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.
alien rpgs review
Chariot of the Gods is the introductory scenario for Free League’s Alien RPG, it comes as part of the starter set and is a relatively lengthy cinematic scenario that casts the crew in a similar situation to the crew of the Nostromo in the original Alien film. I’ve run this scenario for two different groups and have a few thoughts about what I think it does right and what I think could be improved.
tech
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:
borg rpgs review
Building on the massive success of Mork Borg, Stockholm Kartel released Cy_Borg: A digital neon view of a dystopian hellscape where the world itself is on the brink of apocalypse.
alien rpgs review
Destroyer of Worlds is the second cinematic scenario for the Alien RPG, published by Free League. It’s a three act romp across a war torn moon, with the players taking on the roles of colonial marines thrown into a maelstrom of insurgency, bioweapon development and planetary invasion.
mothership rpgs review
The Haunting of Ypsilon-14 is a tri-fold pamphlet adventure for the Mothership RPG. Set on a mining station, the players are visiting the station when people start disappearing. In classic mothership style they then have to survive, solve or save in the ensuing chaos.