fuck you and fuck your train!

Time shifting

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The resulting audio file can be played over the radio (sounding a bit like the old dial up noise, as it's just two quickly oscillating notes) and recorded to a cassette tape, which you can then give to your computer to "decode" back into 0's and 1's, which gives you the program file. You can then run it as if you'd installed it from a disk.

First it was the double-jack. Back in the days where the jack input and jack output were separated, I used a cable (jack male to male) to link them both.

Then they stopped to separate them. I learned about the "Stereo Mix" you can use on Windows. The input signal is the output you get in your headphones. You can activate it by going into your recording devices.

For Linux, you have PAVUcontrol (Pulse Audio VolUme Control) that you can install:

sudo apt install pavucontrol

[Image 2: More of the previous post. It reads: "things you can record (audio only), simply by lying to your computer, telling it that the tape recorder is actually a set of headphones:

discord call

podcast

documentary

radio and internet radio

music, from any source. without having to download it at all.

music you make on virtual pianos/etc noteworthy news items (fireside esque, interviews, huge events)

stand-up comedy

rented or borrowed media

any other sound your pc can produce

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.

Image 3: Photo of an adaptor with a USB plug at one end and RCA connectors at the other end. End description.]

Even the type with a large SD card memory.

Because most countries carved out the same accessibility loopholes, and recording loopholes that cassette and VCRs got; because they all originally used tape.

This is the type I use.

They have a built in microphone, and a good speaker, and a headphone jack.

The are designed to record sounds accurately without tape hiss.

They are also both a microphone and a speaker, so just lie to your pc if you want them recognize as either.

But here's the good bit.

You can just stick it recording next to you, or the speaker you want recording.

If you used a dictaphones with a SD card; you don't need to digitize the file after.

Stick it in audacity if you want to edit it sure.

But you don't need to do that!

You can also just stop and start recording to make new tracks. 🙂

And because it's a dictaphone your not making a copy. You are still just taping it, creating that. Technically you are the originator of that file.

This is also a real good way to digitize you older music collection. Like your vinyl records. Pop the dictaphone recording next to your playing record. No cables needed Yer, you would have to be quiet, to do it this way but it's still the cheapest, quickly way to tape.

And bonus it much smaller, and less obvious; if your recording things someone says for your own safety. People look for you phones and tend not to spot them.

(Not a privacy thing

But I personally load my dictaphones up with audiobooks, and use them at night.

The batteries last like 6-8 hours.

And the built in speakers go from loud enough to play music to a room of people; to quiet enough I can put it inside my pillowcase and no one else hears it.

when my time comes around

lay me gently in the cold dark earth

no grave can hold my body down

I’ll crawl home to her

hozier - work song

Do you live on New Midgard?

Do you like rainbows?

Do you want to see the infinite majesty of Yog-sothoth, The Key and The Gate?

To experience the Roiling Nuclear Chaos of the Mad Daemon Sultan at the Centre of Reality???

No???

Well that's just too damned bad!

And a couple of color testing we did!

a block of cheese you say

like the regular kid enthusiasm of yeah that Grace guy met an alien, cleaned the sun blah blah blah. Eridians are regular visitors on Earth and it's boooooooooring.

and then the kid opens Wikipedia and that asshole is all over the thing. no easy essay of important person invented important thing that is so important that I have to write some bullshit on it. nope.

guy pops up all over the history section. yeah sure. diplomacy? wait wasn't he an astronaut. biology? what? oh he had PhD in something biology. oh he named astophage "astophage"! is that the end of an essay? oh no it continues. xenobiology, xenolinguistics, all the space exploration and, oh, a first contact! are we done yet? no. fuck. wait, metallurgy???? wtf is this dude doing in the metallurgy section. wasn't he a biologist?

and then some kids would get a little bit into it and read through early life section to find oh he got kicked out of his field for being a weirdo alien guy. oh that's a great story! with the hard work and the incredible strength of the will he proved everybody wrong!

no wait

he was just some scrungly guy that got dragged kicking and screaming into this whole bs just to pull the most lock tf in in the history of locking tf in

wtf?!

and then they dig deep enough to find the video logs

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.