of that functionality.

The advantage browser-based ones have is it’s generally easy to copy/paste any text you need. I used one that ran as its own desktop software and made many of the key text fields uneditable, instead of letting you copy text from them but refusing to save any changes to those fields that must not change. Want to grab the order number for this customer? Too bad! Type it yourself or export it to PDF and copy it from there! I was so happy when I discovered a little program that lets you copy any text on the screen by effectively taking a screenshot, running OCR on the screenshot, and putting the output onto your clipboard. Still took more effort than simply right-clicking the text and hitting copy, though, or double-clicking and hitting Ctrl-C.

Sadly not even the worst I’ve ever used as an end-user

internet.website is available to register but I checked a couple registrars and they all seem to have it as a premium domain that costs several thousand to register.

Should be torrenting “Blank Space” by Taylor Swift

If you’re okay with writing a little HTML and just don’t want to deal with writing/designing the CSS, I recently found out about HTML5 UP, which has a bunch of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0-licensed templates. It’s fairly straightforward to modify the content if you understand the HTML, and then you can host it for free as a static page at any number of places like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages.

If you don’t want to have the CC-By attribution on the webpage, the designer also offers a service called Pixelarity with the same templates and more for a $19/quarter non-renewing subscription. You can continue using the templates even after the subscription expires and can keep making new sites with any template you already downloaded, you just don’t get any updates or tech support when the subscription expires. Upload to one of those free static hosts and it’s dramatically cheaper than Ghost or WordPress, and probably less work than a static site generator for something that’s not changing often.

It sounds like this would be expanding that to a lot more commercial customers, though?

I forgot about using those scripts. I’ll have to put Grease Monkey on my newer computer. I added an extension a couple months ago to stop websites from preventing me from pasting into text fields, but I’d guess using a script would be a more efficient way to deal with it than adding an extension for every annoyance!

I’ve spent so little time with YouTube Shorts I didn’t know you could change the URL to a normal video

“We will store backup copies of our code in a secure repository in Switzerland, and we will provide our European partners with the legal rights needed to access and use this code if needed for this purpose.”

If Microsoft is going to actually risk giving access to their source code then they’re really scared!

But really, I read the whole article and there’s nothing mentioned about a blacklight test.

Blacklight test

I liked this read when considering legal ramifications for hosting content. It is U.S. focused so it might not be applicable to someone in another country.