Jae's Blog

In this blog post, we’re gonna see some places where I find music. Some of those are paid, some of those are free.

First, let’s go over some good players:

• XMPlay – Probably the most accurate MOD player out there
• Foobar2000 – Also a really good player, multi-platform as well
• VLC – Plays everything, though badly for some files

Most of the music I listen to are modules (or MODs), to get those, I have a few places:

• https://modland.com/ – Generalist, has a list of all most software for a variety of platforms, with modules classified
• https://files.scene.org/ – More scene-focused, has a lot of demos as well as modules
• https://amp.dascene.net/ – Amiga-focused directory
• https://deepsid.chordian.net – Large aggregation of collections of Commodore 64 modules, also comes with a good web player

Those can generally be found there for free.

For more traditional music, my go-to solution remains Bandcamp, though sometimes, some artists may allow to buy music directly from their site (which is the case of Lman for instance, but it’s more to get physical media).

RSS, standing for Really Simple Syndication, is a really good and easy way to get all your news right onto your computer.

While the standard is fairly old now, being older than me, it still fills its purpose wonderfully.

To have a simple outlook, RSS allows you to get news from feeds made available by websites and aggregate them into a software.

Some good RSS readers include:

• RSSGuard – A good desktop reader
• Tiny Tiny RSS – A web-based reader
• NewsBoat – A cli-based reader

Finding RSS feeds is also easy. You can find them by searching online for them or looking for the RSS icon on websites (small dot with the three lines going out like a broadcast).

Some readers like RSSGuard also have a feature to discover RSS feeds on pages.

Some nice feeds I personally watch are:

• Blender – https://blender.org/feed
• Resonite – https://store.steampowered.com/feeds/news/app/2519830
• Acrouzet (YouTube) – https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UClv1kZDpIA9LcXPYY4KTU-w
• The Servo blog – https://servo.org/blog/feed.xml
• The Matrix blog – http://matrix.org/blog/feed/
• Bellingcat – http://www.bellingcat.com/category/news/feed/rdf

Some tricks as well:

• Any website using WordPress will have a feed at the URL /feed
• You can watch updates for any Steam game or app using https://store.steampowered.com/feeds/news/app/<appid> (and replacing <appid> by the ID of the game which you can find in the store URL)
• If a website doesn’t directly offers an RSS feed, you can build one by using something like rss-bridge or RSSHub
• You can follow any YouTube channel using RSS by using https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channelid>
• Most blogs also have a RSS feed (don’t forget to subscribe to this one to not miss anything in the future :3)

Overall, RSS is an amazing technology, supported by websites you wouldn’t even suspect.
I can only encourage using it as it’s lightweight, easy, ad-free (at least from the experience I’ve had from it).

Recently, I’ve received some e-mails from so-called “AI” startups, wanting me to join them to develop their product.

I will be blunt: don’t bother. I’m not interested.

I’m not interested in your startup that resells the OpenAI API under a fancy interface.
I’m not interested in your startup that has no plans for the future beyond “we’ll see when we get more funding”.
I’m not interested in your startup that wastes incredible amounts of resources just to hallucinate results and for the whole thing to fall down in a year when the funding expires.

And once and foremost, I’m not interested in AI in general.

While I did thinker with it when it was new, it’s pretty much useless outside of making boilerplates.

Here, we make fresh, organic, handmade software.