Cat, I’m a kitty cat.

Gi Joe parody

The talking boat

I totally agree. I still have a large mp3 and flac collection.

When Spotify came a long I used both for a while. But my Spotify playlists became so full of completely random tracks, it was never financially viable to even buy 10%, and its become more difficult to do so legally.

For the bands/artists I really like, I’ve bought CDs or if that’s not possible, bought digital versions.

I am attempting to transition away from streaming completely, but I have playlists which are 100+ hours long; which I’ve curated myself. I have a dozen others which are 8-20.

You could accuse me of having too much music. That i can’t possibly listen to most of it. Perhaps there is some truth in that. When you’ve had access to an unlimited buffet, it’s difficult to go back to a set menu.

Yes, ultimately I want to own all my most listened to music, but for now it would be nice to do both and have a player with physical buttons.

I miss physical buttons for when I’m listening to music.

Having to unlock my phone to skip a track or advance a podcast is really annoying.

I used to be able to click a button in my pocket. I could even slide a bit to skip forward and back 30 seconds.

I also like to listen to music in bed in the dark. The bright screen, the messing around with the unlock, really breaks the flow.

Yes I have earphones that are touch sensitive, but poking it messes with any good isolated fit I’ve achieved, the touch doesn’t always register and after a while, one ear starts to hurt. Especially when you need to tap three times to restart a track.

I’ve now got this stupid setup with a BT dongle in a usb a-c converter; which plugs into my phone and controls a tiny physical keyboard.

There are lots of mp3 players, but they don’t support streaming platforms. The ones that do, also went mainly touch screen only and cost a fortune. There is one physical Spotify player with buttons but it’s just a dumb cube with very basic functionality.

I know this is just my tiny view on things, but I’ve been testing code from a very experienced Dev, who was recently instructed to use AI coding tools in their work (Cursor, maybe some Copilot).

Functionality in our product is now breaking in weird and wonderful ways. Completely new ‘WTF!’ moments. It’s hard to describe.

Core behavior that I’ve taken for granted - things I didn’t realise could go wrong, are.

It reminds me of when after particular iOS update many years back, (for certain scenarios) Apple’s own calculator wasn’t doing addition correctly.

For me, it’s both fascinating and unnerving. Like some unfathomable cosmic horror.

1 - 100% chance of a metallic taste, that lingers after use. 3 as well probably.

4 is the only practical option, just need to use it with your left hand.