[OT] Was: totally satisfied :D

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Mon, 24 Sep 2012 18:10:09 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 07:52:15PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> 
> > A lot of the videogames I've played have independent adjustable
> > SFX/music/voice volumes. I've even happily made use of that. And I'm
> > damn glad that the TV *still* has a properly working volume control
> > despite that because I make even more use of that.
> 
> Yeah I almost never play games with music on, 'cos I generally find
> the music not to my liking. SFX I sometimes leave on low, though on
> handhelds I generally turn both off. But the option to only have SFX
> without music is a plus. I *have* deleted apps before that didn't
> allow independent settings.
> 

I never used to mute videogame music until they started licensing stuff
from the record labels. Like all that "EA Trax" stuff. Blech. Last
generation, that was one of the great things about the XBox: custom
soundtracks. My brother introduced me to Quarashi's Jinx album which
made for a far better soundtrack for THPS2X than the built-in songs.
The Tony Hawk games from 3 onward were almost unplayable with the
built-in music enabled.

Unfortunately, my most frequent use of game audio controls is to fix
the piss-poor mixing that's common in a lot of games. When you can't
hear important voiceovers because they're quieter than the music or sfx
(example: Splinter Cell 3), it's nice to be able to fix that screwup by
cranking up the voice volume, and turning everything else down.

I've often wished I could turn off the elevator music in Wii Sports
Resort without having to mute the whole thing.

But of course, all that still doesn't mean I'd ever be willing to give
up the TV's "adjust *everything's* volume". Individual controls let you
adjust the "mix" ie relative volume relations, and then a
master volume is indispensible for normal "I need this thing
louder/quieter".


> 
> [...]
> > > I feel like I get the best of all worlds.
> > 
> > Yea, but to get that, you have to use OSX as your *primary*
> > environment, and stick with expensive iHardware. Might work for you,
> > but those are all deal-breakers for me.
> 
> I find it sad that Apple has left its original philosophy of open
> protocols and specs so that you can make it interoperate with stuff.

Absolutely. That's one of my biggest irritations with modern Apple.

> For all their flaws, PCs are much more palatable 'cos you can replace
> parts that you don't like with alternatives. With closed hardware and
> vendor lock-in, I can't say that Macs are exactly near the top of the
> list for hardware I'd consider buying. I've had a bad experience with
> PC laptops already (after 2 years parts starting wearing out and I
> can't replace them 'cos they need specialized tools that vary from
> vendor to vendor -- no choice but to buy a brand new one though the
> old one could've continued to work if a few basic parts were
> replaced) -- I don't feel like I want to repeat that experience. So
> yeah, this is a deal-breaker for me too.
> 

Yeah.

> 
> [...]
> > > The one thing I would rip out of OSX and throw against the wall is
> > > the mail app.  Its interface and experience is awesome.  But it
> > > frequently corrupts messages and doesn't properly save outgoing
> > > mail.  Not good for a mail application.
> 
> Ahhh how I love Mutt. ;-)
> 

I've been finding Mutt very useful for when I'm ssh'ed into my server
to create a temporary throwaway address. Doing "mutt
-f /path/to/mailbox" is so much more convenient than setting up a
POP3 GUI client. I need to learn how to use mutt better though, as I've
just been fumbling around with it.

For my usual mailboxes though, I prefer typical GUI desktop clients.
Unfortunately, I still haven't been able to find one that I like.
Outlook Express has a bunch of problems (no spellcheck, can't send
UTF, proprietary storage, etc). Windows Mail won't be an option when I
move to Linux or upgrade back to XP. Claws mail is just generally buggy
and never does anything in the background (feels almost like it might
be purely single-threaded). And I'm not a big fan of Opera and don't
really want to use a web browser as my desktop mail client.

I think I might actually try moving to Thunderbird even though I'm
generally unhappy with Mozilla software/practices, and didn't like it
last time I tried (for example, it kept trying to bold/italic/underline
parts of text in my *plaintext* views, and the people on the "help"
forums just complained that I should shut up and like it - which is
consistent with what usually happens when I inquire about customizing
parts of Mozilla's so-called "most customizable browser in the world").


> 
> > I didn't have corruption issues with it, but I did find it to be
> > rather gimped and straight-jacketed much like the rest of the
> > system.
> [...]
> 
> I find pretty much all GUI mail apps (both webmail and local MUAs)
> strait-jacketed. Anything that doesn't let you configure mail headers
> is unusable to me, and HTML by default gets on my nerves so much it's
> not even funny.

I never care about mail headers (unless I'm debugging something
mail-related, which isn't often), but I *ALWAYS* have HTML disabled.
I'll never use a mail client that doesn't let me turn HTML off. Not only
do I not want to deal with any tracker-images (or god forbid, JS
emails), but in my experience "HTML email" just means it's too easy,
and far too tempting, for other people to make the stuff they send me
really, really ugly ;) "Just the words, ma'am."