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Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

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Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#211

Post by KerrAvon »

milgra wrote: post #159
dtgriscom wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that it should be difficult, if not impossible, for random applications to listen in on user actions, is there a better way Apple could have done this? (Disclaimer: Apple fan/user since 1985.)

A popup on the first start with an alert and a password prompt is a good solution, but usually too many users type in their passwords blindly in case of a password prompt, so I would go with just an alert with "you need root privileges to run this app" and then they have to figure out 1. why do they need root privileges 2. how do they start an app with root privileges.

The security barriers for getting keyboard events in macOS are not as simple as “root has access to everything”, and for various reasons can’t and shouldn’t be that simple. So ignoring that part, Apple could make this into a one-click solution, but the number of legit apps that need to do this are so small that it’s very unlikely they will dedicate engineering time to it.

This is obviously where open source is superior. Apple probably can’t justify cleaning this up in macOS, but you can just go in and make it easier on on Linux if you have the knowledge and time.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#212

Post by stametseater »

bmitc wrote: post #80
qbasic_forever wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the pi 4 you can boot off a USB3 drive like a SSD. I setup a 4gb memory model with SSD boot and it's a flawless little desktop--it runs full gnome and Ubuntu just fine. If you can get a 8gb memory model it would be perfect. I love it.

An Intel NUC is not much more than the top tier Raspberry Pi, once you get a case and stuff it needs, but is orders of magnitude faster. I got one and installed Linux Mint on it. It's a much, much better system than the Raspberry Pi 4 I have.

I was using a Raspberry Pi v1 as my NAS for years. It was fast enough and got the job done to my satisfaction. However when that pi eventually died and I tried to replace it, I found that v4 Pis were 1) just as expensive as NUCs, and 2) not even available for purchase anywhere that I could find. So now I've got a NUC filling that role. The Raspberry Pi org has really dropped the ball.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#213

Post by [deleted] »

Macha wrote: post #63
jasoneckert wrote: post #23

It's also worthy to note that shortly after that part of the video, he notes (from another question) that he has over 50 Raspberry Pis (including 12 stacks of 4xPi4s). So his choice of Raspberry Pi Linux is likely the result of that.

So that's where all the Pi 4s went

[deleted]

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#214

Post by amelius »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #77

I was at the talk, and it's strange this what people take from it. You should watch the whole thing and see what he built over years. I was a bit disappointed that most of the questions ignored his talk about a very cool jukebox he built and focused on OS drama. He built a jukebox with all hit songs he could find in it 1900-2000 and for prerecorded music, got a player piano and sheet music and midi and integrated the…

That's cool but I can understand the audience: you don't have to be named Ken Thompson to build a RPi based jukebox.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#215

Post by drivers99 »

milgra wrote: post #109
burntalmonds wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"..what Apple is doing to something which should allow you to work is just atrocious.." Anyone know what his specific issues are?

I don't know the exact issues but might be related to the issues why I left Apple : I was developing a very successful little tool for MacOS ( https://github.com/milgra/macmediakeyforwarder ) which listened for keypresses. From 2016 to 2019 it became harder and harder to install it because apple added more and more restrictions to apps like this. By 2019, you had to enable the application explicitly to listen for eve…

using Second Reality as the music for the swayos video was a pleasant surprise

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#216

Post by milgra »

equivocates wrote: post #164
milgra wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the exact issues but might be related to the issues why I left Apple : I was developing a very successful little tool for MacOS ( https://github.com/milgra/macmediakeyforwarder ) which listened for keypresses. From 2016 to 2019 it became harder and harder to install it because apple added more and more restrictions to apps like this. By 2019, you had to enable the application explicitly to listen for eve…

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I prefer my OS put several hurdles in front of a key logging app.

Even if you downloaded that app explicitly for key logging? That's crazy! :)

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#217

Post by amelius »

hedora wrote: post #189
adamgordonbell wrote: post #77

I was at the talk, and it's strange this what people take from it. You should watch the whole thing and see what he built over years. I was a bit disappointed that most of the questions ignored his talk about a very cool jukebox he built and focused on OS drama. He built a jukebox with all hit songs he could find in it 1900-2000 and for prerecorded music, got a player piano and sheet music and midi and integrated the…

Better headline: “Unix Legend Ken Thompson Announces he is Switching From iTunes to a Raspberry PI, a Player Piano and Cabinets of old CD’s” Hmmm. I meant for that to be snarky, but it is a better headline.

A better headline: Unix Legend Ken Thompson discovers that you can't use Apple products for building cool DIY stuff.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#218

Post by cess11 »

bityard wrote: post #119
garciasn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this continues to be why Linux suffers with the mass market. I ran Linux solely from 1997 to 2004 on the desktop and switched back because it was such a pain in the ass to manage. Every time I go back, it just isn’t catching up to the mainstream OSs’ ability to manage without “futzing”. My M2 currently lasts all day on the battery while spending half of it on conference calls and half of it writing code. Nothing…

I get irrationally angry when people imply that Mac and Linux are somehow similar, or interchangeable. They are not! Not even close! I think this is where a lot of the negative opinion of Linux comes from, people lament some issue they have with their Mac and someone else will say, "oh you should try Linux, it's really good now." And so they do and are surprised to find that experience is vastly different. Linux is a…

I use Linux because I don't want to futz with all the crap in MacOS and Windows. Takes maybe twenty minutes to install Debian and then I touch pretty much nothing for years, except maybe change apt channel if I want something updated faster.

Everyone I know that is stuck in big corporate OS spend more time than that every week fighting something their masters push on them.

Application install is a terminal command that's trivially easy to learn, there's no e-shop solution with ads and surveillance, and while I use i3wm I think most people would be about as comfortable in XFCE as in the MICROS~1 OS:es of yesteryears. You decide when to upgrade, there are no nagscreens or forced reboots.

At least for the last five years or so I've had no trouble with UEFI, WLAN or sound.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#219

Post by pmarin »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #77

I was at the talk, and it's strange this what people take from it. You should watch the whole thing and see what he built over years. I was a bit disappointed that most of the questions ignored his talk about a very cool jukebox he built and focused on OS drama. He built a jukebox with all hit songs he could find in it 1900-2000 and for prerecorded music, got a player piano and sheet music and midi and integrated the…

@dang Can you change the title to the original one?

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#220

Post by drewg123 »

justinzollars wrote: post #40
kjhughes wrote: post #30

For those who might prefer text over video: Q: What's your operating system of choice, today? A: I have for most of my life, because I was sort of born into it, run Apple. Right now, recently, meaning within the last five years, I’ve become more and more and more depressed and [Laughter] what Apple is doing to something which should allow you to work is just atrocious, but they are taking a lot of space and time to d…

I have to admit, I tried and failed to switch away from Apple. I bought a Linux Laptop - an System 76. I was surprised at how terrible the battery management of linux was compared with my mac. And that particular issue broke me.

For desktop, I had exactly the opposite experience in ~2006. I had a whitebox *nix box that had a catastrophic failure and I needed to be up and running quickly. I was working 12+ hours a day, had a new baby, and I didn't have time to install / maintain a *nix box. So I bought an iMac to use as a desktop. What a mistake.

Everything that was easy in *nix was a massive PITA in MacOS. I'm talking about things like basic desktop customization (focus follows mouse, customized mouse buttons + keyboard hotkeys combos to move/iconify/resize windows, etc). I ended up using open source X11 based utils for most things but my web browser & mail because as long as I stayed within X11, I could satisfy my 20+ year old muscle memory with focus-follows-mouse and my hotkeys. However, every now and then I'd blindly start typing and the focus was still on my mail client or browser and random things would happen (adding bookmarks, deleting emails, etc) After a year I never managed to unlearn ffm & my hotkeys, so I gave up, gave the iMac to my then in-laws, and built a new whitebox.

I realize there are extensions for ffm, but ffm on MacOS is a crapshoot in my experience and I was never able to find an extension that I like. Similarly, at the time, I could not find any extension that satisfied my muscle-memory window management hotkey/mouse button combos. I don't mind click to focus so much on a laptop, but I can't stand it on a desktop.

Over the years I have settled on *nix on a desktop and MacOS on a laptop..

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