iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026

1998: The hardest samples to get right in an audio codec. I love that there's a Forbidden Pitch Pipe at Dolby Labs that Fucks Up Your Codec. Source: Subjective Evaluation of State-of-the-Art 2-Channel Audio Codecs GILBERT A. SOULODRE, THEODORE GRUSEC, MICHEL LAVOIE, AND LOUIS THIBAULT

Code Description Duration Source
bascl Bass clarinet arpeggio 20 s EBU SQAM CD (track 17/Index 1)7
dbass Bowed double bass 31 s EBU SQAM CD (track 1l/Index 1)+
dires Dire Straits 30 s Warner Bros. CD 7599-25264-2 (track 6)
hpscd Harpsichord arpeggio 10 s EBU SQAM CD (track 40/Index 1)
mrain Music and rain 11s AT&T mix
pitchp Pitch pipe 30 s Recording from Dolby Laboratories
trump Muted trumpet 10 s Original DAT recording, Univetxity of Miami
vegla Susan Vega with glass 11s AT&T mix

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

unearthed memory: I can't just set up Mouse Trap and play with the little traps. That's wrong/cheating. I can only enjoy this toy as part of the larger Mouse Trap game from Milton Bradley, which can *only* be played by 2-4 players.

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

seeing 8 year old ffmpeg builds on my hard drive for some reason

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

Google's absurd confirmation code extractor plays an animation like an antique gas pump or a slot machine of numbers rolling into place. Clearly trying to drive engagement of something that's supposed to be as quick as possible - confirmation code retrieval.

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026

In honor of Ilko's heritage, we play some mining games.

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

Some iPod #retrocomputing history! It did not launch with AAC support. The best you could do was VBR MP3. AAC was likely added in mid-2003. They made a very un-Apple like decision to under-promise and over-deliver. "1000 songs in your pocket" is based […] [Original post on social.linux.pizza]

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

Apple actually does a version of this joke. Whenever Steve Jobs invites another CEO on stage, you see how much worse they are at presenting.

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

I am so sick of this. We will know we have Artificial General Intelligence WHEN WE HAVE ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENCE. We will know we are in the singularity WHEN WE ARE IN THE SINGULARITY. Every month some AI charlatan poops out these turds and the tech press dutifully flushes them to us.

OpenAl’s next big Al
model has ‘entered the
AGl era’

It emphasized stronger
guardrails for GPT-6 Astra
after the company’s models
hacked Hugging Face.
HAYDEN FIELD

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2026

YouTube has made its compression worse. Left is my personal copy from years ago, right is today.

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

lmao WD spun off SanDisk just before the RAM/flash boom raised SanDisk's value by 30x.

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

TIL Sandisk is again independent after being spun off from Western Digital. Seagate, Sandisk, and WD are now sorta kinda equal in market cap - differing only by 10s of billions of dollars. Here's the boom-within-a-boom of the storage market. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandisk

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

#Drag is a wholesome family activity. Women (presumably cis) in revealing outfits performed in front of family crowds in the good old days circa 1940-1966 at the Tennessee State Fair. Humans have been dressing up and dressing down since before recorded […] [Original post on social.linux.pizza]

Two women in attire resembling a modern modest bikini. You can see almost their entire stomach and legs. The lower piece sparkles. Purportedly c. 1940-1959.

An all-ages crowd on a fairground midway. Wearing what we today would call conservative dress. Slacks, longer skirts, sleeved shirts. Roller coaster and ferris wheel visible.

A woman from behind. She wears a singlet and a short haircut resembling Liza Minnelli. Her outfit resembles a modern one-piece swimsuit, but on the very revealing side. The outfit is a Vegas showgirl type, with short streamers hanging off it and a contrasting sparkling sheen in the middle. Her lower buttocks are visible along with her pantyhose that slightly darken her legs. She wears a necklace and is seemingly posing seductively for an audience of mostly teens and above. A child age 6-12 is in the front row. This is probably the same midway seen in photo #2, though it was taken on a different day.

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

#KeepAndroidOpen is slightly overblown. This flow is decent. Plenty of people get scammed all the time, and thinking you can't get scammed is how you get scammed. I still recognize: - Google may be doing this for monopolistic reasons - They may change […] [Original post on social.linux.pizza]

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

This page tells you to use 0x93 as `-`. Somehow (Macintosh encoding?) Chrome and Firefox display a true en dash (0x2013). Linux terminals do NOT interpret this as `-`, leading to one of the most cryptic bugs I can remember. Any #webdev able to explain […] [Original post on social.linux.pizza]

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

Listening to music on my PC speakers - Sony APM 3000 (c. 1989). I adore them. The speakers were $20 and I usually pair them with a $6 Sony subwoofer (c.1995). I've seen them listed on Ebay for $200, but these actually sold for $120. Incredible style […] [Original post on social.linux.pizza]

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

Starlight after breaking up with Twilight:

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 18/08/2026

As a kid, I assumed the "weasels" in the Weird Al song "Albuquerque" were little radioactive-green-glowing wormlike creatures. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooI3u4uzEss He says, "All I got right now is this box of one dozen starving, crazed weasels" I […] [Original post on social.linux.pizza]

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

This is how it looks on mobile, "helpfully" hiding that the domain name is fraudulent.

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

Phish alert: #phishing email made it to my GMail inbox from "1Password". It -may- indicate compromise of email for "waterbabies", a real child swim lesson brand with an HTTPS domain. I flagged it as phishing and Gmail helpfully nuked the entire email, so […] [Original post on social.linux.pizza]

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

The Trump CDC is reporting #COVID in the USA in wastewater is at (near) an *all time low*. This is awesome news! Some caveats. The data goes back to September 2024. I argue (without direct evidence) that 2025-2026 has had lower COVID infections than […] [Original post on social.linux.pizza]

National American wastewater graph allegedly showing that covid cases are near an all time low this week.

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

Heartwarming: The World Book Encyclopedia is still in print

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

Snapshot of the fickleness of the collectible market. 100 year old book, some name recognition... 10 dollars.

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026

Rumors of Apple's AAC dying have been exagerated. This blind test on some hard to encode samples (I think) shows it tying Apple's encoder. But ffmpeg's effort is vastly improved from its old one […] [Original post on social.linux.pizza]

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 10/08/2026

If Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001) were released today, the secret final unlockable based on Nintendo's distant past (Game & Watch [1981]) would be based on Wii Sports (2006).

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 09/08/2026

There is a game company from Atari 2600 oldheads that makes new games. The devs are used to 4KB carts but now use 128KB carts because that's the smallest ROM they can buy. >Audacity Games was founded by Activision Co-Founder David Crane and ex-Activision […] [Original post on social.linux.pizza]

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 09/08/2026

We don't know when the Atari 2600 was released.

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2026

civilization peaked here want to look at a whale? there it fucking is. want to walk overlooking the lake? all yours bitch. want to slide into the water? there you fucking go. you don't need anything else.

Blue Whale of Catoosa. 80 feet long, 20 feet tall, inside a lake. Midcentury roadside attraction style made of painted concrete. Like a very large mini golf sculpture. Whale has a slide going out the side of it, a happy grin, and you can walk inside it.

Pic: CC-BY G. Edward Johnson

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

Apparently the word "wildfire" has nothing to do with a fire spreading "by wild causes". That is, in common usage, a human can cause a "wildfire". I think "wildfire" is bad and we should use a new term! Maybe "forest fire" or "brush fire".* Why avoid […] [Original post on social.linux.pizza]

There is no such thing as a “natural disaster.” Human decisions
(infrastructure, resources, planning, etc.) influence the impact of
a storm.

SPOKANE, Washington, Aug 4 (Reuters) - A man has been arrested on suspicion of deliberately starting
one of three fires that have destroyed over 700 houses and other buildings, forcing 64,000 people to
evacuate in and around Spokane, Washington, the city hardest hit by wildfires sweeping the drought-
stricken Pacific Northwest United States.

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2026

Power use testing. Some surprising findings: My modern gaming PC with a huge GPU only draws 85 Watts (W) in basic usage (many tabs open, using the computer). A modern laptop is more like 10 W, but I'll test that too. A 9 year old i7 desktop only takes […] [Original post on social.linux.pizza]

Excel TSV follows.

Debice notes watts Note: not rigorous testing. Using Athom ESPhome plugs. Data is in line with other measurements I've seen so I believe these are accurate within + or - 20%. All reported watts are the most optimistic minimum watts I observed in "real" testing. Meaning testing for several seconds rather than reporting the absolute minimum seen in one second.
optiplex i7 7700 24 idle bios, almost everything unplugged
optiplex i7 7700 20 "testing fan" in bios, fan unplugged
optiplex i7 7700 43 "testing cpu"
optiplex i7 7700 26 bios with cpu fna
optiplex i7 7700 46 memtest86 (one stick)
optiplex i7 7700 9 idle antix desktop
optiplex i7 7700 17 rickroll youtube + internal speaker max vol
optiplex i7 7700 25 60fps youtube (jet lag the game)
optiplex i7 7700 41 opengl bench
optiplex i7 7700 82 ffmpeg bigbuckbunny x264 encode
2012ish amd phenom ii 90 idle
2012ish amd phenom ii + quado low TDP GPU 180 memtest 4 sticks
2012ish amd phenom ii + quado low TDP GPU 120 booting antix
2012ish amd phenom ii + quado low TDP GPU 73 idle antix desktop
2022 amd gaming PC ryzen 5 7600X, RTX 3070, 3 hdd, some SSD 85 "average" over about 1 hour of basic web/etc
2005 dell monitor 22in 38 max bright
2005 dell monitor 18 min bright

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 14/07/2026

If the 2014 Homestar Runner April Fools' Day toon were made today, the humorously outdated desktop theme would be for Windows 7, not Windows 98. "Stop buying computers from thrift stores, man!" Would apply to dual core CPUs with 1 GB of RAM […] [Original post on social.linux.pizza]

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Big Head Mode @bigheadmode.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy · 11/07/2026

One of my favorite videos. What’s up YouTube? Doing a review of my hotel bathtub in Seattle. web.archive.org/web/20200120073436/…

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