Maybe it’s a bit early to be making New Year’s resolutions. Though this used to be a popular practice, many now don’t even believe in setting stretch goals just because the calendar changes. I confess that I have waxed and waned in my observance of making annual resolutions. This year, though, I have something lined up that I think will actually improve my life in meaningful ways.
Roon Audio has a new feature that should delight headphone lovers — OPRA (Open Profiles for Revealing Audio). OPRA is an open-source repository hosted on GitHub that contains precisely crafted headphone curves for different headphone models (and you get an equalizer, and you get an equalizer…).
I love Roon, although I’ve had my share of technical challenges — today I need to bring up two issues on the Roon Community forum. The ability of the platform to continuously innovate ways to give audio enthusiasts a better experience is impressive.
I disclosed my most fondest Christmas wish list item to my lady friend last night — a FiiO DM13 portable CD player. She laughed at me. You want a discman for Christmas?
How can I explain my love of single-purpose devices and high-fidelity to someone who lives on their iPad and sees no problem with lossy streaming music? I want something that doesn’t have a screen with which to focus on music and, for goodness’ sake, some time to part with my phone during the day.
Bluetooth codecs have progressed, but Apple hasn’t seen that as a priority in their annual device updates.1 Their hardware can’t even output the high-fidelity audio that you can stream from their Apple Music service. One could probably successfully argue that Apple is more of a mass-consumer device manufacturer now than the company that used to cater to creatives.
Or even in their headphone updates. ↩︎
The new anti-toxicity feature on Bluesky that allows a user to detach their original post from a quote post is ingenious. I can’t believe no one has shipped anything like this until now. In hindsight, it seems obvious.
Probably the closest publishing platform to the one I'm using — Ghost — is Substack. Although Substack is much more popular for a few reasons, not the least of which is the low barrier-to-entry (it's free if you are not charging for your publication), it has come under quite a bit of scrutiny lately. There was a big push to get writers to abandon the platform after The Atlantic posted an article asserting that there were many Nazi publications using the platform to spread and even monetize their ideas. A prominent tech journalist named Casey Newton, who was using Substack, led the charge to get the company to amend its content moderation policies. After not achieving complete success with his campaign, Newton took his publication, Platformer, to Ghost. Substack did, however, remove five accounts (out of the six that Newton reported) that were distributing Nazi material, in accordance with its existing policies about violent speech. Many writers opined that this was the bare minimum that Substack could do to quell the outrage that was being directed at them.