and with a VCR you could do all of this AND have the visuals as well… but an audio cassette recorder is a good place to start, since they’re small and simple. I would not recommend a boombox, because those are large and nowadays all very, very bad quality.
Now you may be saying “how is any of this helpful, I want a digital file…” here’s the fucking magic. You go into Audacity (free program), and lie to it that the tape recorder is really a microphone. Then you hit record on Audacity, and hit play on the tape, and let it play at regular speed. Trim and export the digital file, and you’re doing gangbusters. You’re cooking with gas. You’re thinking with portals. You’ve won the internet.
Congratulations, you can “pirate”* anything you want, and literally no one can catch you, because you’re not downloading in the traditional sense. You’re streaming to an external device, and that device is recording what it receives. It’s exactly like taping a live tv show to a VHS. This is a very low-key and non-strenuous task for the computer, since your tape recorder does all the work.
*Is this piracy? No. Well- it’s time shifting. Sort of. Tell it to my Steely Dan albums. Tell it to my The Sims: Hot Date VG Soundtrack album.
OP, dropping surprising knowledge from across time and space:
Fun fact: this is called the analog loophole, and it’s completely impossible to close, even in principle. No matter how much copy protection you add to a piece of media, it will eventually have to be sent to a display and then turned into an audio/video output that humans can interpret, because… that’s the whole fucking point
So even if they find some way to encrypt the signal sent to the display so you can’t intercept it with a VCR or tape recorder (which would be exceedingly difficult if not impossible), at the end of the day you just can’t do anything about someone pointing a camera at the screen or a microphone at the speaker. Yo ho ho
(By the way, I’d love to see someone actually talk about the legal precedent of this wrt it being literally the same thing as recording a TV show on a VCR or recording a mixtape off of the radio, both of which I believe are absolutely unambiguously legal. OP may be right that this is literally, legally, not piracy, but I’m not a lawyer nor am I opposed to crimes so don’t ask me)
What’s the advantage to including a tape recorder in this process, rather than cutting out the middle steps and just having Audacity record your headphone output? Is it just that it bears a closer resemblance to the situations that set legal precedent regarding time-shifting?
Tags:
#reply via reblog #fun with loopholes #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
#h/t hatethiscar: I saw theearnestonion’s tags in the notes and I needed them #music #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(people in the notes are waxing lyrical (so to speak) about My Head Is an Animal‚ but you know what’s even better?) #(Beneath the Skin) #(absolutely amazing album) #(almost every track is good and most of them are great) #((I was talking about this on Dreamwidth a while back and *nobody* could agree on what ”We Sink” is about‚ but we agree that it’s great)) #((maybe there’s shrimp emotions in there too)) #(((in semi-related news‚ have you noticed that store radios never play Florence and the Machine anymore?))) #(((it’s weird: I really thought they’d make it into the 50-year rotation)))
A while back I finally figured out how to use UBlock’s element blocker and promptly went mad with power. Just now I turned off all my extensions to debug something and realized how much more useable it made everything. As soon as I see something annoying I open the Ublock popup, select the element picker, click the annoying thing, and (most of the time) the annoying thing is gone forever and I never have to think about it. So here’s my shameless ad pitch for things you can do with it, other than the default “block ads”:
Remove all of the UI buttons that are definitely useful for someone but that you’re never going to use in your life
Remove UI buttons you use only once, like “register”
Hide the “Posts +” button in tumblr
Clear all of the information your credit card website tries to show you that you don’t care about so that you can focus on the couple numbers that you do
Send those pop-up “do you want to chat!” notifications to hell, where they belong
Remove various website overlays
Remove specifically the calorie numbers on food delivery websites
Hide the comments and recommended videos sidebar on youtube
Hide promotions that an adblocker doesn’t pick up on because they’re native
Hide your facebook newsfeed (if you just use it for chat/events/groups)
Hide discord’s sidebar when you just need one channel open and don’t want to be distracted, and then unhide it when you want it back
Get rid of distracting moving elements on pages
Hide almost all of the elements on twitter except the actual tweet, if you only interact with twitter via other people’s links and don’t want to be sucked down the rabbit hole
Generally hide “Related!” or “See also” or “You might like!” type distractions on sites where you only want to see what you came there for, not browse
Remove all of the news from weather websites so that they can actually do their job and show you just the weather
Remove the footer text on websites no one ever reads
I don’t think this requires being a Computer Person to use even though it has the Computer Person aesthetic, but being (to my great chagrin) a Computer Person I might be misjudging this. If you want help setting it up I will help you. If you want step by step debugging of why it suddenly break something I will help you. Two weeks away from graduating with my CS degree I have apparently discovered the obligatory Thing That A Computer Person Must Write Passionate And Slightly Unhinged Rants About No One Else Cares About. Via the power of caring way too much about something it now comes with free tech support, warranty not included, void where prohibited etc.
Further advice, because it is very non-obvious from the UI and I was very frustrated until I figured it out: the popup that shows up when you block things has two sliders. The one on the left makes your selection wide (i.e. also grabs the parents element(s)) or narrower; this is very useful if you’re trying to select something and just can’t managed to click in the exact right place that will grab the entire thing you want to block. The one on the right makes the selection more/less specific, so that in some cases when the default selection will grab all buttons of type X you can make it grab just this one button, or vice versa.
Tags:
#PSA #oh my god #I’ve been experimenting with this the past few days and #I haven’t *quite* reached ”mad with power” but it’s definitely very nice to have #(for weather websites specifically I saw another post going around a while back saying that the trick is to use government-run sites) #(which was also an excellent idea) #(the links that post gave were American but I figured out that the Canadian analogue is weather.gc.ca)
ive always hated when a vampire story is trying to distance itself from traditional lore or common perception and the vampire turns up their nose and says “and no. I don’t turn into a bat” like they’re so offended that you’d even suggest that they could do something so cool. well congratulations you’re uncool and boring goodbye
“Can you turn into a bat?”
“God, no, I wish,” sighed the vampire. “That’d be fucking badass.”
#hey it took him a while but he eventually managed it
Tags:
#vampires #Twilight #Batman #juxtaposition #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
The point of officially naming a pet is not to actually use that name but to have a baseline from which to come up with every conceivable nickname to call them instead.
You bury a seed not because it looks nice in the dirt, but because the limbs that branch out will look nice in the sky
Congrats on contributing to the ancient tumblr tradition of turning shitposts into profound poetry
Tags:
#I don’t relate to this #(we mostly called our dog by the name we officially gave him) #but I do appreciate the ancient Tumblr tradition of profound shitpost poetry
Brinens and Things - Tumblr Mirror 