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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Chiptune formats for retro videogame music can be very efficient. Just picking two with particularly good music, I have a 21 KB (0.02 MB) file storing 28:30 of music and 4.72 MB of files storing 1:54:48 of music, both at source quality.

    The catch is that they are designed exclusively to rip chiptunes from retro videogames as close as the format designers and player coders could manage to the original. So even the oversized ones like the 4.72 MB of files extracted from a 3 MB game are going to be far smaller than a general use format like opus. But you can’t encode your own music in the format without going to massive effort to code it like you would an authentic chiptune, and you’re unlikely to like the results.











  • An irrigation canal like this is a big ditch to move water from a river to near farm fields. Without the extra water taken from the river, there wouldn’t be enough water in the soil for crops to grow in the area.

    Being a big ditch open to the sky, the hot sun and dry air make a bunch of the irrigation water evaporate before it even gets to the field. So we went to all the effort of taking water out of the river just to waste it humidifying the nearby air.

    Why did we do it in the first place? Because it’s way easier and cheaper to dig a ditch than to lay a big pipe, and I don’t know if the US had any other water-delivery tech at the right scale when these were built.


  • This title is a play on words, meaning “leave Mac owners short change”. That is, not having as many coins as they assumed they had. Usually you are short change because you had a little less money with you than you thought, but with malware involved they mean theft.

    It’s difficult. I didn’t understand the headline until reading the summary. “Short-changed” means not getting everything you purchased. It originally meant not getting all your change from paying with a larger bill. For example, if you used a $5 bill to buy $2.20 worth of snacks and got $2.75 back, you were short-changed.