Sticking with the EDM theme of last week’s post, here is some music from the alliteratively named Tommy Trash and Madison Mars. Coincidentally, like Mord Fustang Madison Mars is another DJ hailing from Estonia. Tommy Trash on the other hand comes from the opposite side of the planet: Australia.
🎵 Music of the Week: W36, 2018 Read More »
I spend a large amount of time listening to podcasts. In the past, I suspected the amount of time was immense, but I never knew exactly what the number was. Now, thanks to the listening statistics in Pocket Casts I know exactly how much time I spend listening to podcasts.
I captured the image below on June 16, 2018, exactly 365 days after switching over to the Pocket Casts app:
Sixty seven days is 1,608 hours or 96,480 minutes. If I did absolutely nothing except listen to podcasts 24 hours a day beginning on January 1st, I would have to keep my headphones on until March 18th to equal the amount of listening I do over the course of a year.
However, 67 days is not a truly accurate representation of the amount of podcasts I have listened to because I do not listen to most podcasts at their regular speed. Given that my subscription count stands at 249 podcasts, it is not humanly possible to listen in realtime to all of the content they produce. Instead, I listen to most podcasts at two times their realtime speed. Additionally, I use Pocket Casts features such as silence trimming and intro skipping to further increase the amount of podcasts I can consume. This means that in reality, I actually listen to well over 120 days worth of podcasts every year.
The piece of this situation that strikes me as remarkable is not my total listening time or the amount of time I save by speeding up audio. Rather, what I find remarkable is that every single second of every podcast is 100% completely free. I did not need to spend even a single penny to obtain any of the programming I listened to. Try to do that with television, movies, or even books. In most mediums, it is not possible to consume content for free. Yet, with podcasts I can stay up-to-date with current events, explore various facets of the designed world, study important events in history, gain understandings of viewpoints which are not my own, follow local stories about the SF Bay Area, listen to music from bands across the musical spectrum, and a whole lot more without opening my wallet.
🖼️ Yearly podcast usage Read More »
This week features a collection of my favorite songs from the Estonian DJ Mord Fustang:
🎵 Music of the Week: W35, 2018 Read More »
Today I learned that a river does not wind its way through the countryside, it wends its way through the countryside. I also learned that a journalist does not pour over the historical records, they pore over the historical records.
It is remarkable how I can go through life with these misunderstandings when I learn a word or phrase through speech instead of through reading.
? TIL about wending and poring Read More »
Ever since Rdio went out of business, I have yearned for a music service that is easy and enjoyable to use. Apple Music is a joke when it comes to usability and Pandora does not offer a comparable on-demand music service. This leaves me with Spotify as my only option.
Sadly, Spotify is full of design issues. However, today I encountered a problem so severe that I am closing my Spotify subscription.
Spotify permits you to save only 10,000 songs to your music library.
I wish you could have seen the dismay and anger on my face when I learned this fact. I was ready to throw my laptop threw the window in front of me.
10,000 songs is nothing. That’s less than 1,000 albums. It would take me a mere 500 hours to listen to that entire library start to finish.
This is unbelievable. I pay $120 per year for this service and I cannot save more than 10,000 songs to my library. Don’t think for a second that Spotify needs to save these 10,000 songs in a unique location on their servers requiring gigabytes of data. No, Spotify merely saves a list of metadata which holds the names of songs I’ve added to my library. It’s the equivalent of a text file on my computer which lists the title and artist name for each song in my library. At most, my account uses a maximum of 100 megabytes on Spotify’s servers. In reality, the size is probably much closer to 10-20 megabytes. In this day and age, using 100 megabytes on someone’s server is like asking the person next to you to hold a piece of paper for a second.
Spotify, I was making do with your poorly designed service, but this limit is too much for me to bear. It was nice to know you.
🤬 Spotify is absolutely terrible Read More »