inane ramblings

"Building My MP3 Library" 2/20/25
I'm kind of weird when it comes to collecting music this way. Yes I'm on a Spotify family plan and can listen to what I want when I want 90% of the time, but I really quite love building up an MP3 library of albums I love that I can put on whatever device I want. This started when I got an iPod Classic, obviously I can't just drop music from Spotify on there, so I began to build up a collection of albums I know I love on MP3, making sure to grab higher quality rips so they sound the best they can for being a pretty lossy format. I don't notice any difference from streaming personally, plus there's one aspect I love compared to streaming; putting anything I want on there. Like I said, 90% of the time Spotify has what I want, but there's that 10% of the time where there are albums like CSH's numbered albums or unofficially released mixtapes like Bastard by Tyler, The Creator or Nostalgia Ultra by Frank Ocean, for stuff like that using MP3s with custom libraries is great. Plus I love being able to ensure all the tags for each album are exactly what I want. When I got a new phone with more storage this year as well, I began to sync all of my library there too, and it's been fantastic. One thing I love is being able to quickly shuffle 3600+ songs, really getting anything I want to pop up. I need to get back into using my iPod, maybe when I have some free time I'll make sure everything is synced the way it should be.

"Love For The Steam Deck" 2/4/25
I think one of my favorite things is tweaking with software in various ways. For instance, one of my favorite things that I own is a Steam Deck OLED, and I just adore messing with the various ways to "softmod" it (AKA, just changing aspects of the gaming mode layer). Adding functionality like being able to see ProtonDB ratings on game pages, custom themes, a manager for connected AirPods, and even a really solid screen recorder. Even beyond that, I just love tweaking and adding functionality that could be done without DeckyLoader. Using EmuDeck to get easy access to emulators is a big one I love doing. My little cousins loved being able to watch me play MK8DX when I brought my Deck to my Grandma's one time to kill some possible down time while I was there. I do just have this inclination to tweak with what I own and use software-wise, I think it's why I've become so interested with Linux as of late. Unfortunately my current desktop has had issues with it so I'm stuck with a logged out install of Windows 10, but when I build my next PC I plan for it to be all AMD to possibly skirt these issues I've had with trying Linux, which I suspect to be related to my NVIDIA card and poor monitor setup.