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Neowin: User concept re-imagines File Explorer with Fluent Design.

https://www.neowin.net/news/user-concept-re-imagines-file-explorer-with-fluent-design/

I’d actually like to see something like that. Generally I’ve come to appreciate the new age UIs that pop up in W10, mostly because I’ve already suffered their design evolution from mobile platforms. Much as I did various desktop horrors from Unix and Microsoft systems.

Windows 10’s file explorer largely keeping the status quo left me with mixed feelings. But the fact remains of you end up suffering a GUI file manager: Microsoft’s is the gold standard to curse at.

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So far I generally find myself in a middle ground of sorts.

Diaspora* makes for a social environment that works pretty well, although I think a touch behind what G+ became. But to be fair most of the things I miss about G+, other than the people, were things that took time for the platform to develop.

Where I find myself most frustrated tends to be the software.

You see: most of my time on such things is centered around my Android tablet. Dandelion is about as much as any Diaspora client could be but I find the performance lacking, as a consequence of it being forced to function as a web based app instead of a native client.

Such that I am almost better off going back to keeping my journal on a blogger platform and automating sharing posts to Pluspora, where there is more social life. This my recent experiments doing RSS -> D*.

But of course that leaves another open loop. Before moving to G+, I had used Blogger. Before that I used Live Journal. But in the years since moving from Blogger to Google Plus not much as changed. Rather Blogger has mostly remained fixed in time and others like WordPress have marched on. Creating a sort of software want redux.

Difference is that it is easier to pull a journal migration or write a custom bot bridge than it is to pull a better Diaspora client out of my wazoo.

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Sad thought: when I start thinking it’d be handy for my Fire TV box Gen 1 retired and was replaced with a Fire TV 4K stick Gen 1 just for the HEVC support.

The Fire TV box Gen 3 I use in the living room generally does its job well. The older Gen 1 I use in the bedroom also does pretty well and still gets the occasional updates other than Android version) just fine.

Typically I normalize my video rips into H.264/AVC video. Making the audio carry an AAC-LE stereo track and passing through surround; and sometimes adding AC-3 because of surround sound constraints on the platform. Because if you can’t play H.264 and AAC at this point: you should just go home or be recycled.

Lacking H.265/HEAC is a more understandable at this time. But currently the only devices I really use that lack hardware decoders for that are my Gen 1 Fire TV from 2014 and my Kepler era GPU from 2013. Anything else ain’t getting used for video anything anyhow.

A quick little test using Noucome; episode one, chapter one.

The baseline is about 4.18 GB per episode at around 18~20 Mbit input reported by VLC’s stats. Drop the DTS master audio for the regular DTS, and you arrive at about 3.8 GB per episode. The amount of bits is also a bit excessive when you consider the show has a stereo audio :P. Feeding it through my usual HandBrake settings the video gets taken down to about 5 Mbit/s which is plenty for a 1080p source in that codec.

Encoding a few tests, creating AAC and AC3 at 160 Kbit/s both take about equally long as just passing through the regular DTS. Because the video codec is really where the ~5 min gets spent in x264. Using my old desktop’s 2.1 logitech speakers I can’t telly any difference. The file deltas are about 60M for AAC/AC3 versus 90M for DTS passthrough. Not enough to care about that much.

Using my usual HandBrake settings for H.265 HEVC, which aims to achieve comparable quality to my H.264 AVC configuration, my old ass desktop’s encoding time for the short clip virtually doubled but the size drops from about 60M to 35M.

And then there’s the given case when the per-episode file sizes are only about 4 GB, they’re small enough that I don’t really need to give a flying hoop. The 3 TB drive for that part of my media server is only about 43% full, and by the time it is filled up I’ll probably be able to get an 8 or 12 TB drive for the same price point as when I bought my 3 TB. Which in turn cost about as much as the 1 TB drive it had replaced, lol.

Test 2

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Using a different client app that sucks less.

Also want to see how the formatting comes through my RSS feed and into the post bots conversion.

Here’s a link to Captain’s Log Supplemental as it stood before G+.

Some bold, italic, underline, and strike through formatting.

  • Bullet
  • List

And

  1. Numbered
  2. List

Plus

A block quote.

And a little

Horizontal bar for good measure.

RSS updates

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For quite a while now my RSS feed configuration was like this:

    G+ -> pluss.aiiane.com -> Feedburner

Since G+ is no longer, I have updated my feedburner back to pointing at the normal Blogger feed. Although I doubt anyone really still monitors that feed, if it makes your aggregator angry, I do apologize :P.

I expect that my Feedburner settings have been about the same since Google Plus and the pluss turner-arounder were young, or at least as far back as my journal’s migration to G+.

Rumblings of fhe Future

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I find it curious. The last time I updated this blog was noting my journal would be moving to Google+.

With Google giving G+ the Swift kick, one of the things I’ve had on my mind of late is whether or not I would start using this place again or go all in on Diaspora. I suppose that only time will tell tell.

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I have decided to in fact move my journal to Google Plus. I can be found HERE Those using RSS should be minimally impacted.

The address blog.spidey01.com may at sometime be made to link to a custom setup that pretty prints my Google Plus data via API, and perhaps other stuffs. As a side effect of the move over to Google Plus, this means those relying on my RSS news feed should review their feed next week. If you are using RSS, there should be no problem but if in doubt insure your reader is pointing directly to my feedburner.

Sometime after adapting Blogger, I had set things up with Feed Burner. My RSS feed via feed burner for this blog is here. Thus Blogger is setup to redirect spidey01.blogspot.com feed stuff to this address. Making it an alias of the feed burner. I assume that I should be able to keep this and point my feed burner to a new feed, completing the daisy chain. Soon I will try updating my feed burner to point through GPlusRSS pluss to my Google Plus entries. EDIT: Had an issue with GPlusRSS so I’ve used pluss—and the feed is active on feed burner!

Those who rely on my RSS feed being re-syndicated on my Facebook and Twitter accounts should see business as usual with the exception that it will direct you to Google Plus rather than Blogger, and it still stands that you’ll be silently ignored if you comment via Facebook instead of clicking through the link. This is an advantage of dereferencing the pointer’s in the right sequence lol.

Content that isn’t suitable for G+ will likely reside in cloud storage and be attached to the entry. This is actually an evolution, because in the past, I’ve usually made a document in text or an HTML’able markup in my ~/Documents/, and then posted it to Live Journal/Blogger as applicable. Now I won’t have to manually sync updates, hehehehehe.

Set course, second star to the right, and straight on till morning. Engage.