As with all digital services spotify has begun to suffer from enshitification. Outside of price hikes this has come in the form of advertising even on premium plans. Now this isn’t product advertising for other companies, this is spotify pushing notifications about new podcasts that I have expressed no interest in down my throat. This upset me enough to cancel because:
I was very fortunate to discover I still had all of my old mp3s on an external HDD, so I already had music, I just needed a way to serve it. Enter Navidrome, a music server supporting subsonic clients that runs on a raspberry pi.
With Navidrome set up I started looking for a way to cache my music on my phone for when it was in airplane mode, which for me is 95% of the time as I trust my witch brick far less than I can throw it.
There’s probably a whole segway here about phones and privacy. For now I’ll stop with saying I can’t root my daily driver for reasons and since airplane mode has an actual purpose it’s possible that android might respect it in most cases. At any rate, it’s sufficient for my threat model.
I solved this particularly problem with the Symfonium app, which supports subsonic and allows automatic caching of files. Honestly it’s not often I like android apps, but this one is the bee’s knees. It does what I want, it’s configurable and free from cruft.
One word: bandcamp.
You probably won’t find big names on it, but if they’ve got a big name you’ll hear about them somewhere else anyway.
Another big plus here is that if you buy music on bandcamp artists will generally get a bigger cut of the profits. On top of that downloading stuff from bandcamp is nice, it comes in a zip file. Which doesn’t sound like much but when other sites make you download files individually it really makes a difference (I’m looking at you qobuz, no link ‘cus this site falls into the necessary evil category).
Another small step to reclaim the digital world from the rent seekers that have cannibalised it. It’s not as hard as they want you to think it is.
mothership rpgs review
In the interest of playing more games I decided to offer to run a session of the Mothership RPG for a few colleagues… and it’s turned out to be a success so far. Four sessions in we’ve run the Haunting of Ypsilon 14 and nearly all of Another Bug Hunt (ABH).
borg rpgs worldbuilding
Over the course of my Cy_Borg inspired cyberpunk campaign I made numerous pretend social media posts, headlines, and other bits of world building. I’m posting them here for posterity and in case anyone finds them and is inspired for their own campaign.
mothership rpgs review
Our cyberpunk campaign has reached a season finale and as such needs the full group present for the next session, this meant that we ended up having enough players to play but not enough for cyberpunk.
review books
Written by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin (CoR) is an evolutionary sci fi novel set in a star system that humans had just begun terraforming before an almost complete technological collapse destroyed human civilization. It is a sequel to Children of Time but picks up some time after with a new cast of characters.
rpgs homebrew journal
In my previous post I’d started a campaign journal for a post apocalyptic setting. The first session went great, the players enjoyed it and then…